OPINION:
The red flags just keep popping up in the case of Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. Are voters paying attention?
On Monday, The Midwesterner revealed that Mohamed Soltan, president of the American Committee for Middle East Rights and sentenced to life in prison in 2015 by an Egyptian court on charges including membership in and funding of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been donating campaign cash to Mr. El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat.
The same outlet revealed last week that Mr. El-Sayed’s mother, Fatten Fathy Elkomy, worked for at least five years for a terrorist-linked “charity,” the Islamic American Relief Agency, according to Treasury Department documents.
In 2004, the Treasury Department designated IARA as a terrorist entity for its support of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas and others. IARA was formerly affiliated with the bin Laden-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, used as a global terrorist recruitment network.
The MK is the precursor network to al Qaeda.
Little wonder that Mr. El-Sayed — who has reportedly accepted more than $115,000 in campaign donations from current and former executive leadership of the also-terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations — has refused to distance himself from supporter and far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, with whom he has palled around and appeared at events.
Mr. Piker has said the U.S. “deserved 9/11” and called terrorist organization Hamas “1000 [times] better than Israel,” among other atrocious statements.
Mr. El-Sayed has said that opposition to Shariah in U.S. courts is rooted in “White supremacy,” and he has compared the Israeli government to Hamas, calling both “evil.”
The information available about Mr. El-Sayed’s early life is fuzzy and scant, perhaps by design, but it seems that his parents divorced in 1988, several years after they immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt.
That same year, his father, Mohamed El-Sayed, married Michigan native Jacqueline Johnson, who converted to Islam and helped raise Mr. El-Sayed.
Two days before the Midwesterner revealed the terrorist connections of Ms. Elkomy’s former employer, Mother Jones whined that “The Right Is Targeting Abdul El-Sayed’s Family Members.”
It cited coverage by Fox News and other publicly available information that last fall, Mr. El-Sayed’s half sister, Eman Abdelhadi (daughter of the terror-linked Ms. Elkomy), was arrested for spitting in the face of a law enforcement officer at a rally against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The piece avoided any mention of the social media message posted by Ms. Abdelhadi on the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-perpetrated murders of more than 1,200 people in Israel.
In an Instagram video, she says, “I want to say, Allahu Akbar. That phrase means God is greater. … It’s a phrase that reminds us that no matter how great the brutality, the oppression, the intensity of what we’re going through, the horizon of justice is just around the corner.”
This, as Hamas still held more than 100 Israeli hostages in tunnels under the Gaza Strip in conditions so horrific that the few news articles detailing them have had to include warnings to readers.
The response to the post from the El-Sayed campaign? “Abdul loves his sister and also disagrees with her on a number of political positions and the rhetoric she’s chosen to use.”
Back to Ms. Elkomy’s job with the IARA. It is unlikely that Mr. El-Sayed was clueless about it. Ms. Elkomy, who now works for the Islamic School of Columbia and something called New Horizons Community Support Services, has lived in Missouri for decades. Mr. El-Sayed has a relationship with her.
It is equally unlikely that Mr. El-Sayed was unaware that, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon in July, his father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, has served on the founding committee of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America for at least 19 years, or that Mr. Tayeb is a longtime annual donor to the organization.
Mr. El-Sayed is a terrible candidate for U.S. Senate for multiple reasons, not the least of which are his anti-America, anti-Israel viewpoints.
He has also misrepresented himself on at least several occasions. For example, he has claimed to be a physician, but although he has a medical degree, he has never held a medical license, completed a residency or taken board exams.
He has never held elected office, either, for that matter, even what most Americans would consider a real job. He is a Barack-Obama-style perma-student, having received an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, later becoming a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and then earning a medical degree from Columbia, where he reportedly made great strides in lacrosse.
Mr. El-Sayed seems to have spent his post-M.D. time dabbling in various university-faculty and local-government positions, never staying longer than a few years.
Where there is smoke, there is fire, and there should be too much smoke around Mr. El-Sayed for voters to ignore.
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