In fact, the Senate candidate’s suspect views and associations speak for themselves.
In fact, the Senate candidate’s suspect views and associations speak for themselves.
I t was already too late to salvage the fact-checking industry’s reputation before the Washington Post produced an example of the genre so obtuse and manipulative that it should seal the whole enterprise’s fate. WaPo reporter Violet Jira’s contribution to her profession’s discredit is particularly brazen.
In what was clearly an effort to defang the allegations that have forced Abdul El-Sayed into a defensive crouch in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, Jira dismissed Mike Rogers’s claim that El-Sayed has “ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and disavowed the organization,” she wrote. If El-Sayed had “disavowed” the organization, why would legacy media outlets have spent the last three weeks giving him every opportunity to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood — opportunities he pointedly and proudly rejected at every turn? Indeed, as recently as October 16, it was within the Post’s editorial standards to conclude, as Marc Thiessen accurately noted, that “El-Sayed also has not condemned the Muslim Brotherhood.”
It was only at a mid-October town hall that El-Sayed finally, if perfunctorily, disavowed the group, even as he bristled over the implications that he has dual loyalty. He spat out the condemnation only so as to turn the question back on his young interlocutor, demanding that he, too, denounce the Muslim Brotherhood (which, having no affinities for the Islamist organization, the young man easily did).
As for the candidates’ “ties,” Jira contends that no one has produced any “evidence” of El-Sayed’s “affiliation” with the Muslim Brotherhood. “The claims are based largely on two social media posts from 2012 by Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed’s half-sister,” she wrote.
El-Sayed’s half sister, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, who celebrated the 10/7 massacre, has repeatedly claimed that her whole “family” supports the Muslim Brotherhood. That would seem to directly implicate El-Sayed. But even if you set those claims aside, the accusation rests on firmer evidence than that.
Jira might discount El-Sayed’s many family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations with links to it. She clearly also discounts El-Sayed’s associations of choice, many of whom share his conspicuous habit of evaluating terrorist acts from the sympathetic point of view of the terrorists. But Jira should not so blithely dismiss El-Sayed’s own actions in the Muslim Brotherhood’s behalf.
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s translation of the open letter El-Sayed signed — with other “Egyptian Americans,” in support of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–aligned president, Mohamed Morsi — the letter’s signatories endorsed the “revolutionary decisions taken by the President.” In addition, they urged him to “purge the media and the police force as quickly as possible.”
That doesn’t sound like the behavior of an “elected” president, the mere representative of the “brotherhood’s political wing,” as Jira described it. During Morsi’s brief tenure as president of Egypt, no less a venue than the Washington Post fretted over Morsi’s marginalization of Egypt’s minorities — Christians, in particular — including his push for a new constitution that could set “the stage for a broader implementation of Islamic law.”
Jira concedes that El-Sayed himself, in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, promoted the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda the year before Morsi came to power. “Even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power,” he wrote, “there are several reasons why the ensuing state would look nothing like Iran.” That was a debatable hypothetical then. What’s not debatable now is the extent of El-Sayed’s obvious and, until recently, unconcealed sympathies for the group’s causes, if not its methods.
Jira also appears to take issue with the claim of the Rogers campaign that El-Sayed accepted “donations from terrorist organizations.” She notes that the claim is “based on donations” El-Sayed accepted from “individuals affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America.”
Among those donors are El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, a prolific contributor to El-Sayed’s PAC and a member of the ISNA’s founding committee and the former president of CAIR. Both ISNA and CAIR were unindicted co-conspirators in the landmark 2007 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development for funneling millions of dollars to Hamas.
From there, Jira climbs out on an especially precarious limb to defend not just El-Sayed but the Brotherhood itself.
“Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood denounced violence in the 1970s,” she wrote. “Members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood met with U.S. officials and White House staffers during the Obama administration in 2012.” She adds that, according to Lorenzo Vidino, director of Washington University’s invaluable Program on Extremism, “elements of the organization remain service-oriented and peaceful.”
Vidino is an expert on the Brotherhood, and he offers valuable insights into the organization. For example, in an interview earlier this year, he expounded on its tactical and strategic approach to “Islamize society from the bottom up.”
“The core idea of the Brotherhood is [that] there are levels to its actions,” he said. “In theory,” he added, that process will result in the creation of an Islamic state “peacefully.” However, “what the group has always said, from the very beginning, is that, if there are obstacles on the way to that Islamization,” he continued, it is “perfectly acceptable” to apply “the use of violence.” In sum, “if that peaceful process is impeded by external forces, then violence is justified.”
The Muslim Brotherhood’s support for terrorist activities and organizations, as detailed by the U.S. Treasury Department, lends as much credence to Vidino’s assessment as it detracts from the Post’s credibility. Of course, Jira isn’t throwing herself in the path of the barbs directed at the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood — only those targeting El-Sayed. She does have a few negative things to say about the U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, including “views on social issues, including opposition to gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights.”
Jira closes her op-ed masquerading as dispassionate journalism with some open displays of anguish over the ordeal that Republicans are foisting upon El-Sayed. He’s been “subjected to claims of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood for years,” she wrote, presumably by the inconveniently observant. A handful of self-pitying quotes from El-Sayed are presented as Jira’s last word on the subject.
But it’s Michigan voters who will have the final say. They now have ample evidence to conclude that the Democratic Party’s nominee for U.S. Senate meant each of his unguarded statements on Islamic radicalism right up until his outlook became politically inopportune. Much to the Washington Post’s obvious consternation, El-Sayed’s suspect views and associations speak for themselves.