He’s sorry if you misinterpreted remarks he shouldn’t have to apologize for at all. He’s sorry if you’re hung up on the anti-American ‘streamer’ he campaigned ...
It’s not as though Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is struggling in the polls. His opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, trailed in every survey of Michigan’s voters in August except one, reliably drawing between 45 and 48 percent support. But those last few percentage points can make or break a candidacy, and Michigan Democrats have made it abundantly clear that the polls are masking bigger problems for El-Sayed’s campaign.
What Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell called the “crisis” represented by Hasan Piker’s participation in her state’s politics continued Saturday as El-Sayed persisted in his effort to distance himself from the scandalizing influencer, albeit without disavowing their shared outlooks or even mentioning Piker by name. El-Sayed no longer bothers to hide his irritation over the press’s repeated inquiries into the nature of his relationship with the figure he now calls “a streamer from California.” But it’s hard to blame reporters for their skepticism about the candidate’s effort. El-Sayed’s heart just isn’t in it.
The heedless decision to associate himself with Piker’s toxic brand isn’t the only thing that El-Sayed has to pretend to be sorry about. Over the weekend, he almost apologized for a statement he released during the primary on a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue, which he’d initially refused to condemn unequivocally.
On March 15, a restaurant worker in Dearborn Heights, Ayman Ghazali, drove a truck laden with explosives and accelerants into the reinforced doors of Michigan’s largest synagogue, just outside Detroit, and opened fire on the temple’s security personnel. Ghazali was killed before he could detonate his vehicular IED inside the building in which 140 Jewish preschoolers were in attendance at the time of the attack.
“A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew,” El-Sayed said of the terrorist. “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” In a solemn tone, El-Sayed said of the attacker, “Hurt people hurt people.”
According to the Israel Defense Forces, Ghazali’s brother was a Hezbollah commander who managed weapons operations in Southern Lebanon, and the FBI maintains that the Michigan attacker was radicalized by Hezbollah propaganda likely prior to the IDF operation in question.
Even if you don’t blame Hezbollah for the collateral damage that they encourage by integrating their fighters into civilian populations, Ghazali’s logic is deeply twisted. Let’s say he did set out to mete out vengeance against Israel by marking hundreds of American Jews, mostly children, for death. That’s the logic of the antisemite. And not only did El-Sayed see merit in the attacker’s disordered thinking, he was also proud of himself for saying so.
“It was a risk,” El-Sayed told his team in an organizing call. “All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say.”
The provocative bravado that El-Sayed displayed in the primary is long gone. In its place, we see only his mild perturbation over having to bow and scrape before those who were insulted by the candidate’s apparent sympathy for an attempted mass murderer.
“My comments might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify,” he said. “To anybody who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”
“We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright,” he added with growing exasperation. “What I was trying to do is offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context, and you don’t ever want to trample anyone’s pain.”
In short, he’s sorry if you misinterpreted remarks for which he should not have to apologize at all. In fact, anyone who was discomfited by the statement in the first place is allergic to “context” and therefore beyond appeals to reason.
To a certain extent, Piker is justified in his mild irritation over having been made to play the role of Sister Souljah. Piker contends that his ubiquitous presence at El-Sayed rallies during the primary was the candidate’s idea, and he’s probably right.
It was, after all, El-Sayed’s idea to publish the offending statement after that attack. It was also El-Sayed’s idea to affirm his support for restoring UNRWA’s funding, even though at least twelve of the organization’s employees participated in the October 7 massacre. It was his idea to express pained regret, allegedly on his constituents’ behalf, when Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed by U.S. forces in combat. It is El-Sayed who has repeatedly insisted that he sees no moral distinction between, on one hand, Israel and the U.S. and, on the other, the Islamist terrorists that went to war with the West on 9/11.
How much data do we need before we are allowed to acknowledge the evidence of our own eyes?