Ashley McGuireUnfortunately, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was being serious when he compared himself to JFK earlier this week. This was the second time El-Sayed made the comparison in a matter of days, and it’s patently absurd.
MS NOW correspondent Ali Velshi asked El-Sayed on live television, “You get a whole lot of questions about the Muslim Brotherhood, and terrorism, and radical Islamism…what’s your best response right now?”
El-Sayed responded, “Look, at the end of the day, the whole reason this question is being asked is to insinuate that somehow I have dual loyalties.”
He then invoked his fellow Democrat, perhaps one of the party’s most famous and beloved, and said, “When John F. Kennedy ran for president, he was asked whether his allegiance would be to the Constitution, or to the Pope and the Vatican, because he would have been the first Catholic president.”
Where to start.
We can start with the suggestion that concerns about allegiance to the Pope are akin to concerns about allegiance to a terrorist network as being…well, shaky? More like stunningly offensive.
But the bigger issue is that twice now, El-Sayed has tried to use JFK as a body shield for legitimate questions that are not rooted in religious bigotry, as were biases faced by JFK, but rather in valid concerns about personal support for and potential family ties to terrorism.
His biological mother worked for an organization that financed terrorism, literally wiring funds to Osama bin Laden in the lead-up to September 11.
His half-sister said, “My family has long been MB (Muslim Brotherhood), but I’ve always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively.”
His sister-in-law appeared on the terrorist watch list.
His father-in-law has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed himself has voiced support for a Muslim Brotherhood candidate in Egypt, whom he called on to “purge” the media and police. His primary victory was celebrated by the Muslim Brotherhood online, and he accepted money from the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist affiliates, one of whom explicitly said he was “happy” about Hamas’s October 7 massacre and that “Israel does not have the right to self-defense.”
Suggesting that questions about his ties to terrorism are out of bounds, being akin to what JFK dealt with as a Catholic in the 1960s, isn’t just an insult to history.
It’s worse, because El-Sayed essentially suggests that inquiring about those ties is religious bigotry itself. By claiming the mantle of JFK, El-Sayed implies his critics are bigots, discriminating against him on religious grounds. This makes a mockery of actual religious freedom, something he purports to support while actively eroding its substance.
He faces an American electorate whose trust he asks for, without being willing to demonstrate his trustworthiness. His response to one young man in a town hall asking if he would “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood” was to put the question back on him.
“Why are you asking the question?” he queried. “Have you asked everybody in your life if you disavow them? So why are you asking me?”
Kind of like how he flipped the question on Jesse Watters when asked about sharia law.
Watters asked him to explain why he believes that “getting rid of sharia law is white supremacy,” to which El-Sayed retorted, “Do you know what canon law is?”
El-Sayed’s campaign is decidedly not about what JFK faced in 1960. It’s about serious allegations that he refuses to face today.
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Ashley McGuire is a senior fellow at The Catholic Association.
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