The Washington Free Beacon obtained audio of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed admitting he never said anything about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death because many Muslims in the state are sad.
El-Sayed made the comments during a call with his communications team on March 1, a day after Israel took out Khamenei.
“I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today. So, like, I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all. Like, I don’t think it’s worth even touching that,” El-Sayed told his campaign team.”We have the moral high ground here,” the candidate said, adding that reporters would “try and bait us into saying, ‘Yeah, but isn’t it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right? And I just think, for us, we’ve got to be, like, ‘no.'”
Dearborn has the largest Muslim population per capita in the country, becoming the “first Arab-majority city” in 2023.
Dearborn Democratic Mayor Abdullah Hammoud has made many anti-Israel comments in the past.
Biden’s State Department chose Hammoud for its Assembly of Local Leaders in October 2023, just weeks after he claimed the October 7 attack was “inevitable” due to the country’s “decades of illegal military occupation and imprisonment of Gaza.”
Hammoud also ripped into a local resident who protested renaming a city street after pro-jihadist Osama Siblani.
Vice President Kamala Harris even used Hammoud as a source to court anti-Israel voters in Michigan.
El-Sayed is no better than Hammoud.
He told the communications team he wanted to steer his messaging away from Khamenei to Israel and pro-Israel groups.
The advisers warned El-Sayed against making such a move, but he pushed back:
“You know what benefits [from the war]? It benefits Israel, who has captured too many of our politicians through AIPAC contributions,” he said.El-Sayed’s advisers expressed discomfort with some of his messaging on Israel, telling the candidate that “Israel’s issue always just makes me a little nervous.”El-Sayed defended the talking points, arguing that he needed to “take the whole shot”—that is, to accuse lawmakers of being tools both of AIPAC, an American lobbying organization, and of Israel.”I can shade away from it, but if I’m going to take the shot, I can’t just allude to it. I got to take the whole shot, which means that I’m going to say, ‘Look, you’ve got AIPAC-backed congress people who now don’t want to empower Congress to step up and enforce its own prerogative,'” said El-Sayed. “Ask yourself who that benefits and why? Ask yourself how powerful that force is in our politics if they won’t even stand up to a president who’s making illegal and unjustified war?”
El-Sayed’s campaign’s lawyers at Sandler Reiff law firm sent the Free Beacon a note:
“I write to inform you that the audio recording that you base the below questions on was obtained without the campaign’s permission, and without knowledge that individuals were being recorded,” wrote David Mitrani, a partner at the firm. “The campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question. Given these circumstances, the campaign expects that you will take this into account in determining whether to proceed with any reporting on this matter.”
The Democrats have three candidates competing for the primary to fill Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’ seat, who chose not to run again.
El-Sayed faces off against Representative Haley Stevens and state Sen Mallory McMorrow.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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