What a Vote for Abdul El-Sayed Means
On a recent visit to Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., I heard from someone who described the state’s U.S. Senate race this year as a choice either against antisemitism or for democracy.
What he meant was that a vote for Mike Rogers, the Republican, was also a vote for President Trump and therefore a vote against democracy. But a vote for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat, was a vote not just for a stridently anti-Israel candidate but for the normalization of antisemitism that his candidacy has helped to produce. Temple Israel is the synagogue where, in March, a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist rammed a gasoline- and fireworks-laden truck through its doors with the intention (as the attacker said in a prerecorded video) of killing “as many of them as I possibly can.”
The stakes in the race were again brought home after Representative Haley Stevens, who had been El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, endorsed Rogers after a falling-out with El-Sayed, largely over his refusal to condemn what may be the most nakedly antisemitic political ad in modern U.S. political history.
The ad, which came from an El-Sayed-friendly political action committee founded by Cenk Uygur, a left-wing media personality, features a couple shopping for groceries while discussing why they can no longer afford a $7 carton of eggs: The money has already been stripped from their wallets by the federal government so that it can be sent to Israel and spent on “killing Palestinians” while also “probably” funding Israel’s universal health care.
A voice-over then asks, “Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want, and so little about what you want?”
What’s wrong with the ad? For starters, the price of a dozen eggs has fallen by about half since Trump returned to office; a price-conscious shopper in Michigan could pick up a dozen eggs at Walmart for under $2. And while prices for groceries have undoubtedly been affected by higher energy costs because of the war with Iran, for which Israel is partly responsible, they’ve also been affected by the war in Ukraine; droughts in Brazil, China and the Midwest; and Trump’s capricious tariffs. Is Israel to blame for all that, too?
The larger problem with the ad is that it unites three of the oldest antisemitic tropes in history. First: There’s a powerful Jew out there who’s picking the pockets of the less fortunate. Second, that Jew is doing so to slaughter the innocent. Third, he’s paying a non-Jewish intermediary (who, by implication, is either a dope or a stooge) to do his bidding. To suggest the ad is only about U.S. policy toward Israel would be like arguing that an ad denouncing foreign aid to African countries while featuring the worst stereotypes about people in those countries isn’t racist. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
It would have been morally right — and a political no-brainer — for El-Sayed to forthrightly and unequivocally denounce the ad. A similar dynamic played out in early 2008, when Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., turned out to have a record of incendiary rhetoric. Obama denounced the pastor’s statements, and, after Wright kept it up, broke off relations with the man. Doing so drew a firm and effective line under the controversy, underscoring Obama’s insistence that he was no radical.
Yet the most El-Sayed has said about the ad was that it “was not made by me,” that he didn’t agree with its content but that the controversy was “not worth my time.” That’s odd: It was El-Sayed himself who called Israel “an affordability issue” while adding “we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals.” Nor has he been shy about denouncing Israel at nearly every opportunity he gets. The ad he now says he has nothing to do with merely expresses what he plainly believes.
It’s part of a broader pattern.
His initial response to the Temple Israel attack, where only a miracle spared the over 150 children and staff inside from death or injury, was that “hurt people hurt people.” It took him five months to offer a quasi apology. (“My comments may have been misconstrued.”) He campaigned alongside the antisemitic media personality Hasan Piker (who recently compared campaigning for El-Sayed in heavily Jewish West Bloomfield Township to campaigning for a Black candidate in a “Klan K.K.K. neighborhood”) and quietly distanced himself from him because he feared it was costing him votes, according to reporting by CNN. Tucker Carlson, the right’s most prominent normalizer of antisemitism, now features in one of El-Sayed’s campaign ads.
A question for Michigan voters, especially those who lean left: If the stigmatized minority here weren’t Jewish but, say, gay or Latino or Black, would you even consider a vote for any candidate abetting, or at least tolerating, the stigmatizing?
None of this will matter at all to voters who thrill to El-Sayed’s message. Nor will it matter enough to voters willing to put their misgivings about him aside because they feel that Rogers, for his part, has failed to call out the rhetorical excesses of Republicans, and that nothing is more important than sending Trump the sternest electoral rebuke they can. Yet come January, Trump will still be president, no matter how well Democrats do in the midterms.
The real issue for voters in Michigan is what moral price is worth paying for an additional seat in the Senate. There are, after all, other winnable Senate races in other states. And a vote to further strengthen the forces of antisemitism in American politics, under any party banner or political justification, is no vote for democracy, either.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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