ROYAL OAK, Mich. — Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who is running in a tight three-way Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, slammed one of her opponents, Abdul El-Sayed, for his decision to campaign with the far-left political streamer Hasan Piker. 

Piker, who has a history of antisemitic and pro-Hamas remarks, is slated to appear at two campaign rallies with El-Sayed and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) in April. 

“It is somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes,” McMorrow told Jewish Insider in an interview Thursday, referring to the neo-Nazi podcaster. “[Piker] is a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11.” 

McMorrow’s comments come as El-Sayed has doubled down on his decision to campaign with Piker. The third major candidate in the Democratic primary, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), said on Wednesday that Piker is “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with,” a sentiment McMorrow echoed.

“That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” said McMorrow. “How do you bring everybody together, especially when there are difficult conversations, where there aren’t easy answers? You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention.” 

Earlier this month, a heavily armed man drove a car into Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue with an early childcare center in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., before he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The assailant’s brother, a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, was killed by Israeli forces not long before the Michigan attack.

“I had made a statement back in 2023 after the Oct. 7 attacks that my biggest fear was that events in the Middle East tear us apart at home, and this was an example of that coming to life in a really visceral and terrifying way,” McMorrow said. 

“However you feel about what is happening in the Middle East, the response is never to take it out on people at home. The 140 kids who were at preschool that day bear no responsibility at all for anything that’s happening in the Middle East. And the rhetoric [is] being ratcheted up.”