Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Jewish Democrat who has been outspoken against the rise of antisemitism in her party, raised concerns that Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate, had not publicly withdrawn his equivocal comments responding to a violent attack in March on a synagogue in suburban Detroit.

El-Sayed faced backlash for comments that critics interpreted as excusing the attack perpetrated by a Lebanese American man whose relatives — including his brother, a Hezbollah commander — were killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, controversially arguing that “hurt people hurt people.”

While many Jewish Democrats in Michigan have raised alarms over El-Sayed’s hostile rhetoric toward Israel and vilification of AIPAC, Nessel indicated in a a new podcast interview released on Wednesday that his remarks about the synagogue attack remain a key source of tension with skeptical Jewish voters whose support he will likely need to win in the battleground state.

“A lot of us perceived that as sort of making excuses for somebody who sought to murder over 100 pre-K school children, and that’s the kind of mentality that bothers me a lot,” Nessel explained to David Frum of The Atlantic. “You can’t make excuses for that kind of domestic terrorism,” she added.

Nessel, who recently said that she would not attend her party’s state nominating convention due to fears of antisemitic harassment, told Frum that El-Sayed, “to his credit,” had since clinching the nomination in early August held meetings with Jewish leaders in the state to address their reservations with his candidacy.

“I think privately he will say that he regrets having made those remarks,” she said on the podcast. “But here we are. It’s almost the end of of August, and he still has not withdrawn those statements and said, ‘I misspoke’ or ‘I now recognize the harm that I caused by making those statements.’”

His reticence “has me concerned that he really stands by them, and if so, what does that mean for American Jews moving forward?” Nessel said, while suggesting his response carried troubling implications about his ability to roundly denounce future potential terrorist incidents.

“I think by the same logic,” she argued, “if Iran were to attack, whether it would be a government building or a church or a mall or what have you, that we would just deserve those attacks, because, of course, we are engaged in this war in Iran, and really the list goes on and on as to how you could make excuses for acts of domestic terrorism.”

“It’s a dangerous, dangerous world to live in, where you have somebody who supports that kind of logic,” Nessel added. “When you are providing some sort of rational explanation for why it occurs,” she went on, “it possibly encourages other people to do the same.”

Even as she voiced hesitation about El-Sayed and acknowledged many Jewish Democrats are backing his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), she said she would never vote for the GOP nominee. “To make this abundantly clear,” she emphasized, “I will amputate my right arm before I fill in the oval next to Mike Rogers’ name.”

Nessel said she would “leave hope” for El-Sayed to “withdraw” his earlier remarks about the synagogue attack “because he now has a greater understanding of it” after his meetings with the Jewish community. “That’s my hope, and I’ve had that conversation with him personally. He still hasn’t done it, but I hope that we’ll hear more from him about this soon.”

Nessel is among the most prominent Democratic holdouts on El-Sayed, who on Tuesday declined to confirm if he hoped to receive an endorsement from Jeremy Moss, a Jewish state senator and Democratic congressional nominee in Michigan. El-Sayed stirred controversy this week over a statement that his critics said failed to adequately distance himself from his campaign surrogate Hasan Piker, the antisemitic streamer who recently targeted Moss while claiming Jews who support Israel are inviting violence against themselves. 

Moss has likewise remained noncommittal about whether he will back El-Sayed, even as he said they are in “continual dialogue” about such shared goals as fighting “MAGA extremism” and “Jewish and Arab safety and security.”

Speaking more broadly, Nessel, who said she has been “bombarded” with antisemitic death threats since she became Michigan’s first Jewish attorney general, claimed that El-Sayed has displayed “a lack of knowledge about” the “religious values and beliefs” of Judaism.

The “real dearth” of understanding on such issues is contributing, she said, to a growing sense of political homelessness among Jewish Democrats who are now questioning their place in a party they had long called home.

At the moment, El-Sayed’s rhetoric on Israel and antisemitism is “creating this dynamic where you have a lot of Democrats thinking there’s good Jews and bad Jews,” Nessel argued in the interview. “The good Jews are the ones that don’t believe in Zionism, and the bad Jews are the ones that believe that Israel is our biblical religious historical homeland.”

“We absolutely want a Democratic majority in the Senate. But is Abdul going to spend six years railing against Israel, irrespective of who the government is there?” she asked. “That is a real concern.”

“And an even greater concern is how that’s affecting American Jews,” Nessel continued. “Because it really is turning up the antisemitism.”