At a Tuesday night event with antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker at the University of Michigan, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed doubled down on claims that the man who attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield last month did so as a result of the pain he felt from the war in the Middle East. 

“Nothing justifies the heinous attack that we saw on Temple Israel,” El-Sayed, a Democrat, said at a press conference alongside Piker, with whom he appeared at two campaign rallies in Michigan on Tuesday. “I also think it’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6,000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here, and if we stand against violence, we’ve got to stand against violence, all violence.” 

El-Sayed’s comments reiterated a sentiment he expressed the day after a Lebanese American man drove a car packed with explosives into the synagogue. No one lost their lives in the incident. The assailant, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after shooting at a security guard, had family members killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon — including his brother, a commander in Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia. 

Since El-Sayed’s initial statement, more details surrounding the attack have surfaced. The FBI said the attack was “a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism purposely targeting the Jewish community.” 

When a reporter from The Free Press pressed El-Sayed on his claim, asking whether a similar argument would have allowed sympathy for a Jewish person attacking a mosque after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel, he suggested the circumstances were not the same. 

“After Oct. 7, there was a whole genocide against Palestinians,” El-Sayed said.

Far-left Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, leftist streamer Hasan Piker and Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Summer Lee (D-PA) dismissed criticism of Piker and his past antisemitic and anti-American comments at a rally at the University of Michigan on Tuesday — El-Sayed’s second event of the day with the controversial social media influencer.

The El-Sayed endorsers all brushed off the criticism of Piker’s record of antisemitic comments, support for terrorism and other controversial activity as a distraction from their message and other issues of the day, including the war in Iran.

“A lot of the people that are on the Republican side, the reactionary side, they, instead of talking about [the war in Gaza], decided to talk about me stumping for Abdul El-Sayed instead,” Piker said, dismissing criticism of him — which has come from Democrats as well — as a distraction.

Piker referred to the war in Iran as “Operation Epstein’s Fury” and the Trump administration as “a bunch of fascist monsters that got tuned up by Israel,” and closed out his remarks with “Free Palestine.”

“Every single dollar that is spent on a bomb is stolen from each and every one of you. That’s $1 that they spend blowing up a school overseas instead of building schools in your neighborhoods,” he continued, going on to blame support for Israel for the lack of universal healthcare in the United States, and to claim that U.S. taxpayers are paying for Israel’s healthcare system.

El Sayed said that he had heard that a pro-Israel group on campus planned to protest the rally — to boos from the crowd — but El-Sayed said that the group would be welcome in the room “because at the end of the day, we believe in the courage of our convictions and our ideals.”

During his remarks, El-Sayed took numerous swipes at AIPAC, accusing the pro-Israel advocacy group of “corrupting our entire politics.” He said he expects the pro-Israel organization will be the largest spender in the Senate primary — though it has not yet announced any plans to engage in the race and has never before spent money in a Senate campaign. 

He called the war in Iran “genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable” and accused fellow Democrats of hypocrisy for saying that they view the war as illegal but declining to rule out voting for supplemental funding to support the war effort.

He also insisted — in spite of his promotion of Piker — that he would be a strong voice against antisemitism, pointing to his own background as a Muslim and his “love and reverence” for all people.

Tlaib said she’d told Piker backstage that he would always be welcome in Michigan.

“The fact that, literally, they’re all like, ‘Defend our democracy. Oh, shut up, cancel him’ — make up your damn mind,” Tlaib said, addressing critics of Piker. “Make up your godd*** mind. We’re for everybody in the room or not. Give me a break.”

Tlaib praised El-Sayed as someone closely aligned with her anti-Israel views, including support for blocking aid to the Jewish state. 

“I’ve been there seven years, and I’m tired of having to beg my colleagues to do the right thing, to not take money from the people that hurt us, not to literally spend resources and funding like this for war and destruction and death,” Tlaib said. “If any member of Congress or Senate can support a genocide like that, what else are they supporting right here in our backyard at home.”

Lee, like Piker and El-Sayed, dismissed the controversy over the rally as an attempt by people “who don’t want us talking to people who might rock the boat” to silence and stop the rally.

Other speakers at the rally included UM regent candidate Amir Makled, an attorney who provided pro bono representation to anti-Israel protesters at the university who faced criminal charges for their role in the demonstration, Summit Louth, the newly elected president of UM’s student government and Yousef Rabhi, a county commissioner.

“It was right here on this campus that students were punished for speaking out at the Diag, and it was right here on this campus where that outrage, the irreprehensible conduct of our Board of Regents punished students for speaking out against the genocide that students were charged with felonies just for the words of ‘free Palestine,’” Makled claimed.

Among other issues, Louth praised El-Sayed for calling the war in Gaza a genocide and for condemning the war in Iran and the Israeli operations in Lebanon.

“As we all saw this morning, the deranged president of this country issued a genocidal ultimatum on an entire country. F*** him. F*** that. We need to take our country back,” Rabhi said. “Instead of putting forward money to pay for your tuition, they are bombing people halfway across the world. Instead of paying money to make sure that we have single payer universal health care in this country, they are murdering innocent people. “

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.”

A nasty intraparty divide intensified this week as Democrats publicly debated whether to associate with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer who has faced criticism for antisemitic commentary and pro-Hamas rhetoric, among other extreme remarks.

The dispute erupted Tuesday after Piker revealed that he would join Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, for two upcoming rallies in the state, marking the Twitch streamer’s first major campaign appearance of the midterms.

For mainstream Democrats increasingly troubled with Piker’s rising influence on the left, El-Sayed’s decision was particularly alarming. In a statement on Tuesday, Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, said Democrats’ associations with Piker are “morally repugnant and strategically self-defeating,” and alleged that candidates “eager to campaign with” him are, “at best, comfortable overlooking his antisemitic and anti-American extremism and, at worst, endorsing it.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), a top moderate voice in the House, became one of the first prominent Democratic officials to speak out against Piker in comments on Tuesday, calling on the party to reject and distance itself from a figure he characterized as “an unapologetic antisemite.”

In a statement to social media, Schneider said Democrats “cannot allow those who preach hate and seek division to find safe harbor among us,” urging his colleagues to “call out hate and reject those who champion ideologies of exclusion and demonization.”

On Wednesday, El-Sayed faced further blowback from high-profile Michigan Democrats, including Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), a top rival in the Senate race, who said “choosing to campaign with someone who has a history of antisemitic rhetoric” would not be a winning formula in the swing state. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) echoed that sentiment, saying Piker “sounds deeply antisemitic” and he is “not someone that should be helping anybody out in the Michigan political environment.”

A spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment asking if he had weighed Piker’s antisemitic rhetoric in choosing to appear with him. The Senate candidate has said he is unconcerned with backlash to his decision, while arguing that his “politics resonates with people who have been locked out.”

Piker, for his part, has appeared to relish the new controversy, calling Schneider an “AIPAC dog” in an X post. “Democrats that spend any amount of time chirping about me love israel [sic] more than defeating Republicans and preserving democracy,” he wrote in another.

Even as prominent progressives have come to Piker’s defense, none seem to have meaningfully reckoned with his record of extreme commentary, which features a range of offensive statements about Jews and Israel. He has labeled Orthodox Jews as “inbred,” compared Zionists to Nazis and dismissed reports of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. More recently, he unequivocally sided with Hamas, saying the terror group “is a thousand times better” than Israel — which he condemned as a “fascist settler colonial apartheid state” in a social media post last January to his 1.6 million followers.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), for instance, a potential 2028 presidential contender who has appeared on Piker’s show, said in mid-March that he is “proud” to join the streamer’s feed. But when asked to share his views on Piker’s antisemitic comments, Khanna — in keeping with other progressive elected officials and activists who likewise have ties to the influencer — has demurred, stating broadly that he condemns antisemitism while reiterating he has called Hamas a terrorist organization.

The debate over Piker raises questions about the meaning of progressivism as left-leaning figures have continued to tolerate and in some cases even condone Piker’s extreme commentary, which has frequently shown a penchant for illiberalism that is sharply at odds with traditional progressive values.

In addition to espousing antisemitism and using eliminationist rhetoric with regard to Israel, Piker has said “America deserved 9/11,” downplayed the U.S.-designated Uyghur genocide in China, voiced approval of Hezbollah, called Russia’s annexation of Crimea “justifiable” and endorsed political violence, among other radical sentiments regularly expressed on his Twitch stream and on social media.

Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, who has written critically about Democrats embracing Piker, said the fundamental issue with the streamer “is that he does not believe in liberal democracy.”

“I am generally in favor of a big tent for the Democratic Party,” he told Jewish Insider. “If we want to win large majorities, we’re going to have to accept that some of the people who vote for us will have idiosyncratic, outdated or even outright wrong and bigoted views. But that doesn’t mean we should make those voices the face of the party, and I think it’s a dangerous game for Democrats to promote people like Piker.”

Piker’s status otherwise underscores how some progressive leaders are increasingly aligning with extreme figures in the Democratic Party based on broad policy agreements, without fully accounting for the implications of ignoring or validating baggage that voters would likely find off-putting.

Last week, for example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) joined a growing cohort of Democratic senators in endorsing Graham Platner, a far-left candidate running for Senate in the battleground state of Maine, saying he’s “got the grit to fight for what’s right on behalf of Maine’s working families — not billionaires and giant corporations.”

Her statement made no allusion to the lingering concerns over Platner’s now-covered Nazi tattoo — whose symbolism he claims not to have known until recently — even as she raised alarms last year about one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tattoos that is reportedly linked to white supremacist ideology.

Warren’s team did not respond to a request for comment from JI asking if she had considered Platner’s tattoo while making her endorsement.

Some critics argue that progressives who overlook Piker’s disturbing record or dismiss Platner’s tattoo do so at their own peril. 

Shannon Watts, a prominent gun control activist who has vocally criticized both Piker and Platner, said it is “disheartening to watch some Democratic politicians and pundits align with the most morally vacant and dangerous people in our party, just as we watched happen on the right for over a decade.”

“Too many Democrats are deciding one compromise at a time that their political survival matters more than principle,” she told JI this week. “Anyone who embraces hatred cannot call themselves progressive; they are simply an emerging version of MAGA on the left. Aligning with and supporting antisemitic behavior is a moral stain on our party and a stark warning sign for our future.”

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing criticism from some prominent Michigan Democrats — including Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who is running against him in the Democratic primary — for his decision to host campaign rallies with Hasan Piker, the far-left political streamer with a history of antisemitic remarks. 

“That’s the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with,” Stevens told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “We have to be serious here about who’s going to be the best general election candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan to beat [Republican] Mike Rogers, and someone who’s campaigning with someone like that is not going to win in Michigan.” 

El-Sayed will host two rallies with Piker and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University on April 7. 

Piker has millions of followers on the streaming platform Twitch. He has said that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, and has described Orthodox Jews as “inbred.” He has also praised terrorists and said America deserved 9/11. 

Stevens said that by associating with Piker, El-Sayed is “choosing to campaign with someone who has a history of antisemitic rhetoric.”

Slotkin told JI that she is not familiar with much of Piker’s language but that what she knows of his rhetoric raises concerns for her.

“Any equating of all Jews or American Jews with Israel and the Israeli government is a problem right off the bat, and then it sounds like, from there, a cascading set of antisemitic tropes and just the kind of rhetoric that is — I want to read for myself, but sounds deeply antisemitic, consistently, and therefore not someone that should be helping anybody out in the Michigan political environment,” said Slotkin. 

The announcement of Piker’s upcoming campaign visits to Michigan comes two weeks after an attempted terrorist attack at Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Mich. 

A new poll conducted by the campaign of Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, the third major Democrat running alongside Stevens and Piker, shows McMorrow leading the race with 30%. El-Sayed is behind her at 25%, and Stevens follows at 23%, with 21% undecided. Other polling ahead of the August primary has shown Stevens with a small lead. 

Far-left Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is taking flak over comments in an internal campaign call that issuing a statement on the attempted terrorist attack on Temple Israel in the Detroit suburbs that placed blame on Israel for the attack was a “risk” he felt he had to take, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday.

In both the original statement and the internal comments, El-Sayed condemned the attack while also suggesting that it ultimately could be blamed on Israel’s operations in Lebanon. The alleged attacker was the brother of a Hezbollah commander killed in an Israeli airstrike, the IDF said.

The Punchbowl report linked to a minute-long unlisted YouTube video of El-Sayed, which appears to have been recorded on Zoom.

“I want us to understand that we have to work toward a world where none of this happens, no war, no bombing of apartment buildings, no antisemitism, no attacks on synagogues in schools, like we need to be opposed to all of it and and I think that that’s the kind of leadership that I’m hoping I can offer,” El-Sayed said in the video.

“We put out a much longer statement on this,” he continued. “I hope folks will check it out, and I hope it resonated. And, you know, it was a risk. All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing, if you believe it to be true, that nobody else is going to say.”

El-Sayed clarified in an X post that the “risk” he was referring to “that these cowards will NEVER take is having the courage to call out an illegal and unjustified war that’s killing children, wasting our tax dollars, and spiking gas prices, too.”

While El-Sayed spoke, one person in the Zoom meeting, identified as “Mauricio” appeared to justify the attack, saying in a comment, “The synagogue raised funds for the IDF.”

In the initial statement, El-Sayed offered a condemnation of the attack, emphasizing that it would leave scars on the community and that it recalled “centuries of trauma,” while affirming his support for Jews’ right to practice their faith in safety.

But, while condemning the attacker and saying his actions could not be justified, El-Sayed also suggested that the perpetrator’s actions ultimately traced back to Israel and its reported killing of his family members.

“Hurt people hurt people. Violence is a cycle,” El-Sayed said. “Ayman Ghazali lost family, including two children in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people, and then, in an evil act of displaced rage, he tried to take it out on innocent children who had nothing to do with the loss of the innocent children he lost, except that they share a faith.”

“A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no air strikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died. Imagine there was never an attack on Temple Israel. That’s the world that we want to live in,” El-Sayed continued.

Spokespeople for El-Sayed’s Democratic opponents did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But Republicans have pounced on the comments.

Mike Rogers, the likely GOP nominee for the Senate race, condemned El-Sayed over his remarks in the internal campaign call.

“If you’re having a moral crisis over whether to condemn terrorism, you’re unfit for office,” Rogers said in a statement. “There’s no justification for it, but here Abdul is sympathizing with the attacker. It’s an absolute slap in the face to the families of these kids, and to Michigan’s entire Jewish community — and only serves to inflame antisemitism.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called his comments “pathetic.

“The contrast couldn’t be more clear in Michigan: radical terrorist sympathizers like Abdul El-Sayed or America First heroes like Mike Rogers,” Scott said.

El-Sayed has shrugged off criticisms of his comments.

El-Sayed is also facing attacks from Republicans and the Democratic group Third Way over his participation in a pair of events with far-left influencer Hasan Piker, who has repeatedly made antisemitic comments and expressed support for terrorism.

A prominent moderate Democratic think tank is continuing to call out Democratic candidates for being “too cozy” with antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker, who has been embraced by several left-wing Democrats in recent months.

In his latest statement, Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, condemned Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for his upcoming rallies with Piker, first reported by Politico, set to take place on April 7 at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan alongside Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA).

“It is morally repugnant and strategically self-defeating for Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed and Members of Congress like Summer Lee to cozy up to antisemitic extremists like Hasan Piker,” Cowan said. “Anyone eager to campaign with Hasan Piker is, at best, comfortable overlooking his antisemitic and anti-American extremism and, at worst, endorsing it.”

Cowan referenced a Wall Street Journal editorial he co-authored with Third Way’s Lily Cohen last week, titled “Democrats Are Too Cozy With Hasan Piker,” in which the two urged Democrats to follow the lead of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in calling out antisemitism in their own party.

“Piker’s depravity rivals that of far-right bigots. We will not defeat the surge of antisemitism in America without taking on its most influential proponents on our own side,” Cowan’s statement continued. “Embracing extreme bigots like Piker, who, for starters, has called religious Jews ‘inbred’ and said ‘America deserved 9/11,’ is not only dangerous and wrong, but antithetical to the urgent work of winning over the middle and defeating Trumpism.”

Other Democrats, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), have also embraced Piker, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently pledged to appear on Piker’s popular Twitch stream.

As two Democratic Michigan Senate candidates compete for the votes of anti-Israel voters with accusations of genocide against the Jewish state, Abdul El-Sayed, is going after state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, as insufficiently and inauthentically critical of Israel.

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), meanwhile, is solidifying her support for Israel, receiving an endorsement this week from Democratic Majority for Israel and calling herself a “proud pro-Israel Democrat [who] believe[s] America is stronger when we stand with our democratic allies, confront antisemitism and extremism, and keep our promises to our friends abroad and our working families here at home.”

With significant Arab and Muslim and Jewish constituencies, Israel policy issues are poised to play a significant role in Michigan’s Democratic primary next year.

El-Sayed entered the race as a vocal critic of Israel, while McMorrow, in recent months, has joined him in describing the war in Gaza as a genocide, as well as saying she would support efforts to cut off offensive weapons shipments to Israel.

El-Sayed, in a recent event at Michigan State University, criticized McMorrow for not taking that position sooner, describing allegations of genocide in Gaza as a matter of clear and incontrovertible fact. Video of the comments was published by the Michigan Advance.

He compared McMorrow’s position to someone taking months to decide that the sky is blue and saying, “let me give you five caveats about why it might not be blue.”

El-Sayed also suggested that McMorrow’s positions changed because she was seeking support from AIPAC, and only took a more critical stance on Israel after the group declined to support her. The far-left publication Drop Site alleged that McMorrow had been seeking an AIPAC endorsement earlier in the year and had authored a pro-Israel position paper. 

McMorrow’s campaign has denied that she completed a questionnaire for AIPAC and McMorrow said last month she would not accept the group’s support. AIPAC has previously endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who has maintained her position on Israel, in House races, but has not weighed in on the Senate race.

“When there’s 20,000 kids who died, that’s a genocide,” El-Sayed said in his remarks at Michigan State. “When people who are from the very country that committed — whose government committed that genocide say it’s a genocide, at some point you kind of just gotta be like, ‘Oh it’s a f***ing genocide.’ … “I don’t pretend that when 20,000 babies are murdered by our tax dollars, that there’s hemming and hawing about saying because it’s the truth.” El-Sayed was referring to numbers from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health indicating that almost 20,000 children and teenagers were killed in the war.

He suggested that McMorrow is trying to “package” herself as a progressive changemaker while the “substance” of her policies is “the same old politics.”

Asked last month whether the war in Gaza is a genocide, McMorrow said that it is.

“We have [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu trying to tell us what we’ve been seeing with our own eyes is not true,” McMorrow said. “It is true. And two things can be true at once. … The position of the United States should not be that we support Netanyahu with no check and balances.”

Asked about El-Sayed’s criticisms, McMorrow’s campaign referred Jewish Insider to those remarks.

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed sidestepped a question about Israel’s right to exist during an interview with the anti-Israel media outlet Zeteo last week.

Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan asked El-Sayed how he would respond if and when he faces questions on the campaign trail about whether he supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. El-Sayed initially responded by calling the question hypocritical and again dodged when pressed.

He said that most U.S. presidents have expressed support for a two-state solution, and “Israel exists. Palestine doesn’t. And so I always wonder why nobody asks me why Palestine doesn’t have a right to exist.”

El-Sayed accused the U.S. of supporting “the very people in Israel who want to foreclose on the possibility of Palestine existing.”

“And so to me, frankly, it is about our principles and how we apply them evenly. If you believe in a two-state solution, then what are you doing to make it possible?” he continued.

He went on to note his own childhood experiences in Egypt, which is the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid, and said that aid hasn’t benefited the Egyptian people, suggesting the U.S. should not be providing any foreign military aid anywhere.

“My position on this has always been … it’s not about conditioning aid. I think under no condition should we be sending the money that should be buying our kids’ schools or healthcare or infrastructure to a foreign military to buy them tanks,” he continued. “And that we can start with Egypt. We go to Pakistan, we can go to Jordan, we go to Saudi Arabia and we go to Israel. I just think it’s about principle.”

El-Sayed also dismissed AIPAC donors as “MAGA billionaires throwing their money around to try to dictate the outcome for a Democratic primary.”

“I think Michiganders are sick and tired of being told who they can and cannot vote for in Michigan,” he said.