Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat, boasted that, when he was a college athlete, he refused to face the American flag during the national anthem because he opposed the Iraq war.
"It was 2004, in the thick of the Iraq war, and I had taken to showing my opposition to the war by choosing not to face the flag during the national anthem prior to our games," El-Sayed wrote in his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics: A Doctor's Journey Into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic. "As any kind of demonstration involving the flag and the anthem often does, my choices offended many of my teammates: they couldn't understand how or why I felt this way."
El-Sayed defended his actions in his book, claiming he snubbed the flag out of patriotism.
"As I tried to explain, I love America—I always have," he wrote. "But I love it enough to demand it to be better, and to believe it can be."
Deliberately turning away from the flag during a public rendition of the national anthem is a violation of the U.S. Flag Code, 36 U.S. Code § 301, which Congress established as a guideline against disrespecting the flag. When the flag is displayed during the national anthem, "persons present should face the flag and stand at attention with their right hand over the heart," according to the code, which serves as a public advisory and is not legally enforceable.
El-Sayed praised former NFL player Colin Kaepernick's protest of the anthem—which exploded into a national controversy and made Kaepernick a household name in 2016—but credited himself for doing it first.
"This was many years before Colin Kaepernick would bravely kneel during the national anthem in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, igniting a national firestorm," he wrote.
News of the comments comes as Obama-aides-turned-podcasters Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Ben Rhodes have thrown their support behind El-Sayed's campaign, giving the candidate a boost in the competitive Michigan Democratic primary. His flag protests, though, could help fuel his image as a far-left radical, a perception stemming from extreme and often anti-American positions he has shared in the past.
In now-deleted X posts, El-Sayed repeatedly drew an equivalence between 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror, arguing that both were "perpetrated ignorantly" and driven by "tribalistic grievance," the Washington Free Beacon reported last month.
"Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith," El-Sayed wrote on the 20th anniversary of the terror attack that claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives. "Tomorrow, I'll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country."
He also compared the war on terror to slavery and the Trail of Tears, further arguing that the Muslim-American community was one of the main victims of the post-9/11 era.
The war on terror, he wrote, was an "echo of the worst of our history—the decimation of Native Americans, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow segregation, Japanese interment [sic]." He compared efforts to prohibit courts from issuing rulings based on Sharia law to the Trail of Tears as well and drew a parallel between an Oklahoma ballot measure prohibiting such rulings and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
In October, El-Sayed commemorated the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks with a fundraising email that blamed Israel for the war in Gaza without mentioning the terrorist massacres that incited it.
El-Sayed additionally has a history of backing "defund the police" activism. Last year, CNN reported that El-Sayed had deleted dozens of social media posts in which he denounced law enforcement, called for police funding cuts, and described police departments as "standing armies." The Free Beacon reported soon after that El-Sayed served on the board of an anti-police group when the group organized Detroit protests that turned deadly in May 2020. The Senate candidate also served on the board of a far-left climate group that lobbied to "defund" and "abolish the police" and described cops as "fascist pigs," the Free Beacon reported last year.
El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
