Abdul El-Sayed is under attack from right-wing provocateurs who won't stop noticing the controversial figures in his orbit. Earlier this week, the Washington Free Beacon dared to report on Abdelhamid Algizawi, the imam at the Ann Arbor mosque El-Sayed frequently attends.
Believe it or not, he's not a big fan of homosexuals.
Algizawi has a long history of urging Muslims to reject homosexuality and other forms of nontraditional sexuality because they violate Islam and "human nature." Turns out he's not particularly fond of the Jews, either. Algizawi complained in 2022 that most of the professors teaching Islam in American universities were Jewish. (Fact check: No, they aren't.) The following year, he urged Allah to "eradicate" the "disgusting Zionist regime" in Israel.
Perhaps the candidate and his imam have agreed to disagree on these issues. On the campaign trail, El-Sayed has portrayed himself as a tireless ally of the LGBTQ+ community "in their struggle for equal rights and dignity." Last month, he defended so-called gender-affirming surgeries for minors, which he compared to circumcision because they both involve "a kid's ding-a-ling."
Nevertheless, Algizawi celebrated El-Sayed's narrow win in the Democratic Senate primary as a "very big victory ... for the Islamic nation."
No one has disputed the accuracy of the Free Beacon's reporting, but some liberal activists complained that our story was unfair because it made El-Sayed, a Democrat, look bad.
"I'd find this kind of thing far more compelling if there was evidence that El Sayed was present when [Algizawi] said these things & continued to go to the mosque," wrote Brian Rosenwald, a political historian at the University of Pennsylvania. "Otherwise, I'm not a big fan of guilt by association. Same issue with the Jeremiah Wright stuff years ago."
Rosenwald, who previously served as an editor of the Washington Post's history section, raises an interesting point. We don't have proof that El-Sayed ever heard the imam discuss the deviant nature of homosexuals. Just like we can't definitely answer any of the following questions:
• Did Hassan al-Qazwini, the imam El-Sayed congratulated at a mosque opening in June, ever discuss what Bernie Sanders described as "antisemitic conspiracy theories" in front of the candidate?
• Did El-Sayed ever hear Fadhel Al-Sahlani, another imam who attended the mosque opening in Dearborn Heights, praise the Oct. 7 attack or cast doubt on the Holocaust?
• Why was Husham al-Husainy, a pro-Hezbollah imam who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024 because he thought (incorrectly) that Trump would ban gay marriage, mingling with guests at El-Sayed's primary-night victory party?
• What, exactly, did al-Husainy mean when he told the Free Beacon that "money people" who belonged to a "special faith" were behind the JFK assassination?
• How did a book by Dr. Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips—the extremist Islamic scholar who has denounced homosexuality as "evil" and espoused the benefits of child marriage and wife-beating—end up in El-Sayed's living room on a bookshelf that (allegedly) wasn't his? And why did he ask a documentary crew to refrain from filming it?
• Did El-Sayed ever discuss the American government's direct involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks with fellow speakers at the Islamic Society of North America convention in Detroit over the weekend? Did he get a chance to speak with convention panelist Yasir Qadhi, a Texas-based imam who has called the Holocaust a "hoax"?
• Did he overhear anyone at the convention lament the absence of Tariq Masood, the Pakistani cleric whose invitation to speak was rescinded after the Free Beacon reported on his history of "pedophilic rhetoric," which includes bragging about forcing his 13-year-old niece into marriage?
• Did he happen to catch Zaid Shakir's speech, in which the New Jersey cleric accused the U.S. Congress of committing "treason" by voting to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism?
• What about Siraj Wahhaj, the Brooklyn imam who also spoke at the convention? Did El-Sayed get a chance to ask him whether he still thinks homosexuality is a "disease of this society"?
And finally:
• How many unsavory associations would it take to establish a pattern Rosenwald and others might find "compelling"?
• How impressive is the mainstream media's commitment to unbiased truth-telling? I mean, is there any doubt they are covering El-Sayed exactly the same way they would cover a Republican candidate with similar ties to anti-gay Christian fundamentalists, neo-Nazi activists, and other right-wing zealots?
They would never rush to judgment in that situation.
It's an important lesson to keep in mind as we prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Waldo from the Where's Waldo? books is a perfect example. He travels the world through space and time, getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Suppose you found him at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, maybe even several Nazi rallies.
I know what you're thinking: "It could happen to anyone." Maybe he got lost. Who's to say he didn't leave as soon as the speakers started ranting about Jews? Based on the evidence, we can't prove he wasn't there to protest the regime. Enough with the guilt by association.
