Abdul El-Sayed has quietly campaigned three times this year with a Michigan-based cleric who served as an Iranian Navy propaganda apparatchik in the 1980s and as a high-ranking official at Iran's Martyrs Foundation, now sanctioned by the U.S. government for funneling money to Hezbollah and paying stipends to the families of suicide bombers.
Mohammad Ali Elahi, the imam of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, hosted El-Sayed at a campaign event at his mosque on June 24, organized an anti-Israel "interfaith" roundtable for El-Sayed on July 21, and attended a Dearborn fundraiser last month that raised $350,000 for the far-left Democrat's Senate bid.
While Elahi has been effusive in his support for El-Sayed—praising him as "a person of wisdom" in the same Facebook post where he pointed out that "Netanyahu's son lives comfortably in Miami," El-Sayed kept largely quiet about the relationship, which goes back several years. El-Sayed also campaigned at Elahi's mosque during his 2018 campaign.
Elahi, who claimed after 9/11 that "Mossad and Israel … perpetrated" the terrorist attacks, served as head of the Iranian Navy's "political-ideological office," a post to which he was appointed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian supreme leader who coined the epithet that America is "the Great Satan." Elahi, who was photographed with Khomeini in the 1980s, said in a 2017 interview that his job was to "reintroduce" Iranian officers to Islamic values after they had become "westernized" prior to the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Elahi, who donated $500 to El-Sayed's campaign on July 16, has said he helped create a research unit for Khomeini's Martyrs Foundation, which was officially established to support soldiers injured or killed in the Iran-Iraq War but had other purposes.
The U.S. government sanctioned Martyrs Foundation, also called Bonyad Shaheed, in 2007 over its support for Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. The foundation, which established a U.S. affiliate in Dearborn, has bankrolled terrorist attacks and provides stipends to the families of "suicide bombers in the Palestinian territories," according to the Treasury Department.
Elahi denounced an FBI raid in 2007 on the Martyrs Foundation's Dearborn subsidiary, Goodwill Charitable Organization.
"We expressed our concern that this pattern of dealing with Muslim charitable organizations may send a wrong message to the community and create some fear in the hearts of some people and discourage them from any kind of charity," Elahi said after meeting with FBI officials at his mosque.
Elahi, who immigrated to Dearborn in 1992, has also maintained ties to high-level Iranian political and religious leaders. He met with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the recently assassinated Iranian supreme leader. Elahi also stated that the spiritual mentor for Hezbollah, Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, had "supported" the Islamic House of Wisdom. Elahi hailed Fadlallah at a vigil after his death in 2010 as a "great scholar," according to the George Washington University Project on Extremism.
Fadlallah issued the fatwa, or religious decree, that authorized Hezbollah to blow up the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983, an attack that killed 241 American servicemen. Elahi has defended Hezbollah, saying in a 2006 interview that the terrorist group was "resisting against [Israeli] occupation."
Elahi is an influential figure in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, a heavily Arab and Muslim enclave outside Detroit.
Photos of the June 24 mosque event, which the Islamic House of Wisdom posted online, show El-Sayed speaking alongside Elahi and embracing him in front of a gender-segregated crowd, nearly all dressed in black garb, to mark the beginning of the Islamic new year. Staffers for El-Sayed's campaign manned a booth outside the mosque's worship area, photos show.
"He is under bombardment of Islamophobia and AIPAC and everybody is attacking him," Elahi said at the event, according to since-deleted audio published by the Middle East Forum. "There are over 10 Jewish senators in the U.S. Senate, not even a single Muslim."
The 70-year-old cleric hosted a roundtable for El-Sayed with other religious leaders, including Rev. Horace Sheffield, a black Detroit pastor to whom El-Sayed's campaign has quietly paid $7,500 per month for "consulting." And Elahi attended a fundraiser hosted by Osama Siblani, a local activist who has called Hezbollah and Hamas "freedom fighters." The fundraiser brought in $350,000 for El-Sayed's campaign, according to a report.
El-Sayed appears to take steps to keep his ties to many of the Dearborn-area clerics and activists out of public view.
While El-Sayed prominently displays endorsements from Sheffield and other Christian leaders, he has not acknowledged endorsements he's received from Elahi and other imams. Abdelhamid Algizawi, the longtime imam to El-Sayed in his hometown Ann Arbor, has endorsed El-Sayed. He's also hailed slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as a "heroic martyr." Hassan Qazwini, the imam of the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn Heights, urged congregants in August to vote for El-Sayed in order to "deal the Zionist a blow." El-Sayed headlined the June 6 grand opening of Qazwini's mosque and offered "hearty congratulations" to the imam. In a sermon weeks later, Qazwini preached that Iran "stood firm" against the United States "and it humiliated the most powerful man on earth," according to a video that Qazwini has since deleted.
El-Sayed has tried to avoid questions on the campaign trail about Iran and Hezbollah for fear of alienating his anti-Israel base in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights.
In March, El-Sayed said in a campaign strategy call that he did not want to comment on the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, killed in a U.S. airstrike, because "a lot of people in Dearborn are sad" over his death, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
El-Sayed repeatedly dodged calls at a University of Michigan campaign event last week—held hours after his fundraiser with Elahi—to denounce people who held vigils for Khameini. Elahi offered one such vigil for Khamenei at the Islamic House of Wisdom on Feb. 28, saying it was "an honor" for the dead Ayatollah to be killed by "the most wretched hands on earth."
