The former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party is calling out Abdul El-Sayed's campaign over a statement—presented as being the candidate's own words and appearing for months on his campaign website—that justified the actions of Ayman Ghazali, the Hezbollah supporter who attacked a Michigan synagogue and Jewish school in March.
Lon Johnson, who served as state party chair through 2015, said Monday that he contacted the El-Sayed campaign last month over a notable line in a transcript of El-Sayed's video message about the attack.
"Ayman Ghazali hurt people. There is no justification for what he did. It was wrong and he never should have done it. Hurt people. Hurt people," El-Sayed said in a video-recorded statement after Ghazali attacked Temple Israel on March 12. One week earlier, an Israeli airstrike killed Ghazali's brothers, members of Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, along with two of one brother's children.
As Johnson noted, a transcript of the statement that appeared on El-Sayed's website removed the words "wrong" and "never," leaving behind a sentence that supported Ghazali's attack.
"It was and he should have done it. Hurt people. Hurt people," the website read until last month, when Johnson says he contacted Team El-Sayed.
Ghazali rammed a pickup truck loaded with commercial-grade fireworks and gasoline into the synagogue when dozens of small children were inside. He ended up dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound when his truck got stuck inside the building and went up in flames. No one else died in the attack. The FBI called the incident "a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism."
Johnson—who is married to Julianna Smoot, the Obama White House social secretary—said he does not believe El-Sayed himself made the stealth edit. But he said it warrants an explanation from the campaign.
"I don't believe Abdul wrote it or agrees with it," said Johnson. "But having worked on dozens of campaigns, I know how tightly website access is controlled."
Johnson said he asked the campaign who was responsible for that page of the website, whether the campaign investigated the matter and if anyone was disciplined for it.
"No response," said Johnson.
Notably, former El-Sayed campaign aide Mariam Odeh was indicted on federal terrorism charges in June for threatening Jewish people at the University of Michigan. Odeh worked for the campaign from February through mid-April.
Johnson's remarks are a stunning rebuke at a crucial moment in one of the country's highest-profile Senate races. Many Jewish Democrats have said they will abstain from voting for El-Sayed or vote for Republican Mike Rogers due to El-Sayed's anti-Israel rhetoric and his affiliation with supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. El-Sayed has campaigned with Hasan Piker, a socialist influencer who said "America deserved 9/11."
And El-Sayed spoke in June at the grand opening of the Islamic Institute of America, a Dearborn Heights mosque. Four months earlier, on March 8, the mosque held a vigil—which Ghazali attended—for Ghazali's family members who died in the Israeli airstrike. Four days later, Ghazali rammed his truck into Temple Israel.
Hassan Qazwini, the head of the Islamic Institute of America, said he greeted Ghazali at the March 8 vigil. Qazwini has praised Hezbollah from the pulpit, saying in a February 2025 sermon that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September 2024, was a hero of the "resistance." Qazwini said Nasrallah's death would be "fuel to sustain the resistance against Israel."
El-Sayed offered "hearty congratulations" to Qazwini at the grand opening of the Islamic Institute of America in June. In July, Qazwini urged followers at the mosque to vote for El-Sayed in the Democratic primary in order to "deal the Zionist a blow."
