Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed co-signed a 2012 Arabic-language statement backing Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's authoritarian power grab, and reporters faced prosecution for "insulting Islam" in the months that followed.
The statement, published on November 25, 2012, on the Egyptian news portal Al-Ahram Gate, called on Morsi to "purge the media and the police as quickly as possible." El-Sayed, listed as "Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed" of New York, the 33rd of 46 signatories, was attending Columbia University medical school at the time. The Washington Free Beacon reported that sources familiar with Arab-language media confirmed El-Sayed's identity as the signatory.
El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon's requests for comment on the letter or his current position on the Muslim Brotherhood. The document remains online.
Morsi, Egypt's first elected president and an open ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, won office in June 2012 with just over 51 percent of the vote after the Arab Spring toppled longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak. Five months later, facing growing unrest, Morsi granted himself sweeping new powers, a move that drew condemnation from across the political spectrum.
Human Rights Watch said Morsi's actions "undermines the rule of law." Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of Egypt's defunct parliament, was more blunt. He told the New York Times at the time:
"An absolute presidential tyranny. Egypt is facing a horrifying coup against legitimacy and the rule of law and a complete assassination of the democratic transition."
El-Sayed and his 45 co-signatories saw it differently. Their letter did not merely defend Morsi, it urged him to go further. The signatories called themselves "leaders of the Egyptian community" in the United States and declared:
"We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible."
The letter also rejected outside criticism of the Morsi government. The signatories wrote that they "strongly reject those voices that are courting America and Europe to take a position against the Egyptian regime."
In the months that followed, at least six Egyptian news reporters were hauled into court on charges of "insulting Islam" and "insulting the president." The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that critical coverage of Morsi was pulled from Egyptian websites. El-Sayed and his fellow signatories had asked for a purge of the media. The Morsi government obliged.
El-Sayed was not signing his name alongside moderates. Among the other signatories was Khaled Lamada, a former chairman of the U.S. branch of the Islamic Relief charity. The Middle East Forum reported in 2017 that Lamada's social media posts included praise for Hamas and jihad, along with claims that the United States is controlled by Zionists and that Egyptian general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is secretly Jewish. During Lamada's leadership of Islamic Relief, the organization hosted a speaker who called the Holocaust a "hoax."
Two other signatories, Akram Elzend and Sameh Elhennawy, were listed by Egypt's El Watan newspaper as members of a U.S.-based cell of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Free Beacon previously reported on their Brotherhood ties in March 2014.
El-Sayed's father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, is described as a top leader of an Islamic organization identified by the federal government as a public-facing group for the Muslim Brotherhood. Jukaku is also a top donor to a super PAC supporting El-Sayed's Senate bid.
The November 2012 statement was not El-Sayed's first public defense of the Muslim Brotherhood. In January 2011, as the Arab Spring unfolded, he published an article in the Huffington Post titled "Why the U.S. Should Support the Protesters in Egypt." In it, he downplayed the threat of a Brotherhood-led government.
"Even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power, there are several reasons why the ensuing state would look nothing like Iran."
El-Sayed also addressed comparisons between the Brotherhood and Hamas, a group the U.S. government designates as a terrorist organization, by citing what he called "differing contexts" of their polities. That same month, he published a separate article in The Guardian addressed directly to then-President Barack Obama on the same subject.
The Muslim Brotherhood's record since then has done little to vindicate El-Sayed's optimism. The United States has designated elements of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Egypt's own military rulers, after el-Sisi ousted Morsi in a June 2013 coup, banned the Brotherhood entirely, calling it a terrorist group. Western foreign policy analysts have described the Brotherhood as the intellectual forerunner of both al Qaeda and Hamas.
El-Sayed has also appeared alongside 9/11 conspiracy promoters at an Islamic convention and headlined luxury yacht fundraisers on behalf of an Islamic group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mariam Wahba, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Free Beacon that the 2012 letter should force voters to reconsider El-Sayed's fitness for office:
"This should raise serious questions about El-Sayed's worldview. How could someone looking at the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012 see it as a movement worthy of support, rather than as an Islamist movement whose ideology and networks have served as a gateway to terrorism, sectarian violence, and instability?"
The question is sharpened by the fact that El-Sayed signed the letter not from Cairo but from New York, where he was training to become a doctor. He had access to the same English-language reporting that documented Morsi's crackdown in real time. He chose to endorse it anyway, in Arabic, on an Egyptian news portal, alongside Brotherhood allies and conspiracy theorists.
El-Sayed's personal imam eulogized Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as a "heroic martyr" and "symbol of jihad", another association that fits a pattern rather than an isolated lapse.
Despite these mounting questions, Kamala Harris has campaigned for El-Sayed in Michigan, even as some Democrats have kept their distance.
El-Sayed's campaign has offered no explanation, no disavowal, and no comment. Michigan voters deserve all three before they hand him a Senate seat.
