Dem Abdul El-Sayed afraid to offend Muslim ayatollah sympathizers?

Abdul El-Sayed wants to be Michigan’s next senator, and is running in the Democratic primary. Of the three people in the race, he is the furthest left, and he knows it. And he’s apparently very cognizant of who his base is, and the risk of offending them. In fact, during a call with campaign staff, he told them that he wanted to steer clear of saying anything positive about U.S. forces taking out the ayatollah, because he was worried about offending Arab Muslims. 

This information comes from The Washington Free Beacon, which obtained audio of El-Sayed making these remarks.  

El-Sayed said he would rather not discuss news of Khamenei’s death at all, because there were a lot of people in Dearborn who were sad about it. Dearborn is an Arab-majority city near Detroit that voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, mainly due to frustrations with Joe Biden’s policy toward Gaza. Listen to what El-Sayed said specifically. 

And look, if he feels that way — if he thinks his base is Arab Muslims who sympathize with an extremist and terrorist regime — then yeah, he probably shouldn’t say anything about it. Frankly, what I found more disgusting than those remarks was that he planned to avoid discussing the ayatollah’s death by immediately pivoting to the Epstein scandal. If asked about Iran, he planned to call Trump a pedophile and say the war is a distraction from that. Listen to this.  

Let us be abundantly clear: What this man, Abdul El-Sayed, is accusing Donald Trump of is a vicious smear and a lie. There is no evidence whatsoever that Trump was complicit in the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. There is no evidence whatsoever that Trump abused underage girls. Anyone who utters these lies should be disqualified from higher office, because there is clearly no depth they would avoid sinking to. It is intellectual lazy, it is morally destructive, and it is corrosive to our democracy, to say the other side is not just wrong, not just misguided, but is complicit in the rape of children. 

And it shows that Democrats and the mainstream media, who made so much hay out of saying that MAGA conservatives are insane for embracing conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, have proven themselves to be little better. Because at this point if you believe that Trump was on Epstein island, you are believing in conspiracy theories, too. 

Pizzagate is a fringe belief on the right, but for Democrats the Epstein-Trump version of this story is going mainstream. Just look at what Ro Khanna is doing. And look what El-Sayed aspires to do: distract the public, convince them to ignore his own moral cowardice, by fixating on a lie.  

As a former resident of the state of Michigan and the great city of Detroit, I am really hoping the people there don’t fall for it. 

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary. 

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