The Western Journal

El-Sayed’s Terrible Weekend: Dem Forced to Apologize to Jewish Community, Erase Ties to Terror-Friendly Hasan Piker

Conservative News DailySeptember 1, 2026
21

The content discusses concerns within the Michigan Democratic Party regarding their upcoming Senate race, highlighting the controversy surrounding candidate Abdul el-Sayed. El-Sayed is criticized for his associations with radical figures like streamer Hasan Piker and controversial statements, including comments about the synagogue attack in West Bloomfield, Michigan. His past sympathies, such as an apology emphasizing “hurt people hurt people,” and his connections to radical organizations have alienated key voter blocs, notably Jewish and Black communities.The situation is worsened by his refusal to disavow Piker and his past remarks, as well as a perceived lack of genuine support for customary American culture, exemplified by his criticism of college football and masculinity. The Michigan Democratic Party is experiencing internal issues, including attendance problems at the party convention due to concerns over anti-Semitism and harassment, and some prominent members are avoiding the race altogether. El-Sayed’s campaign appears to be undermining Democratic efforts to secure the seat ahead of the crucial election period.



In a year where Republicans find themselves worrying about Senate polls more than Democrats do as we near the unofficial kickoff of The Real Campaign Season™ — the Labor Day weekend — there’s one pesky outlier that has Democrats fretting, and with darn good reason: Michigan.

It would have been a safe seat, even though Donald Trump has won Michigan twice and the state has turned definitively purple.

Retiring Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat, never faced any serious challenges. Two of the three big names in the Democratic primary to replace him — U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, an orthodox Democrat, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a progressive but one who wouldn’t have made many waves — were uncontroversial and would have sailed to victory in a midterm cycle typically good for Democrats.

A third, former Wayne County health official Abdul El-Sayed, was not. He campaigned with streamer Hasan “America Deserved 9/11” Piker. He’s on record as basically loathing anything Israel-related and has links through donors and/or family members to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. And in Michigan — Michigan, of all places! — he was on record stating that football plays into “toxic masculinity.”

So in other words, Democrats are worrying, particularly since black and Jewish voters, rather important blocs for the Michigan Democratic Party, seem to be turned off by the guy and his associations with radical streamers, radical organizations, and the radical idea that the Wolverines and Lions are basically tools of the patriarchy.

Ever since El-Sayed eked out a victory in the primary and the initial polls showed he’s in real trouble, this has been simmering to a boil. And then the pot boiled over in what could best be described as Abdul and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend — in which he was forced to apologize to the state’s Jewish community again due to offensive comments he made about a synagogue attack in the state, pretend that this race had nothing to do with “a social media person in California” who helped him win the nomination, and tried to pretend he was really invested in the University of Michigan-Ohio State University football rivalry with decidedly, um, unconvincing results.

First off was the apology for the attack on the Temple Israel synagogue in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township, allegedly by an extremist named Ayman Mohammad Ghazali who had lost four family members in Lebanon.

At the time, El-Sayed expressed sympathy but emphasized that “hurt people hurt people,” according to the U.K. Guardian. Yes, because we all know that “hurt people” act like this:

Ghazali reportedly drove his truck through the doors of the Temple Israel synagogue and into a hallway, where he allegedly shot himself fatally after he was confronted by security. Explosives were found inside the truck, which caught fire. Community leaders expressed relief that there was only a minor injury beyond Ghazali’s own death. 

Here we come to our first mention of Piker, the anti-Semitic Twitch streamer who propelled El-Sayed to the front of the pack in the primary despite not having the resumes that the other candidates had, but who also threatened a Jewish Democrat on a livestream on Aug. 20.

“What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context,” El-Sayed said during a media briefing on Saturday in the state capital of Lansing, where the Democrats were holding their convention. “And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”

“My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” he added. “To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”

Jeannie Bueller said it best: “Dry that one out and you could fertilize the lawn.”

We now move to Hasan Piker, who he’s suddenly refusing to talk about.

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” he said when asked about the Twitch streamer. “I am not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California.”

This is humorous because the only reason we’re talking about El-Sayed is the fact that Piker started campaigning with him when he was in a distant third in most polls. At that time, the two seemed thick as thieves, and El-Sayed was unwilling to disavow any of his beliefs, including that whole “America deserved 9/11” thing. This continued throughout the end of the primary campaign, where El-Sayed celebrated prematurely at a pool party hosted by Piker and streamed on his social channels.

It was only after the Aug. 20 stream where Piker had state Sen. Jeremy Moss’ picture up on screen while saying that “someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” that he was forced to issue this statement:

This apparently not doing the trick, he had U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, an establishment icon for the Michigan Democrats, come out and lecture the media, telling them “don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker, it’s not what November is about.”

That didn’t work, and — you’ll never believe this — didn’t work when it came to El-Sayed effectively saying the same thing. Live by the streamer in California, die by the streamer in California.

Oh, and to top it all off, this was the first weekend of college football, one of the official things that’s supposed to bring Michiganders together. Not for El-Sayed, who wrote this essay in 2021 deploring the “toxic masculinity” of football and saying that we all needed to be more like “Ted Lasso.”

And so, appearing on MS NOW, Piker had this “How do you do, fellow hand-egg fans?” moment:

El-Sayed’s recently discovered football fandom comes across as about as legit as when my wife used to say she loved the “New Hampshire Patriots” because Tom Brady was hot.

This, honestly, is the least of the Democrats’ problems. Let’s go back to that Michigan Democratic Party Convention at which El-Sayed made the synagogue and Piker comments. A lot of big names, including state Attorney General Dana Nessel, had announced they’d skip the convention over safety concerns due to anti-Semitism and harassment. Given that they need to keep the seats, scenes like these — which showed people really did stay away, at least for certain parts of the weekend’s festivities — aren’t a good augury:

That’s bad. What’s worse is that El-Sayed’s campaign is turning into something like the Robert Redford 1972 film “The Candidate,” where a long-shot nominee compromises all of his principles once the odds start skewing in his favor.

The difference, of course, was that Redford’s candidate was a template do-gooder liberal still on a Great Society trip a half decade after that got flushed down the drain. He wasn’t palling around with Huey P. Newton, taking donations from sources close to the Weather Underground, and calling Joe Namath “a tool of the patriarchal capitalist structure that’s a secret Zionist op and harshing our buzz, man.” That’s basically what the El-Sayed remake is — and lo and behold, Democrats have every reason to worry about the polls. They’re going to be worrying even more after this debacle of a weekend.

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Conservative News DailySeptember 1, 2026
21
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