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See the full story · 4 sourcesSenate nominee Abdul El-Sayed spent this past weekend trying to mend fences with Jewish Democrats in Michigan, but his Republican rival calls El-Sayed's comments a "sham apology."
El-Sayed, in an appearance Saturday before the Michigan Democrats' Jewish Caucus, and in an answer to a question from Fox News Digital, apologized for comments he made after a March attack on a suburban Detroit synagogue. But he pushed back when asked to repudiate controversial comments from incendiary left-wing streamer Hasan Piker , who is a strong supporter of his campaign.
A vocal critic of Israel who describes its military actions against Hamas in Gaza as "genocide," El-Sayed is facing off against former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee in the Great Lakes battleground state, for a crucial open Senate seat the Democrats must hold in the midterm elections as they aim to win back control of the chamber.
El-Sayed's narrow primary victory over more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens in what was a divisive intraparty showdown was arguably the biggest victory to date for the left in its battle against the establishment for the ideological future of the Democratic Party. El-Sayed appeared this past weekend at the state party's nominating convention in Lansing, Michigan in an effort to unify Democrats in the wake of the primary battle.
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Fox News Digital asked El-Sayed about a recent controversy stemming from comments he made in response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue, when federal investigators say a gunman inspired and radicalized by Hezbollah crashed into the place of worship seeking to kill as many Jewish people as he could. The alleged attacker was a Lebanese-born man who a week earlier had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.
"Hurt people, hurt people," El-Sayed said in response to the attack. He was criticized by members of his own party, including Michigan Secretary of State Dana Nessel, who discussed the comments in a recent interview with The Atlantic, and declined to attend this past weekend's convention partly over concerns of antisemitism in the Democratic Party .
El-Sayed told Fox News Digital his comments "might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify," but then offered an apology.
"To anybody who feels like my comments may have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention. We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright," El-Sayed added. "What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context and you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain."
El-Sayed is an epidemiologist and former Wayne County Health Department director who, if elected in November, would make history as the nation's first Muslim senator. He has argued against unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel, as have other progressive politicians. And El-Sayed has repeatedly declined to directly answer whether Israel has the right to exist.
He said his message to Jewish voters in Michigan is, "We may not agree on everything when it comes to foreign policy... I'm not going to stop fighting for Palestinian self-determination... but that does not mean that I will not stand up… for safety for all communities and I believe in the safety and dignity of Jewish kids like I believe in the safety and dignity of my own kids."
Before taking questions from reporters, El-Sayed met in Lansing with the state's Democratic Jewish Caucus.
"He just had a very good meeting with us," Daniel Rivkin, a convention delegate and member of the caucus, told Fox News Digital, as he referred to El-Sayed. "We're having real conversations."
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The El-Sayee campaign is also in the process of hiring a Jewish liaison, Fox News Digital confirmed on Monday.
But some Jewish leaders in Michigan went public on Saturday with an open letter urging Jewish Democrats and independents in the state to sign their names in support of Rogers, who is making a second straight run for the Senate after falling just 20,000 votes short in 2024.
"Many of us have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles. All of us have felt threatened and alienated by the politics and allies embraced by Abdul El-Sayed, which has included demonization of Jews, equivocation on terrorism, exclusion of Jewish Americans from public life, and expression of implacable hatred of the world’s only Jewish nation," the letter stated.
Rogers, in a statement highlighting the letter, claimed that "Abdul El-Sayed fans the flames of antisemitism. We’re fighting to extinguish it."
In an interview Monday morning on Fox News' "Fox and Friends," Rogers said, "We've had so many Democrat Jewish people here in the state of Michigan ring up our phone and say, "I can't do this. I'm for you."
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Referring to El-Sayed, Rogers said, "When someone says you might have been offended by what I said, that's not an apology."
And he claimed that El-Sayed "has a long history of antisemitic and inflammatory comments."
But El-Sayed has repeatedly pushed back, saying, "My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own kids. We have a responsibility to take on antisemitism in all of its forms, wherever we see it."
Making El-Sayed's mission to make peace with Jewish Democrats and independents more difficult is the backing he receives from Piker.
Piker recently featured on his stream an image of state Sen. Jeremy Moss, the Democratic nominee in Michigan's 11th Congressional District. Moss, who is Jewish, has said that people are sharing a fake audio clip of him claiming that his entire reason for running for Congress is to make sure that America continues to support Israel.
"If Jews in America keep putting this ide...
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