ABDUL EL-SAYED GETS ACCUSED OF HAVING DUEL LOYALTIES AS ROGERS HIRES ISRAELI AGENTS

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used a campaign appearance for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan to attack Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed by questioning his political loyalties, and associating him with the Muslim Brotherhood.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature,” Kennedy declared. 

President Donald Trump has called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” accused him of wanting to impose Sharia law, and questioned whether he can be trusted with national security secrets. Rogers has also invoked the Muslim Brotherhood to cast suspicion on El-Sayed’s loyalties. Republicans repeatedly cite a 2012 letter El-Sayed signed in support of then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi as evidence of Brotherhood ties, even though the letter does not mention the organization and explicitly advocates democratic governance in Egypt.

Trump, Rogers, other Republican politicians, and television commentators have repeatedly questioned whether El-Sayed’s Arab and Muslim identity makes him disloyal to the United States, invoking the Muslim Brotherhood, jihadism, and Sharia law without producing any evidence that he represents or works on behalf of any foreign government or any foreign religious or ideological organization. Yet Drop Site News reported yesterday that two people working on Mike Rogers’s own campaign, including its spokesperson and a communications specialist involved in producing campaign materials, are registered foreign agents for the State of Israel.

Their work is connected to a $46.5 million Israeli government communications contract. There is no comparable evidence of anyone working for El-Sayed’s campaign being registered to represent a Muslim- or Arab-majority foreign government. Yet El-Sayed is the candidate facing repeated accusations of divided loyalty from politicians and the media. The people whose loyalties are being publicly questioned are not the people whose campaign operations have documented foreign-agent connections.

On the same day Drop Site News published its investigation into the Israeli government agents working on Rogers’s campaign, El-Sayed’s former Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, endorsed Rogers, citing El-Sayed’s past campaign appearances with Hasan Piker and claiming that his association with the streamer contributed to an atmosphere in which Jewish Michiganders feel unsafe. The episode reflects a broader media phenomenon in which claims about the feelings and political concerns of Jewish Michiganders have become a dominant lens through which El-Sayed’s candidacy is covered, despite Jewish residents making up roughly 1% of Michigan’s population, while the perspectives of the state’s much larger Arab and Muslim communities receive comparatively little attention.