Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed apologized to Jewish Democrats for his past comments linking a terrorist attack on a Jewish synagogue earlier this year to a greater cycle of violence.
“My comments might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify,” El-Sayed told reporters after speaking to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus at the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention on Saturday.
“To anybody who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry,” El-Sayed continued. “That was not my intention. We condemned that terrorist attack — we condemned it outright. What I was trying to do is 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.”
According to The New York Times, El-Sayed told caucus members during the convention that he had “made a mistake.”
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“I should have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop,” the Times reported him saying.
In March, a man crashed his car into a synagogue in a suburb of Detroit and began shooting, injuring a security guard. The attacker, who was killed in the shootout, was identified as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon who had lost four relatives in an Israeli airstrike in his native country a week before.
In a video condemning the attack shortly after, El-Sayed said that “hurt people hurt people” and that “violence is a cycle.”
El-Sayed’s apology comes as he is trying to unify Michigan Democrats in a tight general election race against Republican nominee Mike Rogers that may determine control of the Senate. El-Sayed continues to face backlash for campaigning with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker after a slew of lawmakers criticized Piker for comments he made about Jewish Americans.
El-Sayed won a hard-fought Democratic primary against Rep. Haley Stevens, who drew record spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians has drawn outsized attention in both the primary and the general election campaigns.
When asked by a reporter at the caucus meeting Saturday about his message to Jewish voters who are concerned about his past comments, El-Sayed said that “he believes in the safety and the dignity of Jewish kids like I believe in the safety and dignity of my own kids.”
“We have to come together as folks who understand what it’s like to be told we’re not enough-of,” El-Sayed said. “We have to come together around our mutual safety, and that is something I am committed to. So I’m looking forward to continuing that conversation. As I’ve always said, if you invite me in, I will come. We may not always agree, but I want to be able to demonstrate how we can disagree agreeably.”
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