The Republican Party declared open season on America’s Muslims on Wednesday.
On the very morning that Muslim American Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official campaign arm of Senate Republicans, released an ad showing grainy footage of El-Sayed and this message:
“Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the most radical Senate candidate in America. El-Sayed pledged support for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated foreign terrorist group … and when his ally claimed America deserved 9/11, El-Sayed refused to disavow it.”
Around the same time, Senate Republicans’ super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, posted online that “Michigan cannot afford the terror and destruction that chaos-agent Abdul El-Sayed promises to unleash.” (Both “terror” and “destruction” were underlined and bolded.) “Michiganders cannot afford the danger that Abdul El-Sayed will unleash on them,” the PAC proclaimed, going on to allege various ties between the candidate and Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden.
An American-born son of Egyptian immigrants wins an election? Must be a terrorist plot.
President Donald Trump called El-Sayed a “Communist loser who hates Jews” and Vice President JD Vance speculated that “God forbid, you’re going to have President El-Sayed in three years.”
And all that was but a warm-up for what happened Wednesday afternoon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. There, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) used the authority of the United States Senate — specifically, his Judiciary subcommittee — to hold a hearing purporting to demonstrate that there has been a decades-long Muslim conspiracy, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, to undermine and control the United States. And that El-Sayed is its crowning achievement.
Cruz had his aides put up a poster showing El-Sayed alongside the Muslim Brotherhood’s emblem of crossed swords and the Quran. “FROM THE MIDDLE EAST TO THE MIDWEST,” it announced. “COMMUNIST EL-SAYED, LINKED TO THE BROTHERHOOD, WINS DEM SENATE PRIMARY IN MICHIGAN.”
The Democrats’ campaign for the Senate “is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America,” Cruz charged from the dais. He said tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood, a nearly 100-year-old Egyptian organization, are “behind El-Sayed’s political rise.”
Democrats on the panel, accusing Cruz of “scapegoating Muslims,” boycotted the hearing, saying they had “no intention of indulging this political creepshow.” Cruz’s fellow Republicans also skipped the hearing — though probably less because of the subject matter than because Cruz is so singularly disliked.
The result was a one-man show of religious bigotry and conspiracy theories, an awkward development that Cruz attempted to conceal.
“You may notice that there are empty chairs on the Democrat side of the dais,” he said, without mentioning that the seats were equally empty on the Republican side. “The American people should ask themselves why not a single member of the minority decided that a hearing on terrorism was worth their time,” he said, without mentioning that those in the majority also couldn’t be bothered to attend. “It is an embarrassment and a disservice to the thousands of American victims of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The embarrassment, though, was all Cruz’s. He informed the spectators how “the present members of this subcommittee” would conduct the hearing, even though he was the sole present member. Over the next hour, he struggled his way through Arabic names in a convoluted attempt to demonstrate that the Muslim Brotherhood is everywhere in America — in public schools, in universities, in government, probably in your sock drawer.
Jowly and grizzled, and with McCarthyesque doggedness, Cruz treated the three journalists and assorted tourists and staffers in the room to a series of charts and anecdotes purporting to show that an alphabet soup of Muslim groups — ISNA, NAIT, CAIR, UASR, IAP — are all in on the plot. His three sympathetic witnesses readily agreed.
The star witness was Kyle Shideler, from the far-right Center for Security Policy, founded by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney Jr., who famously called Muslim groups “termites” who “hollow out the structure of the civil society and other institutions” so that “jihad will succeed.”
“Does Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy for senator in Michigan concern you?” Cruz asked.
“Yes, sir, it does,” Shideler replied.
“Does the Muslim Brotherhood also partner with political groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you agree that this alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the DSA … is based on a shared hatred of America, Israel, Western civilization writ large, capitalism, and democracy?”
“Yes, sir, I would, and I would go further.”
“What does it say to you that today’s Democrat Party is proudly supporting Mr. El-Sayed as a Michigan U.S. Senate candidate?”
“I would say it shows the success of the Muslim Brotherhood network over multiple decades that they achieved what they said they were going to achieve, which was to normalize support for Hamas and normalize support for terrorism.”
The Muslim Brotherhood has been Cruz’s great white whale for nearly a decade. He wants the sprawling group, with innumerable affiliated groups and informal ties throughout the Muslim world, to be labeled a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.
To be sure, parts of the Brotherhood are connected to terrorism, most notably to Hamas. But the State Department (even Donald Trump’s State Department) has resisted such a designation because of the many legitimate, nonviolent groups that are also affiliated with the Brotherhood. Instead, Trump issued an executive order targeting only certain arms of the Brotherhood.
Such nuance doesn’t interest a growing number of Republican officeholders, for whom Muslim-bashing is good politics. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee) opined that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida) said that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) posited that “we will never stop Sharia law until we stop Muslim immigration,” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) referred to Muslims as “the enemy.”
Laura Loomer, an online provocateur and informal adviser to Trump, celebrated the NRSC’s anti El-Sayed ad Wednesday for “calling out Muslim Communist Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for pledging his allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood.” She went on: “Abdul is Egyptian. Abdul is a jihadist. … We can’t allow for jihadists to hold office in America.”
At a news conference in Michigan, El-Sayed mocked the NRSC for its ad referring to him by his full name of Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. “That’s the best you got?” he asked. “My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.”
Then he added something quintessentially American. “I’ve been an ‘Abdul’ in Michigan my whole life,” he said. “This is, like, the best place in the world to be Abdul. You know why? Because Michiganders are — they’re bighearted, they’re open-minded, they’re earnest, and they’re gritty.”
That bigheartedness is one strain in American life. The paranoid strain displayed by Cruz is another. In 90 days, we may find out which is stronger.
Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
More from NOTUS Perspectives:
Why the R-Word Is the Defining Slur of the Trump Era