El-Sayed apologizes to Jewish Democrats as he seeks to bridge party divides
By Eric Bradner, CNN
Lansing, Michigan (CNN) — Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee, is scrambling this weekend to try to win over skeptical Jewish Democrats — meeting individually and with groups of Jewish party leaders and apologizing for controversial past remarks as he tries to unite a fractured party before November.
But he downplayed the importance of his relationship with Hasan Piker, the far-left Twitch streamer who campaigned with El-Sayed during the primary — even after Piker told his audience earlier this month that Israel has become so toxic American Jews who support the country could be met with violence.
“I don’t ever want my comments to hurt anybody’s feelings. It’s important to me that people understand that I take seriously the pain of all communities in this state,” El-Sayed told CNN. “But I don’t want to have a conversation about a Twitch streamer in California. It’s just not a serious conversation.”
El-Sayed, the progressive firebrand, defeated Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate who was supported by tens of millions in spending linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in a hard-fought primary early this month. He is seeking to unify the Democratic Party ahead of his matchup with Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November’s midterm election.
The race is critical in the larger battle for the Senate majority. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to flip the chamber, and that path would grow much more complicated if they lost the seat of Michigan’s retiring Democratic senator, Gary Peters.
A calmer convention
At a state party convention Saturday in Lansing, the fissures from the primary had all but disappeared. The crowd of several hundred Democrats gave El-Sayed one of the day’s loudest cheers when he was introduced, and applauded his jabs at Rogers and President Donald Trump during his nine-minute speech.
Norma McDaniel, a 79-year-old delegate from Inkster who works for the Detroit Department of Elections, said she opposed El-Sayed in the primary and arrived Saturday with serious concerns about his candidacy — but that his speech won her over.
“He’s very articulate, he knows what points to hit, and he knows how to hit people’s hearts. He reached my heart today,” she said. “We have to unify the Democrats against what’s going on in Washington.”
Notably absent from El-Sayed’s remarks onstage Saturday was an attack on one of his most frequent targets during the primary: AIPAC. He pointed to more than $60 million spent against him during that race, but did not mention the group responsible for that spending by name.
It was one of several ways El-Sayed used the convention to seek to make inroads with the party’s most active Jewish members.
This convention featured a much smaller, less raucous crowd than the Michigan Democratic Party’s spring gathering, where progressive pro-Palestinian activists booed Democrats they viewed as insufficiently critical of Israel’s actions in its war with Hamas. State Attorney General Dana Nessel skipped Saturday’s convention, saying she feared she would again be harassed and booed off the stage.
Nessel was among the sharpest Democratic critics of El-Sayed’s response to the March attack on the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit.
Officials said Ayman Ghazali, a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon, drove a vehicle laden with explosives into the synagogue, which caught fire. The assailant, who killed himself at the scene, lost family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon a week before the Michigan attack.
At the time, El-Sayed condemned the attack and antisemitism broadly, but also said that “violence is a cycle” and that “hurt people hurt people.”
He apologized Saturday to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus over those comments, which some interpreted as justification for the violence.
“My comments might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify,” he told reporters afterward. “To anybody who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. 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,” El-Sayed said.
Rogers responded to El-Sayed’s comments Saturday by accusing him of “trying to con Michiganders into thinking his beliefs have changed. Let me be clear: they have not.”
“Abdul has had six months to apologize for his incredibly horrific remarks regarding the Temple Israel attack,” Rogers said on social media. “Instead, he chose to surround himself with terrorist sympathizers and some of the most notable antisemites in the country.”
Some Jewish progressives ‘still struggling’
Jewish Democrats who were in the room for El-Sayed’s comments said they considered his apology sincere.
“That was the first time that I’ve heard him say it in that explicit way,” said Daniel Rivkin, a University of Michigan communications staffer from Ann Arbor who is a delegate at the party’s convention.
“I think there’s a lot of dialogue going on, and that the dialogue will continue,” Rivkin said. “We have to work for every vote. I think that we have progressives who are real progressives who are nevertheless still struggling.”
El-Sayed plans to court that group’s members again in a longer meeting Sunday, as he speaks at the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus Summer Simcha celebration.
That gathering is private. When El-Sayed was asked by reporters to preview his message to the group, he said that “we may not agree on everything.”
“When it comes to foreign policy, I believe deeply in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Palestinian and Jewish Israelis alike. I’m not going to stop fighting for Palestinian self-determination because all of the money that we have spent to foreclose on it is money that should have been spent here, right?” El-Sayed said. “The question of where we spend our tax dollars — that should be a foregone conclusion. It should be spent here.”
“And we can show here in Michigan how we can disagree agreeably on some of those issues having to do with what we do 6,000 miles away, and show that we can stand arm in arm to protect the well-being of all of us here at home,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed dismisses concerns about Piker
Still, it was clear Saturday that El-Sayed isn’t conceding all of the concerns some Jewish Democrats have raised about his candidacy.
He remained largely dismissive about concerns over his relationship with Piker, a strident critic of Israel who recently suggested that American Jews’ support of Israel will make antisemitism worse and invite violence. Piker has said his comments weren’t meant to be taken as antisemitic.
Piker appeared with El-Sayed multiple times on the campaign trail during his primary race. El-Sayed said he wanted to reach Piker’s massive audience of young progressives.
Piker recently drew scrutiny for criticizing a Democratic congressional candidate, state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is Jewish, for failing to endorse El-Sayed. El-Sayed has sought to keep Piker at arm’s length, saying in a statement that “nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople.”
That wasn’t enough for some Democrats, including Rep. Hillary Scholten, who said she won’t campaign with El-Sayed as long as he associates with Piker. She said on X earlier this week that Piker is “hurting the chances of a Democratic majority in November.”
Pressed by reporters Saturday about Jewish Democrats’ concerns about Piker, El-Sayed repeatedly insisted that “this is not a campaign that is about a single streamer in California.”
“This is about affordability in Michigan; anybody who’s ever said that they’re existentially worried about Donald Trump; anybody who’s ever said that they believe in religious pluralism and the right to pray as you choose to pray,” he said. “All that we hold dear is on the line. It is time for us to unite around taking that on.”
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