Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed faced questions on ABC’s “The View” this week about remarks he made following the March 12 attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, and about why it took him months to apologize for those comments.
According to authorities, a man drove a truck into the synagogue and exchanged gunfire with security personnel before killing himself. El-Sayed condemned the attack at the time but drew criticism for later saying, “Hurt people hurt people,” a remark referencing the attacker’s relatives, who had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.
Co-host Sara Haines raised the comment directly during the interview. “Your response, that ‘Hurt people hurt people’ after the Temple Israel attack in Michigan in March really stuck with a lot of people,” Haines said. “And you did apologize for that. But it took you a while to. It took about five months to seemingly understand why that landed wrong with people and voters and constituents.”
Haines also asked El-Sayed whether leaders bear a responsibility to challenge extremism within their own faith communities, noting his position as the first Muslim senator of the United States.
El-Sayed responded by describing his history with the West Bloomfield synagogue, including attending a bar mitzvah there in his youth and visiting the temple after the attack.
“I condemned it immediately, and I wanted to offer context, but … you know, when people are hurting, context is secondary, and I just should have stood with their pain. And I learned from that experience. And I’m not above apologizing when I make a mistake,” El-Sayed said.
He said he had tried to “offer context around the fact that that individual had lost a child, niece and nephew in an airstrike,” and said he wanted leaders to be able to “stand with people’s pain with no exceptions and no asterisks” while also having what he called “an adult conversation about the ways in which actions ricochet around the world and create worse for all of us.”
Haines pushed back, saying, “I respect that. I just think that if that had been done anywhere near what I believed, I would be so furiously enraged that they would use the words that I have led my life with to hurt people that way. And that was young kids. So, I just was surprised it took a minute for you to understand that part.”
El-Sayed replied, “I hear you on that.” Co-host Joy Behar added, “Better late than never.”
The exchange drew further criticism from Jesse Arm, a vice president at the Manhattan Institute and a pollster originally from Michigan, who told Fox News Digital that El-Sayed’s comments were “grotesque” and that the television interview “compounds the problem.” Arm argued that the issue was not the timing of El-Sayed’s remarks but the suggestion that events overseas could mitigate responsibility for an attack on Americans at home.
“Whatever someone has suffered, there is no justification for attacking a synagogue full of children. None,” Arm said.
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