Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed apologized this past weekend to Jewish members of his own party for comments he made after a March attack on a suburban Detroit synagogue, while declining to distance himself from a controversial online supporter, streamer Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed addressed the issue Saturday at the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominating convention in Lansing, where he met privately with the state’s Democratic Jewish Caucus and later took questions from reporters, including Fox News Digital.
“To anybody who feels like my comments may have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention. We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright,” El-Sayed said. “What I was trying to do was 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.”
The apology followed backlash over El-Sayed’s initial response to a March attack in which federal investigators say a gunman inspired and radicalized by Hezbollah crashed a vehicle into a Detroit-area synagogue seeking to kill Jewish worshippers. The suspect, a Lebanese-born man, had lost relatives a week earlier in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. At the time, El-Sayed said, “Hurt people, hurt people,” a remark that drew criticism from members of his own party, including Michigan Secretary of State Dana Nessel, who cited it in a recent interview with The Atlantic and skipped the Lansing convention partly over concerns about antisemitism within the party.
El-Sayed told Fox News Digital his original comments “might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify.”
Daniel Rivkin, a convention delegate and member of the Jewish Caucus, described the closed-door meeting with El-Sayed favorably. “He just had a very good meeting with us,” Rivkin said. “We’re having real conversations.”
The campaign is also in the process of hiring a Jewish liaison, Fox News Digital confirmed Monday.
Piker controversy persists
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former director of the Wayne County Health Department, would become the nation’s first Muslim senator if elected. He has argued against unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel and has repeatedly declined to say directly whether Israel has the right to exist.
Despite his outreach to Jewish Democrats, El-Sayed refused to repudiate Piker, a left-wing streamer and vocal supporter of his campaign who appeared at El-Sayed’s primary night party in Detroit. Piker recently featured an image of state Sen. Jeremy Moss, the Jewish Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, and warned, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
Moss has said a fake audio clip falsely claiming his entire reason for running for Congress is to ensure continued U.S. support for Israel has been circulating.
Asked repeatedly about Piker on Saturday, El-Sayed sought to shift focus. “We’re in the state of Michigan. If you want to make this race about a streamer in California, I just think you’re missing the boat,” he told reporters. “This is about affordability in Michigan. This is about seeing a doctor in Michigan. This is about Donald Trump’s disastrous policies in Michigan. That’s what I’m focused on right now.” He called further questions on the topic “not a serious conversation” and said, “nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople.”
Republican response
El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, dismissed the apology as a “sham apology.” Speaking Monday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Rogers said, “We’ve had so many Democrat Jewish people here in the state of Michigan ring up our phone and say, ‘I can’t do this. I’m for you.'” He added, referring to El-Sayed’s apology, “When someone says you might have been offended by what I said, that’s not an apology,” and claimed El-Sayed “has a long history of antisemitic and inflammatory comments.”
Rogers, who lost the 2024 Senate race by about 20,000 votes, is running again for the open seat, which Democrats must hold to retain any chance of winning back the Senate majority in the midterms.
Some Jewish leaders in Michigan went public Saturday with an open letter urging Jewish Democrats and independents to support Rogers, saying they had “felt threatened and alienated by the politics and allies embraced by Abdul El-Sayed, which has included demonization of Jews, equivocation on terrorism, exclusion of Jewish Americans from public life, and expression of implacable hatred of the world’s only Jewish nation.”
El-Sayed has pushed back on such characterizations. “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own kids. We have a responsibility to take on antisemitism in all of its forms, wherever we see it,” he said, adding that his message to Jewish voters is that disagreement on foreign policy “does not mean that I will not stand up… for safety for all communities.”
El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens, a more moderate candidate, in a divisive Democratic primary this year, a result seen as a significant win for the party’s progressive wing over its establishment.
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