Miami
Fox News revives a 2007 campus protest involving Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race
The outlet reported that the Democratic candidate joined a University of Michigan protest against a campus talk in 2007. His campaign said he has unequivocally rejected terrorism and argued the speakers had been accused of spreading falsehoods.
Fox News Politics reported that Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s Senate race, took part in a 2007 protest at the University of Michigan against a talk by three men who described themselves as former terrorists and spoke about converting to Christianity.
According to that account, based on contemporaneous reporting by The Michigan Daily, the speakers were Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Annani and Kamal Saleem. They were then appearing at events to discuss claimed past involvement with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Muslim Brotherhood before becoming Christians.
The Michigan Daily reported at the time that some students staged a walkout during the event and that El-Sayed praised the action afterward.
El-Sayed’s campaign pushed back through spokesperson Cole Wozniak, who told Fox News Digital that the candidate had unequivocally denounced terrorism. Wozniak also said the protest had targeted speakers widely criticized by experts, including in national security, for spreading misinformation and allegedly fabricating parts of their personal histories.
Fox News also said questions have been raised about the backgrounds of Shoebat, Annani and Saleem. It cited a 2008 report by The New York Times, which said that before an appearance at the Air Force Academy, organizations criticized their participation and Arab-American civil rights groups asked why they had not been arrested or deported if they truly had ties to terrorist groups.
According to The Michigan Daily, organizers of the University of Michigan event said it was intended to educate people about the dangers of Muslim extremism rather than encourage intolerance. Protesters argued instead that the event was generalizing an entire group of people.
Fox News further noted that El-Sayed was vice president of the Muslim Students Association at the time. The outlet tied that organization to alleged links with the Muslim Brotherhood and said the White House last year asked the State and Treasury departments to determine whether certain chapters should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
In the same report, Fox News cited written testimony submitted last month to the Senate Judiciary Committee by Lara Burns, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. In that testimony, she said the Muslim Brotherhood had established a presence in the United States by the 1960s and that its members operated largely through student groups on college campuses, especially the Muslim Students Association.
Fox News added that the organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment and noted that Donald Trump’s administration sought such designations for the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood over their connections to Hamas and the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Sources
About this piece. Written by El Notero with AI assistance, from reporting published by the outlet cited above. El Notero did no original reporting on this story.
