When Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan this week, the Muslim Brotherhood celebrated. And when he took the stage to claim his victory, he introduced himself by his full name in Arabic: Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.
Introducing his name, in a perfect Arabic accent, was a reference to the critics who referred to him as Abdulrahman and were called Islamophobic, racist, and hateful for doing so. Of course, Mr. El-Sayed did not introduce himself that way until he had won.
It’s hard to read the choice as anything other than what it was: a taunt aimed at the people who called attention to his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a way of mocking their fears and savoring his victory over them. It was also his way of affirming their concerns, acknowledging his different upbringing and societal views, while his wife stood next to him in a Hijab.
El-Sayed has won as Islam is gaining strength in America and bringing its values into our society. We have seen open support for Hamas and for terror. We saw protesters in the streets on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. We have seen sharia enclaves take shape, schools change, and the electoral balance in America shift toward this demographic. We have watched Islamist Americans attack Jewish elementary schools in the name of anti-zionism.
Unfortunately, the founding ideals of America are vulnerable to this. Just let El-Sayed’s own words explain this. Addressing Vice President JD Vance at the victory speech, Mr. El-Sayed said, “JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January.” The crowd roared.
Consider what that line reveals. Mr. El-Sayed did not speak of the Constitution as something he reveres, or as something that binds him. He spoke of it as something that binds his opponent — a rule Mr. Vance must obey whether he likes it or not.
The irony he found “delicious” was that the document Mr. Vance believes is the very thing forcing him to hand power to the man he spent months warning voters about. One who loves something doesn’t talk about it in this way. Clearly, the Constitution is not a creed Mr. El-Sayed reveres, but rather a lever to manipulate against his enemies.
The Muslim Brotherhood, and many Muslims in America, see the Constitution this way too. Against that backdrop, Mr. El-Sayed’s candidacy carried serious problems. And while I’d like to put much of the blame on the press, it did not ignore them fully.
The New York Times and other outlets have reported on his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, including a letter he signed backing Egypt’s Morsi government and his family’s involvement in the movement. True, the coverage was still sympathetic and far too late, past the primaries when it was most important. And they did fully omit his father’s political involvement and ties to Hamas funding.
But the more consequential omission was the surrounding context. Mr. El-Sayed’s Muslim Brotherhood connection was treated as a biographical footnote — the sort of thing one notes about a candidate’s college years — and as a talking point for his opponents. But readers, and Americans, have little context for what the Brotherhood is.
Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood has been explicit about its aims for nearly a century. Its motto concludes, “Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Its goal is the global ascendance of Islam: a world ordered by Islamic law, with other nations drawn into it over time. Hamas’ founding charter describes the group as one of the Brotherhood’s branches.
Nor has the Brotherhood relied on violence alone. Its more durable strategy has been patience — building institutions, cultivating influence and working to transform other societies from within. In the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case, federal prosecutors entered into evidence a 1991 memo by a Brotherhood member in the United States. It described the movement’s work here as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
This is the organization that celebrated Mr. El-Sayed’s victory. It deserved more than a passing mention.
So why didn’t it get one? Because for much of the press, describing the Brotherhood’s ambitions is trafficking in conspiracy. They regard it much as they regard the “great replacement” theory: as paranoia, rather than as a description of what has been happening across the West in plain sight.
The great replacement was discredited by being made about race. Once it was framed as a theory about whiteness, it became a white nationalist theory, and once it was a white nationalist theory, no one was obliged to answer it. But one need not say anything about race to observe that an electorate is being transformed. The label simply placed the observation beyond discussion.
The same maneuver has been applied to Islam, Islamism and the Brotherhood. The word is “Islamophobia,” and it serves the same function. It ends the conversation before it begins.
After Sept. 11, the prevailing liberal consensus — which reached its fullest expression in the Obama years and was carried to a generation of students through the public schools — concluded that the right answer to terrorism driven by Islam was to embrace Muslims and multiculturalism. Diversity was our strength. Muslims, Christians and Jews were not so different from one another.
But religions are not only communities of individuals. They are bodies of ideas, and ideas have ends. Only Protestantism could have produced America and its liberty; Catholicism could not have. In the same way, only a religious, anti-secular Islam could have produced Sept. 11. To pretend otherwise is not tolerance. It is a refusal to take religion seriously as a force that shapes civilizations.
To discuss these things, like El-Sayed’s countless ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, is not Islamophobic. Nor is it hateful. Rather, it reflects an understanding of the historical and civilizational forces that have moved across Europe, through Jerusalem and around the world over the past thousand years — and that have now arrived in the United States.
Those who decline to see this, and insist on electing Abdul El-Sayed, lack historical perspective. They live so fully in the present — each election, each protest, each school board fight its own isolated story — that they lose sight of the longer trajectory to which these events belong.
America has now, more than once, elected officials who are not only Muslim but connected to Islamism — and who are tied religiously, ideologically, and culturally, to the extreme conclusions and actions their faiths have led to in the modern world. In Mr. El-Sayed’s case, voters were not uninformed. They heard about his Brotherhood ties and voted for him anyway, for reasons that had to do with the economy and health care.
I understand that, up to a point. When rent is due, the long arc of history can feel like an abstraction. But while blissful ignorance can ignore the truth, I cannot sympathize at all with a view so narrow that it misses the historical forces now coming to roost in America that could destroy the greatest nation-building experiment in the history of the world.
The Muslim Brotherhood has reason to be pleased with Mr. El-Sayed’s victory, and more reason still to be pleased with the inattention that made it possible. The larger contest, though, is only beginning. Across Europe, curtailing Islam has moved from the fringe toward the political center. I believe that’s where America is headed, and that level-headedness and an eye on history will help bring it there.
