El-Sayed's Terrible, No-Good Weekend: Forced to Apologize to Jewish Community Again, Then Attempts to Erase Ties to Hasan Piker
In a year where Republicans find themselves worrying about Senate polls more than Democrats do as we near the unofficial kickoff of The Real Campaign Season™ — the Labor Day weekend — there’s one pesky outlier that has Democrats fretting, and with darn good reason: Michigan.
It would have been a safe seat, even though Donald Trump has won Michigan twice and the state has turned definitively purple.
Retiring Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat, never faced any serious challenges. Two of the three big names in the Democratic primary to replace him — U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, an orthodox Democrat, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a progressive but one who wouldn’t have made many waves — were uncontroversial and would have sailed to victory in a midterm cycle typically good for Democrats.
A third, former Wayne County health official Abdul El-Sayed, was not. He campaigned with streamer Hasan “America Deserved 9/11” Piker. He’s on record as basically loathing anything Israel-related and has links through donors and/or family members to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. And in Michigan — Michigan, of all places! — he was on record stating that football plays into “toxic masculinity.”
So in other words, Democrats are worrying, particularly since black and Jewish voters, rather important blocs for the Michigan Democratic Party, seem to be turned off by the guy and his associations with radical streamers, radical organizations, and the radical idea that the Wolverines and Lions are basically tools of the patriarchy.
Ever since El-Sayed eked out a victory in the primary and the initial polls showed he’s in real trouble, this has been simmering to a boil. And then the pot boiled over in what could best be described as Abdul and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend — in which he was forced to apologize to the state’s Jewish community again due to offensive comments he made about a synagogue attack in the state, pretend that this race had nothing to do with “a social media person in California” who helped him win the nomination, and tried to pretend he was really invested in the University of Michigan-Ohio State University football rivalry with decidedly, um, unconvincing results.
First off was the apology for the attack on the Temple Israel synagogue in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township, allegedly by an extremist named Ayman Mohammad Ghazali who had lost four family members in Lebanon.
At the time, El-Sayed expressed sympathy but emphasized that “hurt people hurt people,” according to the U.K. Guardian. Yes, because we all know that “hurt people” act like this:
Ghazali reportedly drove his truck through the doors of the Temple Israel synagogue and into a hallway, where he allegedly shot himself fatally after he was confronted by security. Explosives were found inside the truck, which caught fire. Community leaders expressed relief that there was only a minor injury beyond Ghazali’s own death.
Here we come to our first mention of Piker, the anti-Semitic Twitch streamer who propelled El-Sayed to the front of the pack in the primary despite not having the resumes that the other candidates had, but who also threatened a Jewish Democrat on a livestream on Aug. 20.
“What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context,” El-Sayed said during a media briefing on Saturday in the state capital of Lansing, where the Democrats were holding their convention. “And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”
“My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” he added. “To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”
Abdul El-Sayed — who said “hurt people do hurt people” after the Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack on Temple Israel in Michigan — is now trying to defend his comment:
“What I was trying to do is offer context…” pic.twitter.com/t0jII95CMx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 29, 2026
Jeannie Bueller said it best: “Dry that one out and you could fertilize the lawn.”
We now move to Hasan Piker, who he’s suddenly refusing to talk about.
“I’m gonna stop you right there,” he said when asked about the Twitch streamer. “I am not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California.”
Abdul El-Sayed — who made his whole campaign about Hasan Piker — now doesn’t want to answer for it:
EL-SAYED: “I’m gonna stop you right there…I am not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California.” pic.twitter.com/0fgWLoveFe
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 29, 2026
This is humorous because the only reason we’re talking about El-Sayed is the fact that Piker started campaigning with him when he was in a distant third in most polls. At that time, the two seemed thick as thieves, and El-Sayed was unwilling to disavow any of his beliefs, including that whole “America deserved 9/11” thing. This continued throughout the end of the primary campaign, where El-Sayed celebrated prematurely at a pool party hosted by Piker and streamed on his social channels.
Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed says there is NOTHING that Hasan Piker has said that he disagrees with.
JOURNALIST: “Are there any views that Hasan holds that you disavow?”
EL-SAYED: “I’m not here to disavow people’s views…”
Reminder: Piker said “America deserved 9/11.” pic.twitter.com/8U2IzctPZR
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 7, 2026
It was only after the Aug. 20 stream where Piker had state Sen. Jeremy Moss’ picture up on screen while saying that “someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” that he was forced to issue this statement:
My statement on Hasan Piker’s comments regarding Jeremy Moss: pic.twitter.com/bUm96ANJXT
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) August 24, 2026
This apparently not doing the trick, he had U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, an establishment icon for the Michigan Democrats, come out and lecture the media, telling them “don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker, it’s not what November is about.”
That didn’t work, and — you’ll never believe this — didn’t work when it came to El-Sayed effectively saying the same thing. Live by the streamer in California, die by the streamer in California.
Oh, and to top it all off, this was the first weekend of college football, one of the official things that’s supposed to bring Michiganders together. Not for El-Sayed, who wrote this essay in 2021 deploring the “toxic masculinity” of football and saying that we all needed to be more like “Ted Lasso.”
Abdul El-Sayed wrote in a 2021 Substack post that “toxic masculinity is at the heart of football.”
Is there anything uniquely American that these people don’t absolutely despise? pic.twitter.com/ACBcDGYwgh
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 10, 2026
And so, appearing on MS NOW, Piker had this “How do you do, fellow hand-egg fans?” moment:
“It’s about to be football season…I can’t wait to beat Ohio.”
– Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayedpic.twitter.com/L5aptnKMPy
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 28, 2026
El-Sayed’s recently discovered football fandom comes across as about as legit as when my wife used to say she loved the “New Hampshire Patriots” because Tom Brady was hot.
This, honestly, is the least of the Democrats’ problems. Let’s go back to that Michigan Democratic Party Convention at which El-Sayed made the synagogue and Piker comments. A lot of big names, including state Attorney General Dana Nessel, had announced they’d skip the convention over safety concerns due to anti-Semitism and harassment. Given that they need to keep the seats, scenes like these — which showed people really did stay away, at least for certain parts of the weekend’s festivities — aren’t a good augury:
BREAKING: The Michigan Democrat Convention is half empty.
Jewish, Indian, and Black Michiganders have come out saying they feel uncomfortable to attend. pic.twitter.com/iJh38Mc1zv
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) August 29, 2026
That’s bad. What’s worse is that El-Sayed’s campaign is turning into something like the Robert Redford 1972 film “The Candidate,” where a long-shot nominee compromises all of his principles once the odds start skewing in his favor.
The difference, of course, was that Redford’s candidate was a template do-gooder liberal still on a Great Society trip a half decade after that got flushed down the drain. He wasn’t palling around with Huey P. Newton, taking donations from sources close to the Weather Underground, and calling Joe Namath “a tool of the patriarchal capitalist structure that’s a secret Zionist op and harshing our buzz, man.” That’s basically what the El-Sayed remake is — and lo and behold, Democrats have every reason to worry about the polls. They’re going to be worrying even more after this debacle of a weekend.
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