Democratic US Senate candidate Dr. El-Sayed justified terrorism last March. He justifies it now.
Hurt people hurt people.”
This was the considered reaction of Abdul El-Sayed to the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield last March 14.
A car rammed the temple. That it killed no one was a miracle, doubly so because it rammed past the preschool.
Abdul El-Sayed was then a candidate in the Democratic primary for the US Senate. Now he is the Democratic nominee.
Poof. He says he made a mistake in his remarks last March, and now he apologizes. Did he?
Back in March, the first phrase in his perfectly clear, concisely put, “hurt people hurt people,” referred to the Michigan attacker’s two brothers who, the attacker said, were killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon.
Who were these brothers? Two innocents tragically caught up in a war not their own? On this, more below.
For now, the attacker’s logic, according to El-Sayed, ran like this: Because one’s two brothers were killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon, the appropriate response is to try to kill Jews in a temple in Michigan — because “hurt people hurt people.”
El-Sayed now says: “My comments might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify.”
He further says, “To anybody who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”
Is this sincere? For the six months before El-Sayed won his partisan primary, he offered no apology. Only now, when he needs Jewish votes to win the general election, he offers an apology. Judge the sincerity for yourself.
The sincerity quotient, however, is not the main point.
Which is, the words that El-Sayed now offers as an apology sustain the same hatred that prevented him from apologizing six months ago.
Look at his “apology.” It does not take a professor of literature attuned to fine nuances to see it for what it is. In addition to the words of El-Sayed we have just quoted, he now says:
“We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright. What I was trying to do is 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.”
El-Sayed did condemn the attack. But he couldn’t leave it at that. The issue then was not, and the issue now is not, “anybody’s pain.”
The issue is El-Sayed’s legitimation of terrorism.
It was not the pain of Jews in the aftermath of the attack on the temple that prompted outrage at El-Sayed’s “hurt people hurt people.” It was El-Sayed’s justification of terrorism. Who were these two brothers? They were military members of Hezbollah, which is a US-designated terrorist organization (under both Democratic and Republican administrations). The two brothers were terrorists. The IDF named them and their “jobs” within Hezbollah.
• Brother #1 was Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali, a Hezbollah commander who managed weapons operations within a specialized branch of Hezbollah’s Badr Unit, responsible for launching rockets at Israeli civilians.
• Brother #2 was Qasim Ghazali, a member of a Hezbollah rocket unit.
These two brothers were operatives in the organization that launched daily rockets at Israeli civilians beginning Oct. 8, 2023 and continued for almost a year, and intermittently since.
This is the El-Sayed’s “context.”
This is what El-Sayed is now saying: It wasn’t the right time back in March to legitimate the work of two terrorist brothers in Lebanon because the Jews were hurting in the immediate aftermath of the temple attacks. But now . . . it’s six months later. Now, I can provide the “context.” Now, it’s OK to do so.
That context — when two terrorists are killed in Lebanon, and these two terrorists are your brothers — explains why a third brother would try to kill Jews in America, says El-Sayed.
The third brother, the attacker of the temple, is a hater of Jews. The first two brothers, members of a terrorist organization that targets Israel, are haters of Israelis (the great majority of whom are Jews). The actions of all three brothers (“hurt people”) provide “explainable” context, according to El-Sayed.
This is Abdul El-Sayed’s “apology.”
He was not misconstrued last March. He was perfectly construed. His words are as outrageous now as they were then.
This is the Democratic Party’s candidate for the US Senate in Michigan.
© IJN 2026
