Normally, I’d put a piece like this behind the paywall, but I think it is very important for everyone to read it and to share it.
On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker asked the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, whether he could set the record straight on allegations that his family has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. When she followed up to confirm that neither he nor his family had any ties to the group, he said no, twice, and then accused his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, of Islamophobia. His campaign has called the whole matter “debunked as racist and untrue.”
His half-sister had already answered Welker’s question in writing. Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor who shares a mother with El-Sayed, wrote on June 24, 2012, as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was taking power in Egypt, that “my family has long been MB.” The same day, she wrote about an amazing talk with their mother about their mother’s activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during college in the early 1970s. On July 3, 2013, the day the Egyptian military removed Morsi, she wrote that she had family jailed for being part of the Brotherhood and that she was praying for the relatives who support it to lie low and stay safe.
Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, attended Alexandria University, where, according to a 2012 Brookings report cited by the Free Beacon, the Muslim Brothers dominated the campus Islamic student group in that era. El-Sayed himself wrote in his book, Healing Politics, that his mother was a leader on campus, though he left out that her campus leadership role was in the Muslim Brotherhood.
Elkomy also worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which the Treasury Department designated in 2004 for financing al-Qaeda and Hamas. Court exhibits in the federal case against the group named her more than a dozen times in connection with wire transfers between 1999 and 2002, and her brother worked there as a bookkeeper. When Rogers raised Elkomy’s terror connections at last week’s debate, El-Sayed asked whether Rogers was going after his mom and accused him of using “foreign names” to scare voters.
To be fair to El-Sayed, no man should have to answer for his mother’s college politics from more than 50 years ago. Had El-Sayed told Welker that his mother was involved as a student, that some of his extended family in Egypt support the Brotherhood, and that he thinks they are wrong, that would have been an honest answer and probably the end of the story. Instead, he said no, twice, on national television.
El-Sayed’s problems are not his mother’s decades-old activism. His problems are his own defenses of the Brotherhood, his college membership in a Brotherhood college group, and his donors.
In January 2011, as protesters filled the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring that brought down Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, El-Sayed wrote in the Huffington Post that the United States should back the uprising and that Americans had nothing to fear from the Brotherhood. Even if it took power in Egypt, he wrote, the resulting government would look nothing like Iran, because the movement was less hierarchical than other Islamists and willing to compromise. He made much the same pitch to President Obama in the Guardian.
The Brotherhood got its chance.
Mohamed Morsi won Egypt’s presidency in June 2012, and that November he granted himself sweeping new powers by decree. On November 25, 2012, an Egyptian news portal published a statement from 46 self-described leaders of the Egyptian community in America backing the president’s “revolutionary decisions” and calling on him “to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.” The thirty-third signature belonged to Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed of New York, who was then in medical school at Columbia. In the months that followed, at least six Egyptian journalists were hauled into court for insulting Islam and insulting the president.
El-Sayed did not simply misjudge the Brotherhood. In 2011, he assured Americans a Brotherhood government would not turn into a repressive theocracy. In 2012, when it began doing exactly that, he put his name to a demand that it go further and purge the press and the police. The Egyptian people rose up against the Brotherhood, filled the streets again in June 2013, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi drove the Brotherhood out.
Asked on Fox News last week whether he supports the terror designation of the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood, he said he would support a designation for any organization engaged in political violence. He then declined to say whether the Brotherhood qualifies. President Trump’s administration designated the Egyptian branch in January for helping Hamas. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman have a bill to designate the entire organization, and the European Parliament voted 381 to 167 last week to push the European Union toward putting Brotherhood-linked groups on its terrorist list.
El-Sayed’s yard signs promise to get money out of politics. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, had given $200,000 to Fighting for Michigan PAC, the super PAC backing him. As of March that money was nearly half of everything the PAC had raised. Jukaku has sat on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America since at least 2007, a post that requires him to give at least $5,000 a year to the group. He was president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Michigan from 2005 to 2010 and remains on its board.
Fox News found that El-Sayed has taken more than $115,000 from at least 41 people who work for or have led CAIR, including CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, who said he was “happy to see people breaking the siege” of Gaza on October 7, remarks the Biden White House condemned as antisemitic. The Free Beacon found donations from Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, a former foreign affairs spokesman for the Brotherhood’s political party in Egypt, and from Hany Saqr, the CEO of a charity whose board has included both El-Sayed’s father and his father-in-law. Saqr appears in a 1992 directory of American Brotherhood leaders that federal prosecutors entered as evidence in a terror financing trial.
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that a new super PAC built to fight AIPAC, American Priorities, put more than half a million dollars behind El-Sayed. The Journal’s list of the super PAC’s top twelve donors is worth reading: Mohammad Waqas, Omer Hasan, Sam Mahrouq, Afaq Ahmed, Idris Mokhtarzada, Fig and Olive Action, Nasser Barghouti, Nazar Khan, Moiz Ali, Mehak Jamil, Haroon Mokhtarzada, and Bothaina Salama. The top two had no record of political giving before this cycle and then gave about $1 million each. Five also funded Zohran Mamdani. Fig and Olive Action is a Delaware corporation that does not disclose who funds it. Bothaina Salama is listed as not employed and has given six figures. The man who wants money out of politics has a great deal of it coming in, and he does not seem curious about where it comes from.
That 1992 directory that listed El-Sayed’s donor Hany Saqr has a history worth knowing.
On August 20, 2004, a federal indictment unsealed in Chicago named Ismail Elbarasse, an accountant from Annandale, Virginia, as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 15-year scheme to finance Hamas. Elbarasse was no bystander. He had served on the board of the Islamic Association for Palestine and on the Palestine Committee, the body the Brotherhood created in the United States to support Hamas politically and financially. He had been an assistant to Mousa Abu Marzook when Marzook ran Hamas’s political operation, and prosecutors said the two shared a bank account used to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hamas. Hours after the indictment was unsealed, two off-duty Baltimore County, Maryland, police officers noticed Elbarasse’s wife videotaping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from the family SUV as he drove, and she lowered the camera when she saw their police car.
The chief of the bridge’s police force later said the tape ignored the water and the skyline and focused on the bridge itself. The footage included close-ups of cables and other features integral to the bridge’s structure. Elbarasse was on an FBI watch list, which held him as a material witness. His lawyer said the family was simply coming home from the beach. Elbarasse was never charged over the videotape.
What mattered was what the FBI found when it searched his house. In a hidden sub-basement, agents found the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, including the Palestine Committee’s internal records. Those papers became key evidence in the government’s case against the Holy Land Foundation, entered into evidence under the label “Elbarasse Search.”
One document in that basement was a memo dated May 22, 1991, written by Mohamed Akram, also known as Mohamed Adlouni, and addressed to the Brotherhood’s Shura Council in North America. Akram wrote it to flesh out a long-term plan the council had adopted in 1987, and he asked that it be put on the agenda for the council’s next meeting. The stated goal was the “enablement of Islam in North America,” which he defined as an Islamic movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood that would present Islam as a civilizational alternative and support “the global Islamic State wherever it is.”
Akram called the work in America a “Civilization-Jihadist Process.” He wrote that the Brothers must understand it as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within” so that God’s religion would be made victorious over all others. Among the institutions he wanted built was a political organization with a central party, local political offices, political symbols, and alliances. He conceded the Brotherhood could not do the job alone and would need to master the art of coalitions.
Attached to the memo was a list of 29 groups under the heading “A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends,” followed by the aside, “Imagine if they all march according to one plan!!!” The Islamic Society of North America was first on the list. The Muslim Students Association was second, and Abdul El-Sayed was vice president of its University of Michigan chapter in 2007. The Islamic Circle of North America was on it, too. None of this makes every Muslim who joined a campus MSA or attends an ISNA convention a member of the Brotherhood. However, the Brotherhood itself claimed those organizations in its own words and in its own archive. Prosecutors used the memo in the Holy Land Foundation trial, which ended in 2008 with convictions of five of the charity’s leaders for funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. It remains the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history.
The same trial revealed the FBI’s recordings of a 1993 meeting. Weeks after the Oslo Accords, about 20 leaders of the Brotherhood’s Hamas support network in America gathered at a Marriott near the Philadelphia airport, not knowing the FBI had wired the room. They referred to Hamas as “Samah,” its name spelled backward. They discussed how to keep building support for Hamas among American Muslims while hiding it from everyone else. “War is deception,” one leader told the room. Another talked about gaining influence with Congress by working through American media, universities, and research centers.
One of the men in that room was Nihad Awad. A few months later, the Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded in Washington, and Awad became its executive director, the job he still holds. CAIR has always denied being a Hamas front and fought the government’s characterization of it. Awad is also one of Abdul El-Sayed’s donors.
ISNA and CAIR were both named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case. When they fought that label, a federal judge ruled in 2009 that the government had provided ample evidence tying them to Hamas, noting, among other things, a joint bank account where checks were made out to “the Palestinian Mujahadeen,” the original name of Hamas’s military wing.
None of this is a conspiracy theory. It is in federal court records.
My friend Michael Youssef has a new book, * An Unholy Alliance*, that lays out how Islamists and the progressive left have found common cause. He recounts the experience of writer Amil Imani, who got into a closed-door Islamic Circle of North America fundraiser…
