Abdul El-Sayed went on national television Sunday and flatly denied that his family has any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. Within hours, his own half-sister's decade-old social media posts surfaced to contradict him.
The Michigan Democratic Senate candidate appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, where host Kristen Welker pressed him directly on accusations from his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, that his family is tied to the Islamist group that spawned Hamas. El-Sayed answered no. Welker asked again — this time separating him from his relatives. According to Breitbart News, his answer did not change.
The problem: Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, has written publicly and repeatedly that the family's Muslim Brotherhood history is real. The Washington Free Beacon found the posts, and they are not ambiguous.
"My family has long been MB," Abdelhadi wrote on June 24, 2012 — days after Egypt elected Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi as president.
She didn't stop there. On July 3, 2013, she wrote, "I have had family jailed for being a part of it." And in another post, "Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe."
Abdelhadi and El-Sayed share a mother, Fatten Elkomy, who emigrated from Egypt in the late 1970s and married El-Sayed's father before the couple divorced. Elkomy later married Abdelhadi's father, who was Palestinian. El-Sayed lived with his father after the split; Abdelhadi lived with their mother.
Where the Money Trail Leads
The Free Beacon reports that El-Sayed's familial ties to the Brotherhood run through Elkomy, who at one point worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency. The Treasury Department designated that group a specially designated terrorist organization in 2004 for providing financial and logistical support to al-Qaeda and Hamas. Court documents filed by U.S. officials named Elkomy more than a dozen times in connection with cash transfers, according to the Beacon.
The reporting also flags Tayeb Jukaku, a physician and major donor to a super PAC backing El-Sayed. Jukaku has served on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America since at least 2007, per the Beacon. Federal prosecutors identified ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case and described it as having historical ties to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Jukaku gave $200,000 to the Fighting for Michigan PAC and previously headed the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The questions are not new. El-Sayed's campaign confirmed in August that he still complies with Sharia law in his personal life. And during Thursday's Michigan Senate debate against Rogers, Breitbart News reported that El-Sayed failed to deny receiving money from terrorist groups — a refusal that Rogers hammered him on.
On Meet the Press, El-Sayed dismissed the accusations as an attempt to make voters suspicious of his Muslim faith. That is his framing. What he did not do was address his sister's posts.
It is not known which relatives Abdelhadi was describing, and the posts do not name them. There is no evidence in the reporting that El-Sayed himself was ever a member of the Brotherhood. Whether he knew about his sister's public account before Sunday is also unanswered.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 and has grown into a transnational network. Its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt engage in or facilitate violence and destabilization that harms U.S. citizens and U.S. interests, as the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack in Israel made plain.
Our Take
Here's what Michigan voters are being asked to swallow: a man who wants a U.S. Senate seat sat in front of a national audience and told them his family has no Brotherhood ties, while his own half-sister's posts say the family has "long been MB" and that relatives were jailed for it. That isn't a smear from Rogers. That isn't opposition research. That's his sister, on the record, in her own words.
El-Sayed's defenders will call this guilt by association. Fine — but he didn't get asked about an acquaintance. He got asked about his family, and he said no. When the receipts show otherwise, the story stops being about his relatives and starts being about him.
Add the rest of the picture: Sharia compliance he doesn't hide, a mega-donor whose organization federal prosecutors tied to the Holy Land Foundation case, and a debate stage where he wouldn't deny taking terror money. Michiganders deserve a straight answer on all of it before November.
Patriots, the legacy media will bury this by Tuesday. Share it. Make your neighbors read it. And ask yourself one simple question: if the answer were truly "no," why did his sister spend years saying yes?
