Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent Saturday apologizing to Jewish Democrats for the crime of noticing cause and effect — and the forced grovel reveals exactly why nobody in this country can have an honest conversation about the violence washing up on our shores.
In March, a Lebanese man named Ayman Ghazali rammed a truck loaded with fireworks and gasoline into a synagogue daycare in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where roughly 100 children were present. He opened fire on security and killed himself. One guard was injured. By the grace of God, no congregants died.
El-Sayed's offense? After condemning the attack and calling antisemitism unacceptable — "Full stop" — he added that "hurt people hurt people" and noted that Ghazali had lost family, including two children, in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon the previous week.
For that, the Michigan Democrat was dragged through the usual ritual. "I made a mistake," he conceded at a Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus event Saturday. "I should have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop." He told reporters his comments "may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify."
The Guardian framed the apology as El-Sayed simply "eager to push past controversies" after a bitter primary. The New York Post noted what The Guardian buried: that leaked audio also caught El-Sayed struggling to respond to the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for fear of alienating Muslim voters, and that he still refuses to disavow far-left streamer Hasan Piker — who infamously claimed "America deserved 9/11" — even after stumping with him on the final day of his primary.
So El-Sayed is no profile in courage. He's a politician trying to hold together a coalition that includes people who cheer anti-American violence and people who are targets of it. That's his problem.
But the broader problem belongs to all of us. A man from Lebanon attacked a Jewish house of worship in Michigan because of something that happened in Lebanon. That's a fact. The Israeli strikes that killed Ghazali's family were retaliation tied to America's and Israel's assault on Iran, as the Post reported. That's another fact.
Notice what you're not allowed to connect: that American foreign policy — blank checks, no exit strategy, no defined American interest — has consequences at home. Import foreign conflicts, get foreign violence on American soil. It's not justification. It's cause and effect. The same establishment that demands El-Sayed's head for stating the obvious is the same establishment that ships your money overseas with no plan and no accountability.
El-Sayed apologized because he wants to win an election. The truth doesn't care about his ambitions, and it won't stop being true just because nobody's allowed to say it out loud.
