Abdul el Sayed is an American tragedy

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Dr. Abdul el Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee, grew up in an affluent suburb of Detroit. The median household income in his hometown of Rochester Hills, named after Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Rochester, is roughly $120,000. Not bad.By the time el Sayed graduated from the local high school, well over 95% of his classmates were also headed to college. At the University of Michigan, an institution co-founded by the Catholic priest Gabriel Richard and Presbyterian minister John Monteith, el Sayed excelled, graduated with high honors, and delivered his class’s commencement speech.After receiving a full scholarship to the University of Michigan Medical School, el Sayed won a Rhodes Scholarship, a prestigious academic award named after Cecil Rhodes, a diamond mining magnate and champion of the British Empire. He then attended Oriel College — “The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” to be exact — at the University of Oxford, ultimately earning a doctor of medicine degree from Columbia University, a school named after the great Italian explorer Christopher Columbus.Born into a society of unprecedented wealth built on American work ethic, capitalistic imagination, Christian ethical and communal norms, and liberal freedoms, el Sayed won the generational lottery. Every step of his impressive career was girded by the foundational institutions of Western culture and American exceptionalism.El Sayed didn’t adopt Third World Marxism because of his color or his circumstances. He is one of the luckiest people to ever live. He is an extremist by choice.Our meritocratic system, imperfect as it may be, offered el Sayed the opportunity to parlay prodigious intelligence into a very good living, advancing Western medical science or caring for his community. Instead, he’s chosen to degrade the nation.Now, it is fair to say that el Sayed isn’t the most fanatical socialist candidate, at least not openly. This is surely more a function of moderating to win a statewide race than any deep-seated ideological temperance. El Sayed’s movement, the people who support him most vociferously, want to abolish not only constitutional governance, eliminating virtually every institution, but also to get rid of our capitalistic system, and import Third World bigotry and violence.Marxists and the Islamists share a deeply illiberal and anti-Christian outlook, but they also share a near-universal antisemitism. In virtually every Islamic majority nation, even ones where there are no Jews, over 90% of the population is antisemitic.A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 44% of American Muslims expressed a favorable opinion of Hamas, a group that has murdered dozens of Americans.This is the culture el Sayed fosters. Virtually every day, the candidate spreads some medieval conspiracy about the “genocidal,” “bloodthirsty,” and “evil” disposition of world Jewry.Yet, at the same time, el Sayed won’t take a public stand on the death of America’s enemy, terrorist leader and mass murderer Ali Khamenei, for fear of insulting his constituents. If this is true, and we have no reason to believe otherwise, there is something deeply wrong and un-American happening in this country.Judging from his friends, there is something deeply wrong with el Sayed, as well. After all, no one forced el Sayed to appear with a Holocaust-denying traitorous imam who holds vigils for terrorists and asks Allah “to grant victory to our brothers in Iran.”No one forced el Sayed to closely ally with Hasan Piker, a man who believes 3,000 innocent Americans deserved to die on 9/11, who wants the streets to “soak in red capitalist blood,” and who says he holds no patriotic feeling for America but celebrates mass murders such as Mao Zedong. At this point, even if el Sayed condemned Piker, which he hasn’t, no one should believe it.Of course, when el Sayed empathizes with an American Islamic terrorist who attempted to murder a kindergarten filled with Jewish children in Michigan — “hurt people hurt people” — he gives the game away.Yet, el Sayed is now endorsed by the same mainstream Democratic Party that endorsed a Maine Senate candidate who sported an SS tattoo for nearly two decades.These people will put their party above their country every time.The truth is that el Sayed’s Islamic background makes him especially appealing to the Democratic Socialists of America wing of the Left. But he isn’t a first-generation immigrant worth celebrating. Indeed, he should know better.Abdul el Sayed, a progressive candidate in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, center, with his wife Sarah Jukaku, left, and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), right, attend a service at Kingdom Covenant Church on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) Mohamed el Sayed, his father, left Egypt in 1979 to pursue an engineering degree at Wayne State University. That same year, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, who was later assassinated by a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group for making peace with Israel, introduced “democratic socialist” reforms into his nation’s constitution to roll back the authoritarian collectivism of his predecessor.Starting in the late 1950s, Gamal Nasser nationalized Egyptian banks and industries, created an unsustainable welfare system, and stripped land from the wealthy to distribute it more fairly among the people.Basically, his agenda sounded a lot like the DSA’s dream, right down to the obsessive paranoia about “Zionists.”Nasser’s nationalistic socialism appealed to poor Egyptians, but it was disastrous. Even today, Egypt’s nominal GDP per capita is still estimated at around $3,904. Next door, in Israel, the only Western-style capitalist liberal democracy in the Middle East, and a country el Sayed might detest even more than the United States, the nominal GDP per capita is $69,804.Yet, el Sayed wants us to be more like Egypt.In his commencement speech at Michigan, el Sayed claimed that one of the hallmarks of the “American dream” was an “audacity to believe we can change this world.” This is just cringey Obama-era puffery. But if el Sayed really wants to “change the world,” the place to start is Cairo, Khartoum, or Damascus, not Ann Arbor. As the writer Hussain Abdul Hussain retorted, changing America is “a nightmare, one that I left behind and came to America to live the American Dream, as a proud Arab who believes in America, not in changing it.”POST-WOKE AMERICA? THINK AGAINLike el Sayed, and millions of others, I also won a generational lottery. My parents fled European socialism and fascism. While I may or may not be hopelessly wrong on a host of issues, I have zero interest in importing any of the detestable, failed ideas or ancient prejudices of the wider world.That, however, seems to be el Sayed’s mission.