Commentary

His Sister Wrote “My Family Has Long Been MB”

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

Abdul El-Sayed went on television Sunday and said neither he nor his family have any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The host asked twice. He said no twice. Hours later the posts from his half-sister were back in circulation. In 2012 and 2013 she wrote that the family has long been MB, that her mother was active in the Brotherhood in college in the early 1970s, that relatives had been jailed for membership, and that she was praying for the ones in Egypt who still supported it. The campaign called the reports lies and Islamophobic attacks. It did not say the posts were fake. The Brotherhood’s own paper, entered in a federal court, describes its work in North America as a civilization-jihadist process aimed at eliminating Western civilization from within. Whether El-Sayed is the vehicle for that process is the question the denial and the posts now force.

What he said and what she wrote

Kristen Welker asked him on Meet the Press to set the record straight on whether he or his family have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. “No,” he said. She asked again, for him and for the family. “No,” he said again, and turned to his opponent’s attacks. The half-sister is Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor, five years younger, different father, same mother. In June 2012, days after the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the Egyptian presidency, she posted: “My family has long been MB, but I’ve always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively.” She wrote that she had had an amazing talk with her mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 1970s while she was in college. In 2013 she wrote that she had had family jailed for being part of it, and she posted a prayer for the relatives in Egypt who supported the Brotherhood: lie low, stay safe. She described conversations with her MB family that, in her telling, showed respect for individual liberties and a secular state. The mother is Fatten Elkomy, who emigrated from Egypt in the late 1970s. She at one point worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, later sanctioned for funding al-Qaeda. The campaign’s answer, from a spokeswoman, was that Abdul is a dad and a doctor who has worked to keep Michiganders healthy and safe, that fact-checkers have debunked the opponent’s lies, and that the attacks are bad-faith assaults on his faith and family. It did not quote the sister’s sentences or say they were invented.

What the Brotherhood is

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. Its motto is that Allah is the objective, the Prophet is the leader, the Quran is the law, jihad is the way, and dying in the way of Allah is the highest aspiration. It is a political project that treats Islam as a complete system of governance, not only a private faith. It spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s. The Egyptian branch has been designated a terrorist organization by Egypt and by other governments. The United States has designated Hamas and other Brotherhood-linked entities; it has not designated the Brotherhood itself as a single foreign terrorist organization. In 1991 a senior Brotherhood figure in North America, who was also a Hamas leader, wrote “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” The document was seized by the FBI and entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. It states that the process of settlement is a civilization-jihadist process, and that the Brotherhood’s work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. It lists front organizations and the organizations of friends. The strategy is not bombs in the street. It is institutions, coalitions, absorption, and the gradual presentation of Islam as a civilizational alternative until the political ground has shifted.

Whether he is the candidate for that agenda

Family history is not a membership card. A mother’s college activism in Egypt in the 1970s and a sister’s description of the Egyptian relatives as longtime MB do not prove that the Michigan doctor who is running for the Senate has taken the oath or accepted the memorandum. What they prove is that his categorical denial on television is in tension with his own sister’s contemporaneous words about the same family. A candidate who says “no” to the family question, when the sister has said “long been,” has chosen the denial over the record. The stealth question is whether that choice is tactical. The Brotherhood’s written method in this country is precisely the use of acceptable vehicles—candidates, nonprofits, community groups—to advance the civilizational shift without announcing the end state. El-Sayed’s public positions do not mention the Brotherhood. They do include abolishing the immigration enforcement agency, equating Israel and Iran as dangers, opposing defensive arms for the ally, Medicare for All as the end of private insurance, and the seizure language around idle factories that he signed onto years ago. None of those is a Brotherhood trademark by itself. Taken together with a family the sister described as MB, and with a denial that does not engage the sister’s posts, they are the profile the memorandum contemplated: a figure who can operate inside the existing system while the system’s premises are revised.

He is not charged with membership. He is charged, by the contradiction, with having told a national audience that the family has no ties when the sister has said the opposite in her own hand. The Brotherhood’s agenda does not require him to carry a card. It requires him, or someone like him, to reach the Senate while the question of what the family believed is treated as an Islamophobic distraction. That is the test the posts and the denial have set. Michigan can read the sister’s sentences and the candidate’s “no,” and decide which one is running.

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