Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, told voters last summer that America's own conduct helps explain why terrorists commit "heinous" acts, framing political violence as a predictable response to pain the United States inflicts abroad. The remarks, captured on video at a July 2025 campaign stop in South Haven, Michigan, surfaced this week in a Washington Free Beacon exclusive reported by Alana Goodman.
The footage shows El-Sayed responding to a voter who asked how he would "deal with hostages and terrorism as a U.S. senator." His answer did not begin with the hostages. It began with empathy, for the terrorists.
El-Sayed acknowledged that military force is sometimes "necessary" to root out terrorist organizations. But he quickly pivoted to what he called a deeper question, one Michigan voters, and the families of terror victims, deserve to hear in full.
"But I also think we need to be curious about why those things happen in the first place. Like, what drives somebody to want to commit such a heinous act? Like, what, what happens when people are in pain?"
He went further, describing terrorism as a product of American hypocrisy on the world stage.
"There is a level of pain and frustration and a level of lack of agency that they have to feel to do something so insane and absurd, right? And so I've often tried to ask, like, so what moves somebody into that, and how is it that we're behaving that may get somebody to think that we don't see them, and that's creating pain?"
El-Sayed did not stop there. He told the South Haven audience that the United States built a "rules-based international order" and then broke its own rules, producing resentment that fuels violence.
"I think too often, the way we've engaged in the world has been that we set up this rules-based international order, and then we break the rules of the rules-based international order, and that creates a situation where there are a lot of people who look at us and say that's hypocritical and that's wrong."
He pitched himself as uniquely suited to bring this perspective to Washington, citing summers spent in Egypt and family ties there.
"I think that's the thing that I can bring to the table, is an empathy for what it's like for people seeing America from outside of America. And I think that's a perspective that is very lacking in the Senate right now."
Read that again. The man wants a seat in the United States Senate specifically so he can channel foreign grievances against the country he would swear an oath to serve. He frames this not as a liability but as a qualification.
El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon's request for comment. He has previously said "nothing justifies" terrorism and that it is "critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6,000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here." Those caveats do not change the thrust of his South Haven remarks, which located the root cause of terrorism in American behavior rather than in the ideology of the attackers.
El-Sayed's comments carry particular weight in Michigan. In March 2026, a Hezbollah-inspired attacker named Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove his truck into Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in what the Free Beacon described as an attempt to murder over 100 children inside. The Israel Defense Forces reported that Ghazali's brother was a commander in Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization. Ghazali's brother had died in an Israeli strike in Lebanon days before the synagogue attack.
Apply El-Sayed's framework to that attack. A man who lost a relative in a military strike felt "pain and frustration and a level of lack of agency." He then tried to kill Jewish children in Michigan. Is the correct response for a would-be senator to ask what America did to "create" that pain?
El-Sayed's record of controversial associations and mounting scrutiny makes these remarks harder to dismiss as a one-off philosophical musing. A pattern is forming.
The terrorism comments are not the only El-Sayed remarks to raise questions about his instincts on national security. On March 1, 2026, the day after the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, El-Sayed privately told campaign staffers he wanted to avoid taking a public position. His reason, as reported by the Free Beacon: "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad."
Dearborn has the largest Muslim population per capita of any city in the United States and became the nation's first Arab-majority city in 2023. El-Sayed's instinct was not to affirm American interests or acknowledge the threat Iran poses. It was to tread carefully around constituents who might mourn the ayatollah.
That episode, previously covered in leaked audio reporting on the Dearborn dodge, fits a pattern: El-Sayed consistently prioritizes the feelings of those sympathetic to hostile foreign actors over the clarity voters deserve from a Senate candidate.
On April 8, El-Sayed campaigned alongside streamer Hasan Piker at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. Piker is on record saying "America deserved 9/11" and that it "doesn't matter if rape happened on October 7." At the rally, Piker condemned those who "smeared" him as "radical."
Both of El-Sayed's primary opponents, state lawmaker Mallory McMorrow and Representative Haley Stevens, criticized the decision. McMorrow described Piker as "somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks." Stevens referenced his "hurtful and antisemitic comments."
El-Sayed has also campaigned alongside a Michigan regent candidate whose deleted social media posts praised Hezbollah and the Iranian regime. The company he keeps tells voters something his carefully hedged public statements try to obscure.
El-Sayed is not a fringe candidate. A new Emerson College poll shows him tied with McMorrow at 24 percent in the Democratic primary. Stevens trails both by nine points. Federal campaign finance disclosures show McMorrow leading in fundraising at $8.6 million, with El-Sayed close behind at $7.6 million and Stevens at $6.8 million.
This is a well-funded, competitive race in a state that just experienced a domestic terror attack on a synagogue. The candidate currently tied for the lead in the Democratic primary has explained terrorism as a response to American-inflicted "pain," avoided condemning the death of Iran's supreme leader to protect "sad" voters, and shared a stage with a man who said America deserved 9/11.
Jordan Domingue, El-Sayed's former security chief and a Marine veteran, raised concerns about the candidate's foreign policy positions in comments to the Michigan Enjoyer earlier this month. Domingue said what he initially took for political posturing "turned out to be beliefs." That distinction matters. Posturing can be walked back. Beliefs drive policy.
The broader turmoil inside the Democratic Party only compounds the stakes. As Senate Democrats distance themselves from their own leadership, candidates like El-Sayed are filling the vacuum with a foreign-policy worldview that treats American power as the problem and terrorist grievances as the diagnosis.
The Free Beacon also noted that Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Democrat, has called for the destruction of Israel. El-Sayed's orbit is not short on figures whose sympathies run in directions most Americans would find alarming.
El-Sayed has the right to hold whatever views he likes. But Michigan voters have the right to hear those views plainly stated, not buried under phrases like "empathy" and "curiosity" and "understanding." When a man running for the Senate says he wants to bring "an empathy for what it's like for people seeing America from outside of America," voters should ask: whose outside perspective, exactly? And at whose expense?
The families who were inside Temple Israel in March did not need a lecture on American foreign policy. They needed a senator who would name the enemy without equivocation. El-Sayed, as his own words reveal, is not that candidate.
A Senate seat is not a faculty lounge. Michigan deserves someone who will represent the people who live here, not explain away the motives of those who wish them harm.
