The Age of Abdul

I’m not a big fan of Abdul El-Sayed, the winning candidate in this week’s Michigan U.S. Senate primary. Democratic Socialists have a way of going off the rails, especially on questions of Israel and the Jews. I’m still smarting from the short career (to date) of Zohran Mamdani, who imagines himself the King of the Universe (Secretary-General? Emperor of the Air?) instead of the mayor of New York City. A little bit of modesty and a lot of philo-Semitism would help me appreciate Mamdani better, but he keeps clawing at opportunities to bash the Jews. It took me a while to get here, but call me a hater.

Yet this is an argument from association; El Sayed has created his own messy politics. After the vehicle attack on Temple Israel in suburban Detroit, El Sayed tried to put the matter “in context.” The perpetrator, he argued, had lost close family in Lebanon, killed in an Israeli bombing raid this year. The precise language of his defense was “hurt people hurt people,” as if to explain away the assault. Who could blame even a Hezbollah sympathizer, even if he targeted Jewish preschoolers in Michigan?

The answer, of course, is anybody could. Little Jewish kids at a temple in the suburbs had nothing to do with Israel’s attack in Lebanon, and the killing of those children was likely collateral.

But that was not the whole of El-Sayed’s message. Before he got to the part about hurt people, he condemned the attack as a “horror” and a “heartbreak” and drew a bright red circle around hating Jews: “There is no room for anti-Semitism in America.” I’m fairly sure that he meant “in the world.” That’s what he said, like it or not.

But not even that was enough for AIPAC, the pro-Israel political action committee that spent $32 million on this campaign, trying very hard to defeat El-Sayed. It didn’t use to happen this way. AIPAC was once a bi-partisan entity that did not spend directly on campaigns. It served as a powerful influencer and clearing-house, urging its donors to keep track of their opponents. I didn’t always like what it said, but I respected AIPAC for its focus and verve.

That changed with AIPAC’s shift in self-definition and its rock-hard alliance with the Republican party. In El-Sayed’s case, it was relentlessly combative and created a slushy campaign conflating his feelings about Israel with his supposed animus toward American Jews. I acknowledge the one; El-Sayed’s remarks have been inflammatory and they do harm to Israel’s place in the world. But I reject the other; he doesn’t seem to be a Jew-hater. In the first three seconds of his celebratory acceptance speech, he emphasized the importance of American Jewish security and said that he hoped to win our hearts and our minds.

The real problem, of course, with AIPAC’s approach is that if you oppose one campaign, you must support another. This is not an argument over a table in a restaurant, but a bona fide, consequential American election. That means that AIPAC will likely help fund Republican Mike Rodgers. After a middling, moderate start in politics, Rodgers is now a hard-line MAGA stalwart, in bed with Trump, prone to election denialism, partisan on crypto, and a supporter of the president’s adventure in Iran. Instead of a war of choice, undertaken in a frenzy of stupidity, it’s an exigent matter of national necessity.

I don’t think it’s that, at all, and if I were a Jewish voter in Michigan, I’d be strongly averse to voting for Mike Rodgers. I remain uncomfortable with Mamdani, but El-Sayed might be different, neither the devil nor the deep blue sea.