Rogers uses RNC midterm platform to attack El-Sayed as Dems push back against Islamophobic rhetoric

The campaign of Michigan Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers had a national audience on Thursday night as he spoke at the party’s midterm convention — a platform he used to level attacks against his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed.

Much of Rogers’ speech, however, focused on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon, relating the threat of Islamic terrorism to the campaign of El-Sayed, which Democrats on Thursday said was just another example of Rogers using Islamophobia to negatively portray his opponent.

Although Rogers has pounced on El-Sayed’s progressive platform since the latter became the Democratic nominee, highlighting his stances on Medicare for All and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a large part of Rogers’ campaign has centered on El-Sayed’s Muslim faith, his Egyptian heritage and his support for the people of Palestine in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, the radical political group that has governed the Gaza strip for many years now.

That continued to be a cornerstone of the Rogers campaign, but at scale, on Thursday as millions of Republicans tuned into coverage of the Republican National Committee’s midterm confab. Rogers invoked El-Sayed’s connection with leftist influencer Hasan Piker, and the streamer’s belief that America deserved the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy.

“I’ve spent much of my life confronting this enemy head-on. I know what they’re capable of, and I know what happens when America becomes afraid to call evil by its name,” Rogers said from the stage. “That’s why I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it. Yeah, but here we are.”

A common attack against El-Sayed has focused on the Piker connection, and Rogers has said — hyperbolically — that Piker was El-Sayed’s running mate. Of note, candidates for the U.S. Senate are solitary nominees, and do not run for office in teams with deputies much like a president or a governor.

El-Sayed has been adamant since becoming the Democratic nominee that Piker does not speak for his campaign, but El-Sayed has yet to denounce the influencer or distance himself from Piker in a profound way. 

El-Sayed’s choice to not do so has only led to more personal attacks from the GOP, alluding to Piker and El-Sayed holding the same political ideologies. El-Sayed has said that wasn’t true and one of the biggest distinctions between them is that El-Sayed does not view himself as a Democratic Socialist, but rather a capitalist concerned with the current state of capitalism.

Rogers was undeterred in evaporating that distinction.

“Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain,” Rogers said, just before pivoting to a GOP talking point that El-Sayed has accepted campaign cash from terrorist organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is no evidence that El-Sayed has ever pledged his support to the organization or accepted money from them, let alone ever having explicit ties to the group.

That said, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has in recent days fixated on a story from conservative Michigan news outlet The Midwestern, which sought to tie El-Sayed with the dealings of his biological mother, Fatten Fathy Elkomy.

The Midwesterner noted that in 2004, the U.S. Department of Treasury designated the Islamic African Relief Agency, which was focused on worldwide healthcare for disadvantaged people in war or conflict zones, as an organization supporting terrorism. 

In its examination of that connection, The Midwesterner also noted that Elkomy worked with the Islamic African Relief Agency between 1999 and at least 2004.

Rogers did not explicitly mention El-Sayed’s birth mother in his remarks, but it was a piece of the overall campaign rhetoric used by the NRSC to advertise Rogers’ address.

Fact checkers, however, have found that the claims about El-Sayed’s biological mother and her work with the IARA were either false or missing key context. The same goes with Rogers’ assertion on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Snopes, in an attempt to debunk the claim, reported that it was not possible to find any evidence that the humanitarian aid group knowingly financially supported terrorist groups or Islamic militants.

The Midwesterner had referred to charging documents filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2007 the Islamic American Relief Agency. Elkomy worked for the African branch. Snopes noted that although the DOJ convicted several of the group’s former officers of unlawful financial transactions with Iraq during the 2000s-era war, there were no charges filed related to knowingly supporting terrorism.

El-Sayed’s campaign also said that Elkomy, a nurse practitioner in Missouri, had never been accused of wrongdoing and was neither charged or named as a defendant in the Department of Justice’s case.

That said, Snopes reported that it could not definitively label the claim as a lie or patently true — only that it was misleading.

The Muslim Brotherhood line has long been debunked as a conspiracy perpetuated by conservative firebrand and former state Sen. Patrick Colbeck. The former Republican senator made the claim during his campaign for governor in 2018, when El-Sayed was also seeking the office on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Considering those facts, the Advance asked the NRSC if it was fair to use his birth mother’s ties to the organization in a direct attack against him.

Samantha Cantrell, the NRSC’s regional press secretary, said it was fair game.

“Abdul El-Sayed’s true views on 9/11 should concern every Michigander given he still refuses to condemn Hasan Piker, told Americans to ‘center’ our reaction to 9/11, and has refused to condemn his mother’s work funneling money to terrorist organizations assisting Osama Bin Laden,” Cantrell said in a statement to the Advance.

Rogers also asserted that El-Sayed sympathized with the man who perpetrated the attack on Temple Israel, a Jewish temple in West Bloomfield. The attacker’s brother was later identified by the Israeli government as a Hezbollah leader killed in an Israeli airstrike.

El-Sayed at the time called the situation a tragedy but also said, “hurt people hurt people,” in reference to the attacker.

The Democratic nominee recently apologized for that statement during an annual, pre-Michigan Democratic Convention meeting of the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus, known as their Summer Simcha and held in the weeks following the August primary

Rogers did not acknowledge that El-Sayed had apologized or reexamined his past remarks.

Democrats label Rogers’ remarks as pure Islamophobia

In response to Rogers’ address, El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner said Rogers and his allies were “resorting to shameful lies” about the Democratic nominee “to try and distract from Rogers’ deep record as a corrupt career politician who has taken millions from Big Pharma.”

“But Michiganders see right through it,” Richner said. “And they’ll send Mike Rogers packing in November, once again, so he doesn’t get another opportunity to make himself and his billionaire donors richer while selling out working families.”

Christyna Thompson, press secretary for the Democratic-led Senate Majority PAC, said that “this is what Republicans do when they can’t outrun their own record.”

“They rewrite history. They point fingers. They’ll do whatever they can to make people forget how they voted,” Thompson said in a statement. “You don’t get to wrap yourself in 9/11 after turning your back on the people who answered the call. It’s spineless behavior and it turns voters off. “

Thompson said that Rogers voted against the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act when he was in Congress. The act created the federal health program that treats 9/11 responders and survivors from Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

In direct response to Rogers’ focus on El-Sayed’s religious and cultural background, Thompson told the Advance that voters should “take it as a sign of where the GOP playbook stands 50 days out.”

“They’ve got nothing better beyond casual Islamophobia and fake promises of free money they pray would win voters over,” she said. “Pretty stupid strategy altogether.”

Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel, in a statement issued following Rogers’ speech, addressed that fact that throughout his speech, Rogers didn’t address skyrocketing prices on goods and services, the new trade war President Donald Trump has opened with Canada, or the new hot war he’s engaging in with Iran.

On Rogers’ rhetoric on El-Sayed’s heritage, Hertel said Rogers was “trafficking in dishonest, Islamophobic attacks because he wants to distract from how his and Trump’s agenda is spiking costs and hurting Michiganders.”

“Rogers’ remarks were dangerous and desperate, and they were beneath the office he seeks,” Hertel added.