The hour-long debate was held at WXYZ in Southfield and moderated by Chuck Stokes, Carolyn Clifford and Alicia Smith. It was calmer overall than the candidates’ first meeting in Grand Rapids on October 8.
The Brotherhood issue has followed El-Sayed since early October. That was when the Free Beacon resurfaced 2012 and 2013 posts by his maternal half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor. In one post, written days after Morsi’s election, she wrote, “My family has long been MB, but I’ve always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively.” In another, she described “an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.” A 2013 post said members of her family had been jailed over their ties to the group.
Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, studied at Alexandria University in Egypt. As a nurse practitioner in the early 2000s, she worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, a charity the U.S. government later labeled a supporter of terrorist groups and shut down. She was never accused of wrongdoing.
El-Sayed told NBC’s Meet the Press that neither he nor his family had ties to the group. NBC’s Tom Llamas later pressed him about his sister’s posts. He said he had not discussed the matter with his mother and noted that he was raised by his father and stepmother. He called the posts “hearsay evidence from a tweet.” At a town hall in Caro last weekend, he was asked whether he would disavow the Brotherhood and answered, “sure, yeah, absolutely.”
The race is being closely watched by Michigan’s Jewish community. El-Sayed would be the first Muslim U.S. senator and is a frequent critic of the Israeli government. Rogers said Wednesday that he is “doing exceptionally well with Jewish Democrats who are literally afraid.” Polls show a close contest for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
