The Michigan Senate candidate wants to move past “hurt people hurt people.” A lot of the coverage is ready to help.
The Washington Post: “El-Sayed apologizes for March comments about Michigan synagogue attack.”
CBS: “Abdul El-Sayed apologizes for his comments about Michigan synagogue attack.”
AP: “El-Sayed apologizes for comments he made responding to an attack on a Michigan synagogue.”
The New York Times: “‘I Made a Mistake’: El-Sayed Apologizes for Comment About Synagogue Attack.”
CNN on Monday morning: he is “now apologizing for his previous comments.”
So that’s the story. He apologized.
I listened to what he said. The question is what he thinks he apologized for.
After the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, El-Sayed condemned it. Then he kept going. “Hurt people hurt people.” He brought up the attacker’s family, killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, and the “cycle” of violence. Jewish children had just been targeted at a synagogue in Michigan. He wanted the room to hear about the terrorist’s pain, too.
Jewish Democrats in the state were among the people who were furious. Now he’s the nominee in a race that could decide the Senate, and those comments are a problem. Hence the apology tour.
To reporters: “My comments might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify.” Then: “To anybody who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”
Misconstrued. Anybody who feels. Not my intention.
He has also said, “I made a mistake,” and told Jewish Democrats the first condemnation should have ended there. “Full stop.”
Then he told you what the mistake was.
“What I was trying to do is offer context for why it happened. But it wasn’t the time for context.”
He still thinks the context belonged. He put it this way: “When you give the right medicine at the wrong time, it’s the wrong medicine and I gave it at the wrong time.”
Right medicine.
That line should be in the stories. He still treats the terrorist’s grievance against Israel as the correct analysis of an attack on Jewish kids. He just thinks he said it too soon.
JTA noticed. After his meetings with Jewish Democrats, it reported that in both spoken apologies he “insisted the main problem was with the timing of his attempt to apply ‘context’ to the situation, not with the substance of what he said.”
That’s the part the “EL-SAYED APOLOGIZES” headlines bury.
Those three words will travel with him. Rogers brings up the video? He apologized. A reporter mentions Temple Israel? Already handled. A voter still objects? What do you want from the man? He said he was sorry.
That’s how these things get filed away. The candidate names it an apology. The headline repeats it. By October, the “misconstrued” hedge and the “right medicine” line are gone. The clip pack says he apologized. Anyone who brings the original remarks back up is rehashing settled business.
It isn’t settled if he hasn’t dropped the idea.
He’s sorry people were hurt. He’s sorry about the timing. He’s sorry they heard justification. He wishes he’d waited.
Does he still think “hurt people hurt people” explained why a man rammed a truck into a Michigan synagogue full of children? He called that explanation the right medicine. So yes.
This isn’t a charge that he backs terrorism. It’s about what he reached for in the first hours after Jews in his state were attacked. He explained the attacker. He tied it to Israel.
Voters can decide whether that instinct belongs in a senator. A headline that says “apologizes” does not decide it for them.
Ask him the sentence: You called the context the right medicine at the wrong time. Do you still think “hurt people hurt people” was the right context for Temple Israel?
If he still thinks it was the right medicine, stop writing that he apologized for writing the prescription.