Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Saturday apologized for his response to a March attack on a synagogue.
After the antisemitic attack, in which an individual rammed his truck into the building, El-Sayed faced criticism for his tepid comments about the incident.
From ABC News:
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, apologized to the state's Jewish Democratic Caucus on Saturday for comments he made after an attack on a synagogue in March, which he tied to Israel's actions in the Middle East.
“My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” El-Sayed told reporters after he addressed the caucus at a party convention in Lansing. “To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I'm really sorry. That was not my intention.”
El-Sayed’s apology was his latest attempt to unify Democrats after a bitter primary where he defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. He’s eager to push past a series of controversies involving allegations of antisemitism, including his association with controversial commentator Hasan Piker. He faces Republican nominee Mike Rogers in a race that will help determine control of the Senate.
In March, a man attacked Temple Israel synagogue in a Detroit suburb, ramming his car into the building and opening fire on a security guard before dying by suicide. The man, Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, had lost four relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon the week prior.
Reflecting on the attack at Temple Israel. pic.twitter.com/u9p4BwdzoA
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) March 13, 2026
El-Sayed released a video in which he condemned the attack and noted that the alleged assailant was a Muslim Arab.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz accepts Abdul El-Sayed’s defense of justifying the Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack on a synagogue as an “apology.”
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 31, 2026
SCHULTZ: "I'm glad that he made the trip towards amends..." https://t.co/MAZ2b31f2L pic.twitter.com/5xijT8PDcU
“I condemn what he did. There is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship. Never. As an epidemiologist, I've spent my career studying the worst things that happen to people to understand how to stop them from happening,” the candidate said.
But it was his comments about the suspect that raised eyebrows:
And I'll never forget one of the simplest lessons I learned while on my psychiatry rotation in medical school. Hurt people hurt people. Violence is a cycle. Ayman Ghazali lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people.
And then, in an evil act of displaced rage, he tried to take it out on innocent children who had nothing to do with the loss of the innocent children he lost, except that they share a faith. Temple Israel is not the state of Israel. Jewish people are not the state of Israel. And the people of Israel are not the political actors who make direct choices for the state of Israel. We cannot and must not conflate these, an act rooted in antisemitism.
During his apology, El-Sayed said he was trying to “offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context.”
He added, “And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”
I don’t know whether El-Sayed was trying to pander to Muslim voters in those comments or if he was trying to exploit the attack to make a political statement against Israel. It was probably both.
But can you imagine how someone like him would have reacted if the assailant targeted a mosque? It’s doubtful that he’d be prattling on about how “hurt people hurt people.” He would immediately exploit the incident to attack his political opponents while railing against Islamophobia. Here’s yet another reason why we can’t take this man seriously.
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