Commentary Culture Investigations

Tal Fortgang, City Journal The arrest of Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a Tehran-backed terrorist, shows that enhanced border security and community safety are vital tools in the fight…

On Monday, The Supreme Court handed down several rulings, one of which went in favor of President Trump, expanding his power to fire the heads of Federal agencies, but several others went against him, including one which allows mail-in ballots to arrive after election day and be counted. This decision caused the President to double down on pushing the Save America Act, which became a topic of discussion on Monday’s The Arena, on CNN, where Trump was bashed, and the very sanctity of our elections was glossed over.

Host Kasie Hunt turned to CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel, who proceeded to downplay any concern over delaying election results, and of course, went after Trump.

GANGEL: For perspective, does it take a while to count ballots in certain places? Yes. If they’re coming in after election day, can it extend it longer? Is it a little messy? Yes…. It’s not about corruption or fraud…. So is this a loss for President Trump? Yes. But big picture, he’s obsessed with this. It is sort of a loss of his own making because the underlying problem here is he doesn’t want to admit he lost in 2020. So he’s looking for fraud and corruption where there isn’t.

Liberals can always say Trump’s losses can be blamed on Trump. Hunt then played a clip of Trump who was asked if he’d sign the housing bill.

TRUMP CLIP: It hasn’t been sent to me yet….It’s a yawn. Some people say it’s wonderful. Compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.

After mockingly repeating Trump’s “big yawn” description, Hunt welcomed in former Trump White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley, who she would almost immediately interrupt.

HUNT: The President calls it a big yawn….Why not take the political win on housing under these circumstances?

GIDLEY: I think he is going to take the victory lap in some form or fashion. I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing now in this country for decades. You remember around 65% of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election, but around 60-

HUNT: Isn’t that President Trump’s fault?

GIDLEY: But around 63 percent of —
HUNT: Didn’t he tell them that he — (Hunt laughs)

GIDLEY: But around 63 percent of Democrats did not believe that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. People have been complaining about this process for a long time.

Gidley continued, addressing Gangel’s claim that Trump was “obsessed” and then turned his attention to the SAVE Act, which would require voter ID, and prevent voter fraud, something that Hunt didn’t seem to have much interest in.

GIDLEY: He is not obsessed with this.

GANGEL: Yes. [Laughter]

GIDLEY: Unless you consider obsessed with 90 percent of the country, which also agrees only American citizens should decide the outcome of American elections.

HUNT: But that’s already a law.

GIDLEY: I don’t get to vote in Italy, I don’t get to vote in Germany or France, and I’m sure you don’t either. Only in this country —

HUNT: It’s also the law, Hogan-

GIDLEY: Well, it’s also the law you can’t come into this country illegally, but yet people do it all the time. It’s also the law you can’t murder somebody, yet murder happens in big cities all the time. So, to pretend as though just because it’s a law, it doesn’t happen is ridiculous. It happens constantly.

HUNT: The Heritage Foundation is the one that has studied this,  between someone voting when they’re not a citizen and the number of votes required to change the outcome of an election.

GIDLEY: Sure, but how many — how many instances of fraud are okay? Is it one? A hundred?

HUNT: I’m not arguing instances of fraud are okay. The question is, can we trust or not the results of our elections. And it’s required for us —

GIDLEY: No question. And on both sides, people don’t trust it. That’s just the statistics.

Not sure why Hunt would bring up The Heritage Foundation’s study on voter fraud, which noted, among other things, “In 2015, a city council election in the New Jersey town of Perth Amboy was decided by a mere 10 votes. A judge overturned the election and ordered a new one after it was revealed that at least 13 illegal absentee ballots had been cast.”

Hunt then outrageously allowed Democratic Strategist  Adrienne Elrod,  to go unchallenged while claiming that Trump is, “actively trying to disenfranchise voters.” Unfortunately, it was consistent with the entire segment.

Left-wingers present raising taxes on the rich as a simple solution to Social Security’s problems.

The world’s richest man has had enough of anti-Israel fake news peddler and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for continuing to spew sewage on the internet with impunity.

Kristof attempted to play gotcha! against SpaceX CEO Elon Musk by making a post-hoc argument to illustrate how the first trillionaire supposedly “killed” people by taking a blowtorch to the massive government waste replete throughout federal agencies. “Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts,” Kristof snorted in a June 28 X post.

He then cherry picked a few random names and then arbitrarily shoe-horned Musk’s DOGE cuts as being the culprit behind their deaths: “Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.” As NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino suggested in retort, this is as idiotic as saying Musk could be blamed for a kid dying in Tajikistan from toxoplasmosis because he stopped paying for his Mucinex.

Musk had a one-line response to Kristof’s nonsense: “You’re an utter piece of shit and a liar.” 

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo piled on the mockery: “The moral calculus here is insane. According to Kristof, the USA is responsible for every poor nation in the entire world. If an ambulance runs out of fuel in rural Liberia, that is our fault. The liberal has a pathological tension between the feelings of omnipotence and guilt.” Using Kristof’s logic, the Trump administration putting a freeze on $8 million for the African Elephant Conservation Fund means he would be liable if the world’s largest pachyderms eventually experience a thinning of the population. 

You’re an utter piece of shit and a liar
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2026
What made it worse for Kristof was that he tried doubling down on his argument a day later, making himself look even more foolish in the process and teeing him up to get swatted down by Musk:

No, I don’t think we are responsible for all poor nations. But we were saving 1 life every 10 seconds with USAID, and we cut that off abruptly with no time for countries to adjust. So kids died unnecessarily. And I do think that it’s bad when kids die unnecessarily, don’t you?

Of course, there’s absolutely zero way for Kristof to know if we were in fact saving “1 life every 10 seconds with USAID,” given the litany of chain of custody issues and lack of oversight that has become damningly commonplace with foreign aid.

As South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper reported January 30, despite the U.S. giving $200 billion in foreign assistance to Africa since 1991, “African countries lose an estimated $88 billion each year through tax evasion, money laundering and corruption.” The USAID Inspector General Adam Kaplan even admitted in a March 17 statement to the House House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence that “Foreign assistance programs, no matter which agency administers them, are targets for fraud, corruption, and diversion to terrorist organizations.” 

Musk addressing these significant issues is apparently tantamount to killing people, according to Kristof. Kristof clearly didn’t think this correlation vs. causation argument through at all.

But what more can you expect from the same moron who actually tried convincing the world through garbage journalism that the Israeli Defense Forces were teaching dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners? Here’s a suggestion for Kristof: Just because you have a social media account doesn’t mean you have to post every lowbrow thing that pops into your brain. 

The Democratic nominee in Colorado’s competitive Eighth Congressional District, Manny Rutinel, wrote blog posts advocating for socialism and veganism, a Washington Free Beacon review of the archived blog found. Headlines included “What Would Jesus Do? Socialism” and “The 5 Stages of Becoming a Vegan.”
Rutinel—who won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday—published the blog between 2013 and 2014, but it remained active until around 2022, when the site began redirecting users to Rutinel’s campaign website when he launched his campaign for state legislature, according to a former friend of Rutinel’s, the left-wing political operative Deep Singh Badhesha. Only the blog’s homepage was archived, so the full posts are no longer accessible. The titles and excerpts, however, provide plenty of insight into Rutinel’s far-left views.
One post, published in May 2014, is titled “What Would Jesus Do? Socialism,” and begins, “First, allow me to clarify that, technically, Jesus is a monarch because he is the ‘king of kings.'” Five days earlier, Rutinel published a post headlined, “Why a More Socialistic Society Is Superior.”

The posts were published to the “Politics” section of MannyRutinel.com, the same domain Rutinel’s congressional campaign now uses. Other sections included “Environment,” “Health,” “News,” and “Veganism.” Rutinel was especially active in posting to the last of those sections. Headlines include “The 5 Stages of Becoming a Vegan or Vegetarian” and “Top 5 Benefits of Being Vegan or Vegetarian,” which argues that a meatless diet is “better for your health.” Included in the “Health” section is the headline, “The Benefits of Universal Health Care.”

Details of Rutinel’s blog come amid a socialist surge in Democratic congressional primaries, including in Colorado. On Tuesday, one week after Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist sweep in New York City’s congressional primaries, another socialist in Denver, Melat Kiros, unseated 15-term congresswoman Diana DeGette.
Rutinel won his own primary against the more moderate Democrat Shannon Bird by nearly 30 points. Though he ran to Bird’s left, he is not running as a socialist like Kiros and the Mamdani-backed challengers in New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez. Those candidates are effectively guaranteed to win their general elections in deep-blue districts come November. Rutinel, by contrast, is running in a competitive general election against a Republican incumbent, Army veteran Gabe Evans, who unseated Democratic congresswoman Yadira Caraveo in 2024.
Rutinel, a former vegan activist and attorney with the left-wing environmental group Earthjustice, has attempted to present a more moderate image—one in which he often wears boots and a cowboy hat, though he was born in Los Angeles—while campaigning against Evans. Rutinel has notably downplayed his longstanding opposition to the meat and oil industries, which make up the backbone of the eighth district’s economy.
Rutinel, for example, was one of dozens of left-wing protesters who stormed the field at the 2019 Yale-Harvard football game to accuse the universities of being “complicit in climate injustice.” Rutinel and his comrades delayed the game by nearly an hour as they chanted, “hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go.” Rutinel also spent years arguing that animal agriculture is “horrific,” holding a protest while attending the University of Florida in which he held a sign reading, “Animal liberation is human liberation.”
Colorado’s eighth district is responsible for 4 percent of all U.S. crude oil output and is home to roughly 4,000 farms and ranches, which may explain why Rutinel now says he supports an “all-of-the-above energy solution” that “protects good-paying jobs in our communities” and “will always fight to support farmers and ranchers.” Rutinel also says he now eats meat. Asked during a June debate to explain why he made the change, Rutinel said, “it’s important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make.”

Those positions stand in stark contrast to what Rutinel told the Working Families Party last year as he sought the far-left group’s endorsement. In an interview published in part by Rutinel’s former friend Badhesha, Rutinel told the party he supported universal health care and a ban on fracking. Badhesha has accused Rutinel of ditching his “progressive” views in pursuit of power, though he also expressed hope that Rutinel could emerge as a reliable left-wing vote when elected.
“There’s a version of this story where Manny is a good progressive who is simply scared of the money now but will vote fine in the future,” Badhesha wrote in June. “I want to believe that version, because it’s the one I lived.”
If Rutinel indeed plans to return to his leftist roots while serving in Congress, his campaign isn’t making it known.
“The posts on this website were written more than 10 years ago,” a Rutinel spokesman told the Free Beacon. “Manny is not a vegan or a socialist, he is a former economist in the US Army Corps of Engineers who supports Colorado famers [sic] and ranchers.”
The post ‘What Would Jesus Do? Socialism’: Archived Website Shows Colorado Democrat Pushed for ‘Socialistic Society’ appeared first on .

The Hamas-linked founder of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor—the advocacy group that was a key source for the May 11 New York Times article that made outlandish claims about Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian journalists—recently declared on social media that Gaza-based journalists have a right to dually serve as terrorist operatives.
Euro-Med Monitor founder Ramy Abdu, who reportedly “has documented ties to senior Hamas leaders,” acknowledged in a June 23 Arabic-language Facebook post that “a limited number” of “slain journalists had engaged in acts of resistance prior to their journalistic work—a right belonging to a people living under injustice and occupation, which no fair-minded person can deny.” The message was posted just two days before the New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists announced a wholesale review of its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza, which has included dozens of confirmed military operatives for Hamas and other jihadist groups.
Both the CPJ and Euro-Med Monitor served as primary sources in Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s notorious May report, which at its most salacious, made the bizarre claim that Israeli soldiers raped two Palestinian journalists with a carrot and a dog in two separate incidents of what the Times called “sexual violence.” Less than a month since that column ignited an international controversy over the Times’s editorial policies and dueling newsrooms—and a potential lawsuit from the State of Israel—the central sources behind the claims are facing challenges to their own credibility. While the Times’s public relations department has vigorously defended Kristof’s report, and the sources behind it, the outlet has declined to comment—or not responded to requests for comment—as both the CPJ and Euro-Med Monitor are picked apart by various media watchdog groups. Two senior Times employees are on the CPJ’s prestigious board of directors, including the anti-Israel polemicist Lydia Polgreen.
Euro-Med Monitor’s Abdu, in his Facebook posting, said Gazan journalists are being unfairly penalized for also serving in military roles for Hamas and allied terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Both terror outfits have published a flurry of obituaries in recent weeks acknowledging that many supposed journalists, including at least 20 who once appeared on the CPJ’s list, served on the battlefield. In one recent example, Al Jazeera photojournalist Ahmed Samir Muhammad Washah was revealed to be a Hamas sniper, with videos showing him aggressively firing an automatic weapon in the air and posing with a sniper rifle with an enormous sight while wearing a terrorist group’s headband.
“Within the context of Israel’s war over the narrative and its smear campaigns,” Abdu wrote, “footage from their past or obituary statements issued by factions are being exploited to justify targeting the journalistic community. The publication of such obituaries by factions, as well as the circulation of footage showing journalists in military uniforms, serves the false Israeli narrative and undermines the reality that the occupation is targeting journalists and the Palestinian narrative in a systematic and widespread manner.”
Many of the supposed Palestinian journalists were—purely based on material released by Palestinians after the men’s deaths—active military leaders, planning attacks inside Israel, and helping to train jihadist operatives.
The Times did not respond to a request for comment on Abdu’s remarks, questions about Euro-Med Monitor’s credibility, or its reliance on the CPJ’s slain journalists list for the Kristof piece and multiple other reports published by the outlet’s two newsrooms (the Times has a dual newsroom structure where its “news” reporters work separately from its “opinion” writers, under different editors with different standards, and it can be difficult for a reader to tell between opinionated news articles and reported opinion pieces).
Euro-Med Monitor also did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment on Abdu’s post.
Kristof’s lurid Times rape report described Euro-Med Monitor as “a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel” and cited its claims that Israel engages in “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.” The piece, however, does not note that the organization has a long history of peddling discredited and bizarre conspiracy theories about Israel, or acknowledge longstanding ties between Abdu and the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, shown with Abdu in this 2011 photo.
“For two years we were told Israel was hunting down innocent journalists. Now Ramy Abdu, founder of Euro-Med—the group that Nicholas Kristof used for evidence of ‘dog rape’—has admitted that some of those innocent journalists started their careers as terrorists,” said Jacki Alexander, CEO of HonestReporting, the watchdog group that has exposed multiple Gazan “journalists” as active terror combatants. “At what point do Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times that vouched for him as ‘extensively fact checked’ admit they got it wrong? A correction won’t cut it. This calls for a retraction and an apology to every reader they misled.”
The CPJ, meanwhile, is facing its own legitimacy crisis. Just days after the organization announced a “full review” of its slain journalists list, CPJ board member and biotech heiress Nika Soon-Shiong announced that she was booted from her post and blamed a Free Beacon report on her anti-Israel activism for prompting the embattled organization to cut ties.
Like Euro-Med Monitor’s Abdu, Soon-Shiong—publisher of Drop Site News and daughter of the South African biotech billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong—said that confirmed terrorists should not be excluded from the CPJ’s list solely for their affiliations with terrorist groups.
“How could CPJ’s response place scrutiny on the journalists themselves—as though they were somehow responsible for their own deaths—even after they had been killed? Permanent reputational damage of doing so might undermine the impartiality and credibility on which CPJ’s work rests,” she wrote in an open letter.
“Reopening the question of ‘who is a journalist’ carries profound implications for the individuals CPJ protects and for the organizations with which they are affiliated,” Soon-Shiong added, in comments similar to Abdu’s regarding combatants who claimed to be journalists. “It’s a betrayal to our colleagues in Gaza who have faced the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. Because baseless accusations will become more common, not less, CPJ must strive to rise above the fray.”
The post Key Source for Kristof’s New York Times Gaza ‘Rape’ Column Now Claims Palestinian ‘Journalists’ Can Also Be Terrorists: Times Won’t Comment appeared first on .

Ooops! What we predicted about higher gas prices a couple of months ago… Never mind! 

On April 28, Politico White House reporter Scott Waldman along with his sidekick, Eli Stokols, were confidently citing experts who predicted a big surge in gasoline prices due to the Iran war as you can see in “‘There’s a day of reckoning coming’: Energy experts expect another spike at the pump.”

Energy experts say another oil price spike is coming — and it may be made worse by the president’s social media posts.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly spurred temporary dips in oil prices by claiming on Truth Social that the Iran war is near an end and that U.S. oil production would ensure sky high gas prices would soon retreat.

The jawboning has mostly worked. Even as the global price of oil has crept up over $100 per barrel on the futures market, it is significantly less than the $140 per barrel spot price, or what it would take to buy a barrel today.

But the president’s promises can only work for so long. Supply of oil — especially in Europe and Asia — is dwindling and a price shock is coming, said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners.

He said that when the summer driving season begins there will be another gas price shock that “hits people in the face.”

“There’s a day of reckoning coming,” he said. “It will be painful because I can tell you that the stock market’s ignoring this.”

Well, two months later and it appears that the “day of reckoning” is fading away as petroleum and gasoline prices continue declining.. From a high in April of $112 per barrel of crude oil that price has plunged over $40 to the current price of just over $70 per barrel with the price of gasoline also declining and expected to lower even more. To Waldman’s credit, he acknowledged the erroneous predictions of April on Tuesday in “Energy experts said gas prices would stay high. Why were they wrong?”

Gasoline prices have fallen precipitously since the U.S. and Iran began their fragile truce, defying expert predictions of a long summer slog with sky-high prices.

Instead of spiraling upward, the average price at the pump has plummeted 70 cents per gallon in a month from a peak of $4.56. A little over a week since the memorandum of understanding was signed between the countries, a barrel of oil costs just a little more than it did before the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran in late February.

It wasn’t supposed to work this way, according to energy experts whose predictions of $150 barrel of oil, $5 gasoline and summer recessions were widely quoted in the media, including POLITICO.

Unsurprisingly, since this is Politico after all, Waldman seemed a bit bummed out that the lower than expected gas prices at the pump could improve the GOP election prospects in the midterm elections.

The falling prices are a huge win for the president and his party, helping to blunt an easy Democratic attack line ahead of the upcoming midterms in which voters say they are hyperfocused on the cost-of-living. While voters may never forgive the spike, many political prognosticators thought it was going to be much worse.

If the current prices hold, the midterms may not be quite as catastrophic for Trump and Republicans in November, said Frank Luntz, the veteran Republican pollster. But he said the deadline for easing voter anxiety over affordability is essentially now. That’s because voter attitudes are locked in by August, which means that further price drops in September and October are likely less meaningful.

Hmmm… So does that mean Scott Waldman and much of the rest of the Politico staff will be furiously rubbing their worry beads in August while gazing fixatedly at the prices on the gas pumps?

With the exception of increasingly dour Democrats, adult Americans’ pride in their country is holding steady as the nation nears the 250th anniversary of its founding, results of a new Gallup poll reveal.

In a national survey of U.S. adults (18+), conducted June 1-15, 93% of Republicans and 51% of Independents said they were either “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, on par with the 92% of Republicans and 53% of Independents who voiced such pride in June of last year.

Among Democrats, however, those expressing similar pride in being American fell to 27%, down from 36% last year – when it plummeted 26 percentage points from 2024, as Gallup noted in its 2025 report:

“Democrats are mostly responsible for the drop in U.S. pride this year (2025), with 36% saying they are extremely or very proud, down from 62% a year ago. This is only the second time Democrats’ pride has fallen below the majority level, along with a 42% reading in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration. That poll was conducted during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.”

Overall in 2026, 58% of U.S. adults reported they were either extremely or very proud to be an America, down from 53% in 2025, as the decline in those with “extreme” pride (from 41% to 33%) was partially offset by an increase in adults who said they were “very” proud (from 17% to 20%).

Among Independents, those who said they were very proud inched up from 21% to 23%, but those who said they were extremely proud Americans fell more, from 32% to 28%.

This year’s 56-point gap between the 70% of Republicans who said they were “extremely” proud to be American and the 14% of Democrats who felt the same rivals the record 57-point difference in 2025.

Republicans (69%) are also far more likely than Democrats (26%) to express national pride by displaying the American flag outside their homes on national holidays or other days during the year, Gallup found. Among Independents, 42% reported that they fly the American flag.

Both Republicans and Independents are more likely to fly the flag today than they were 40 years ago, while Democrats are less inclined to do so, Gallup notes. In 1986, 50% of Republicans, 42% of Democrats and 36% of Independents said they flew the flag outside their homes.

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D.), who has made opposition to Israel and the “pro-Israel lobby” a centerpiece of his campaign, accepted an endorsement from an Arab-American lobbying group led by an unabashed supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah who has called for Israeli Jews to be sent “back to Poland.”
El-Sayed said, in a statement dated this past Saturday, that he is “honored” for the endorsement of Arab American Political Action Committee (AAPAC), a Dearborn-based group that aims to “lobby on behalf of the Arab American political causes which are of concern to the majority of the community.”
“AAPAC understands that we can only achieve that promise by investing in our communities here at home instead of sending our tax dollars to fund killing, genocide, apartheid and endless war,” said El-Sayed, according to the Arab American News.
It’s a powerful endorsement for El-Sayed, who leads Rep. Haley Stevens (D., Mich.) and state senator Mallory McMorrow ahead of the Aug. 4 primary, one of the most closely watched races in the country. AAPAC pledges to provide “all available resources” to its endorsed candidates, including through “direct bilingual mailings to Arab American registered voters.”
AAPAC is led by Osama Siblani, the publisher of the Arab American News. Siblani, who praised El-Sayed in the endorsement for his “vision” and “leadership,” has a lengthy history of urging violence against Israel and defending the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, drawing condemnation from Democrats and Jewish groups.
In 2022, Siblani urged Arabs to “fight within [their] means” against Israel with “stones,” “guns,” or “their hands.” He has bragged that he refused to condemn Hamas, which he called “freedom fighters” during a conference call with Biden White House officials in 2021.
In October 2024, Siblani blasted the Jordanian government for its “interception of Iranian missiles directed at Israel.” Siblani said Jordan was “complicit” in Israel’s war against “Lebanon and Palestine,” where Israel is fighting Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively.
At a rally in Dearborn in September 2024, Siblani hailed “the great Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” and hailed the late Hezbollah leader as a “hero.” After chants of “death to Israel” broke out during Siblani’s speech, Siblani responded, “Believe me, they will take care of the job,” an apparent reference to Hezbollah.
And he issued a message to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Jews: “We will take you back to Poland.” The Nazis operated their principal death camps in German-occupied Poland, and shipped Jews to the Polish camps from elsewhere in Europe by train.
Stevens, who trailed El-Sayed by 2 points in the latest Senate poll, blasted Siblani’s remarks at the time. “I will not condone or associate with this kind of relationship,” said Stevens. “A grown man should not be saying, ‘All Jews should go back to Poland.'” The Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups have condemned Siblani’s remarks, and blasted the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns for meeting with Siblani and other community leaders in Dearborn in the months after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“Any person who denies that Hamas is a terrorist organization should not be meeting with appointed and elected officials to discuss foreign policy,” the ADL said of Siblani.
El-Sayed has already faced scrutiny for campaigning with Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American socialist influencer who has said that “America deserved 9/11” and that Israel is much worse than Hamas.
Siblani, who cofounded AAPAC in 1998, is a highly influential leader in Dearborn’s large Arab and Muslim community. City leaders there recently voted to name a street after Siblani, drawing objection from a Dearborn-based Christian minister because of Siblani’s statements condoning terrorist groups.
El-Sayed has catered heavily to voters in the Detroit suburb, which one researcher dubbed the “Jihad Capital of America” because of its high concentration of extremist preachers and activists. El-Sayed spoke at a May 2021 protest against President Joe Biden, ahead of his visit to Dearborn. El-Sayed spoke at the rally alongside Siblani and Amer Zahr, an anti-Israel activist who has urged Muslims to “stand with” Hamas and Hezbollah.
El-Sayed, in a campaign strategy call in March, refused to comment on the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the hands of U.S. and Israeli forces out of concern that he would upset Dearborn residents.
“I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today. So, like, I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all,” said El-Sayed, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
El-Sayed, whose former campaign aide, a Dearborn resident, was indicted last month for conspiring to terrorize Jewish groups at the University of Michigan, has written for Siblani’s newspaper, the Arab American News. He published an article in April endorsing a process to make it easier for Arab families to send remittances from the United States to relatives in the Middle East.
Another contributor to the newspaper, Jeffrey Stevens, was indicted in 2024 for threatening to kill Jews. Stevens wrote 45 articles for the paper between November 2022 and November 2023.
While El-Sayed embraces AAPAC, he routinely demonizes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group that funds pro-Israel Democrats’ campaigns.
El-Sayed’s campaign has referred to the group as the “pro-Israel lobby,” and accused it of steering bills that “have us paying more, making less, and watching our taxes get misused to do genocide instead of build schools.” And El-Sayed incorrectly referred to it as a “foreign lobbying group” in a fundraising email.
AAPAC not only touts its own lobbying activities, but its leaders have direct access to Michigan’s political leaders. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D.) met with Siblani after he publicly condemned her for visiting Israel. Siblani invited Whitmer to travel with him to Lebanon, his home country. Siblani accompanied Whitmer on a state business junket to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain last year, the Free Beacon reported.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The post ‘I Am Honored’: Abdul El-Sayed Accepts Endorsement From Arab-American PAC Led by Hamas Cheerleader Who’s Called for Israeli Jews To Be Sent ‘Back to Poland’ appeared first on .