Michigan Election: How Abdul El-sayed's Critics Smeared His Defence Of Palestinians As 'hate'

In his victory speech last week, Abdulrahman El-Sayed, the first Muslim American elected to the US Senate, said "hate" or "hateful" five times, and each time the word did something different.

He recalled supporters asking why he never called his opponents hateful. Those opponents, he said, "hate the idea" of an America big enough for people who pray differently.

He told Mike Rogers, the Republican he had just beaten, "You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope." Then he turned to those who call people hateful for believing that Palestinian children should not be killed with American tax dollars: "That's not hate. It's love."

In one speech, Sayed declined the word "hate", turned it around, used it as a weapon and refused it as a name. The rhetoric of hate is the currency of American politics. It gets minted, exchanged and spent, and it buys moral standing, which converts into votes and endorsements.

Everyone trades in it, including the man it was aimed at, but its real value is sorting groups into those accused of hate and those who make the accusation.

Follow its circulation through Michigan. "Hate" hounded Sayed throughout his campaign. Rogers regularly denounced his "hateful ideology". One Democrat told CNN he could not vote for Sayed "because I'm against hate".

Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens, whom Sayed beat in the primary, switched her endorsement to Rogers, "choosing country over hate". She announced it after attending services with Rogers at a prominent Black church in Detroit, as his party courted Black and Jewish voters.

Hours before the polls opened, US President Donald Trump posted: "Abdul El-Sayed Hates Jews and Hates Blacks." A year earlier, as New Yorkers voted, he had called Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim candidate for mayor of New York, "a proven and self professed JEW HATER".

The word comes back around. In Vanity Fair, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates noted that Stevens, having accused Sayed of hate, had joined "the campaign of hate, of which El-Sayed is the latest victim". Its purpose, he wrote, is "to render Muslims and Arabs more killable".

Minted in Michigan

See how it gets minted. The fight's last round began with an ad from Rebellion PAC, an outside group not connected to Sayed's campaign. It ties grocery prices to US military aid to Israel. It is guns versus butter, one of the oldest arguments in American politics.

Stevens nonetheless said the ad blamed "Israel and Jews". Those last words turn a dispute over funding a state into a people's guilt. This was, for her, "hate".

Researchers at the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate counted 38,280 Islamophobic posts naming Sayed between January and August, which they called "anti-Muslim hate". The Michigan office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported three death threats in three days after an anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn.

Aimed at Rogers, hate means bigotry and fear-mongering. Aimed at El-Sayed, it means bigotry, too, plus terrorism and radicalism: a threat

Sayed spoke at a "Hate Has No Home in Michigan" event in the city in August. A month later, when Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas named him at his party's midterm convention in Dallas, a man in the crowd shouted: "He should be shot!" The word "hate" circulates in every direction, but it does not trade at the same value.

Rogers settled his own account cheaply. He asked his opponent at their last debate: "Are you for America, or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?" Spoken in the name of national security, the accusation cost him nothing.

His earlier claim that Sayed supported the Muslim Brotherhood had cost him one line from a spokesperson, who told a fact-checker that he "vehemently condemns hate against all religious groups". To win Stevens's support, Rogers had to disavow nothing, including the multiple ads that racialised Sayed as "dangerous" and "radical".

Aimed at Rogers, hate means bigotry and fear-mongering. Aimed at Sayed, it means bigotry, too, plus terrorism and radicalism: a threat.

Whether Sayed disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood, a group no evidence ties him to, or disclaimed an ad he did not make, the accusation stuck. A Muslim candidate is handed a text to recite, and yet whatever he says is not quite it.

Balancing the books

Even the ostensible peacemakers balance the books. Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingell found hate on all sides: in the ads targeting Arab-American Muslims, in the grocery ad, in a country being torn apart.

Every community's account gets credited, and an ad about an appropriation, no matter how crude, is entered at the same value as one casting a Michigan-born doctor as a Brotherhood loyalist.

The framing also misnames the culprit. A feeling and heated rhetoric did not tear the world apart.

Wars, the budgets that fund them, the campaigns and institutional norms that have long treated Muslims as suspects, the conflation of Jews with Israel to justify sending military aid to a foreign state that stands accused of genocide and apartheid - that is what is doing that work. Calling all of it hate discounts those choices.

Sayed, too, traded in this currency. "You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope" might be a satisfying line, especially after an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racist campaign that featured more foghorns than dog whistles, but it misnames the problem. The speech itself offers a better name.

Sayed described a corporate advertising campaign "built to deceive and distract", and put the pro-Israel lobbying group Aipac's spending against him at $42m. That is a description of power: who paid, for what, and to whose benefit? Calling it hate turns a strategy into a feeling, which can be deplored but not explained. Spending the word keeps the currency in circulation.

His sharpest line refuses the currency outright. To say "that's not hate" is to say the word misnames the thing, and here he is right. Hate asks what is in a speaker's heart, not whether the claim is true.

It turns a political claim into an emotion - the wrong emotion - or into how other people's supposed emotions make us feel. If it is about hate, nobody has to debate aid or Gaza, and Palestinian children vanish from the account.

Sayed brought them back and then went straight to the budget: what Michigan's taxes should buy here, and what they should not fund abroad. That is the argument the accusation exists to prevent.

The morning after his victory, the first question put to the senator-elect on MS Now was what he would do to protect Jewish voters "in this era of antisemitism": the text to recite, handed to him once more.

He answered that standing up against the killing of Palestinian children "is not about hate for anybody", and that he would hate for anyone to assume he accepted the abuses of Egypt's government because he shares the ethnicity of most Egyptians.

The price of unity

In Michigan, the accusation of hate failed to buy the Senate seat, but the currency itself still circulates. "Hate" will outlive the ballot. It is the keyword of American politics around Muslim candidates, Arabs and Palestine. In practice, its working opposite was not "love", as Sayed claimed. It was unity.

Democrats staged unity events, and Sayed called former Vice President Kamala Harris's visit a matter of unity, standing with a leader of the administration that armed Israel's genocide in Gaza. Former President Barack Obama, whose drone wars killed Muslims from Pakistan to Yemen, came too.

Neither of them carries the word that stuck to Sayed. Against hate, unity asks only who stands together. It demands erasing what they have done. The first Muslim senator will now be welcome as proof that the country is big enough, never mind what it keeps doing.

The point is not Sayed as a person, or his commitments, convictions or compromises. It is not to take away from the historic nature of his victory or what he might be able to accomplish. In fact, he likely understands the hate currency, how it works, and how and when to use it best.

The point, however, is the structural conditions under which some kind of "victory" alongside Democrats who stand "against hate" is possible. This was the price to be paid: continuing to accept "hate" as the framework and permitting unity to displace critical analysis and accountability.

Ask of every transaction: who minted it, where it is accepted, what it bought, and who paid. This time it did not buy a Senate seat. Arabs and Muslims in Michigan paid anyway.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.