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Texas Congressman Brandon Gill is done apologizing. The Republican leading the push in Congress to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization confronted Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed with his own family's words — and when the Islamophobia charge came straight back at him, Gill made clear he does not care.
Gill's evidence was not an opposition research file. El-Sayed's half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, told the Michigan Daily back in February 2011 that she cried with joy when Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, saying, "My whole family took part in the celebrations." Her posts over the years described the family's longstanding closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood. "His own sister is tweeting about his past ties to the Muslim Brotherhood," Gill said.
The confrontation sits on top of a real legislative fight. Gill is pushing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood itself a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Washington has already designated several Brotherhood offshoots, and in January the State and Treasury Departments designated Brotherhood chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Sudan as terrorist organizations; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Russia already ban the Brotherhood as a terrorist group outright. The parent organization, founded in Egypt in 1928, remains undesignated by the United States — the gap Gill's effort would close, in part because of the Brotherhood's material support for Hamas.
"Most Americans are so tired of being slandered as racist or bigoted or Islamophobic," Gill said during the exchange. He framed the issue as basic accountability, not religion: the minimum bar for somebody who wants to serve in the United States Senate, he argued, is not having ties to organizations linked to al Qaeda, the Taliban and Hamas.
El-Sayed's side calls it a smear. On Meet the Press, he denied any Muslim Brotherhood ties and said the attacks amount to Islamophobia. "Abdul is a dad and a doctor," his campaign said. "He has spent his entire career working to keep Michiganders healthy and safe," adding that independent fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked the attacks. Fact-checkers in Michigan have found no evidence of El-Sayed's personal membership in the Brotherhood. But he has also declined to say whether the Brotherhood deserves its terrorist designation, and in a 2011 op-ed he argued that concerns about a Brotherhood-led Egypt were rooted in bigotry — answers that keep the questions alive.
The race makes the stakes national. El-Sayed is running for the Michigan seat being vacated by retiring Senator Gary Peters, against Republican Mike Rogers, a close Trump ally, in one of the country's true toss-up contests. A win would make El-Sayed the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Senate. In the campaign's final weeks, Gill has made sure the Brotherhood question follows him there — and he is not backing down from the word thrown back at him.
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