First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
Comedian Paul Mecurio went on CNN's NewsNight on Thursday night to defend Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed — and ended up calling himself a "terrorist" on live television.
Trying to shield El-Sayed from questions about alleged Muslim Brotherhood ties and Islamist extremism, Mecurio turned the argument on Catholics. By that logic, he argued, he would himself be a "terrorist because Timothy McVeigh was a Roman Catholic" — a defense that immediately raised eyebrows, because it rests on a premise McVeigh himself rejected.
McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, described himself as an agnostic. His biographer Lou Michel put it plainly in a CNN interview about the book American Terrorist: "McVeigh is agnostic. He doesn't believe in God, but he won't rule out the possibility." The Oklahoma City bomber was driven by hatred of the federal government, not by Catholic teaching — which is why the comparison landed so badly as a defense of El-Sayed.
The questions hanging over El-Sayed are specific, and they come from his own family's words. On NBC's Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker noted that Republican rival Mike Rogers had "repeatedly tried to tie you and members of your family to the Muslim Brotherhood," making roughly ten references to it in a debate and in campaign ads. Asked directly whether he or his family had any ties to the group, El-Sayed answered: "No."
El-Sayed argued that Rogers raised the issue only because "he really wanted to repeat the word Muslim," calling the tactic "the approach of small people with small ideas, who don't really care about solving big problems." But reporting by the Washington Free Beacon found 2012 and 2013 social media posts by his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, in which she wrote that her family "has long been MB" and that relatives had been jailed for belonging to the Brotherhood. A September Bridge Michigan fact check, for its part, found no evidence that El-Sayed himself held membership in or pledged support to the group.
The stakes explain why a late-night panel segment matters. Michigan's Senate race is one of the tightest in the country and could help decide control of the Senate in the November 3 midterms. Rogers and his allies — Kid Rock among them — have pressed the national-security argument for weeks, while El-Sayed has campaigned with figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and cast the attacks as bigotry aimed at his faith and his name.
Thursday night's segment handed the Rogers side a fresh clip: a televised defense of El-Sayed built on branding the Oklahoma City bomber a Catholic terrorist, when McVeigh called himself an agnostic. With 18 days left, Michigan voters are being asked to judge El-Sayed's record and his family's words — not a comedian's analogy.
Never miss a story.
Join our Telegram channel and get every article link the second it’s published.
Join Telegram Channel