What El-Sayed's Senate nomination means | And why it will bother Egypt's government as it bothered Israel and the lobby
The results of yesterday’s primary-election vote count in Michigan were finally confirmed today: Dr. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, known in America as Abdul El-Sayed, has won the right to the Democratic Party’s nomination for the November elections (held in three months) for a seat in the US Senate (with its one hundred members), prevailing in that intra-party battle over candidate Haley Stevens, who was favored and backed by party leaders, including the state’s governor, and who was strongly supported by the Zionist lobby AIPAC with donations to her campaign of about $40 million, alongside donations from other businessmen, bringing the total financial donations to the Israeli-backed candidate to nearly $70 million, most of it ads against Abdul. The total donations that reached the victorious Abdul, by contrast, did not exceed $7 million, some of them from citizens giving just five dollars each — but more important was their commitment to turning out to vote for him.
The result of the financially unequal competition was a winning margin of less than 15,000 votes for Abdul, out of more than one and a half million American voters who took part from the state of Michigan.
Although Michigan has the largest concentration of Arab Americans, especially in the city of Dearborn, the paradox (author’s update) is that he beat Haley Stevens by only a small margin even in the count of Wayne County, which contains Dearborn, the “capital of Arab Americans,” where one would have expected them to vote for him overwhelmingly!
The largest bloc that helped Abdul, 41 years old, was young people who want change against their party’s submission to the influence of the lobby and businessmen; Michigan’s youth voted for him by a 20-point margin compared with the older age groups that preferred Haley.
Abdulrahman was born in Michigan, like his rival Haley, but her family and ancestors are from the state and from America, as she used to boast, while Abdul’s father, born in Alexandria, is the Egyptian immigrant engineer Mohamed El-Sayed, who had Abdulrahman with his former wife Faten El-Komy, who immigrated with him and currently works as a nurse in the state.
Dr. Abdulrahman represents a story of excellence and brilliance from a young age, and he did not burden his father with the high cost of American university education. Abdul received a scholarship for his excellence at Michigan State University, from which he earned his bachelor’s degree, then won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to earn his doctorate from Britain’s Oxford University in public health, and afterward studied on another scholarship at Columbia University’s college of medicine and public health, yet he chose not to obtain a license to practice medicine from the American professional board, preferring to work in public health and epidemic control, and he served as director of the public health department in his state. Before that, at the age of 33, he ran to become governor of Michigan but lost the 2018 Democratic primary.
The argument of the Democratic Party leaders and grassroots who did not back Abdul in these elections is that he is extreme and radical in his positions and views and sits on the party’s left, which gives the Republican Party’s candidate a better chance of winning in the general election.
They cite as examples that those who supported him this time were among the Zionist lobby’s opponents and Israel’s adversaries in Congress, such as independent Senator Bernie Sanders (who is a Jewish American), Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who is of Palestinian origin, and Representative Ilhan Omar (the immigrant from Somalia).
In his interviews during this campaign for the Democratic nomination against the Republican candidate for the seat (Mike Rogers), Abdul stressed more than once that he is not against Israel or anyone else, but against the influence of any foreign state through a lobby such as AIPAC that heavily affects politics in America.
He stressed that it is unacceptable to provide support and aid to another country before it goes first to poor Americans in the state and elsewhere and to those without health insurance, explaining that a state whose army committed genocide in Gaza, and whose prime minister alone, named Netanyahu, deceived America’s president Trump into a failed war and the killing of innocents in Iran, cannot receive any support as long as it violates international law.
In his latest interview three days ago with the Detroit Free Press (link in the first comment), Abdul explained that he is a man of principle and is not with one sect, country, or religion against another, saying that what is known as the “Leahy Law,” sponsored by former Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, prohibits providing any American aid to any country that violates human rights and any regime that does not hold accountable the security and armed agencies that commit those crimes against their people or other peoples.
Accordingly, Abdul El-Sayed added, speaking of his father’s country and other Islamic countries that, if they are not receiving aid, are receiving advanced American weapons:
“I come at this position from a place of principle. I will not treat money spent on Israel differently than I treat money spent on Egypt. I don’t think we should be sending money to either. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of foreign military aid. If you’d like to start there, we can start there. I don’t want to see my tax dollars used to put a chokehold on the Egyptian people through a military dictatorship, which is what happens in Egypt. Similarly, I don’t want my money used to support apartheid or genocide. I want my money used to provide classrooms for children, good schools, and health care here in Michigan. And so they are making themselves one of the most important players in our domestic politics.”
The journalist asked him: and what is the criterion you judge by...? He answered:
“...If there is a legitimate purpose under international law for providing military aid, as is the case in Ukraine (which was subjected to a brutal Russian invasion), that is a goal grounded in international law, and we work with our allies to support it. But when it comes to Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Pakistan, or any other country we provide unconditional foreign military aid, I believe that should only be done if it is legal.”
Abdul thus relied on the Leahy Law, which ties American aid to a state’s respect for human rights in dealing with its citizens. It is the provision that ousted Democratic Senator Robert Menendez previously tried to bypass in the Senate by defending Egypt’s human rights record; the American judiciary later convicted him and sentenced him to prison along with his wife for taking bribes from Egypt to cover up the accusations against its government of committing human rights violations.
The Zionist lobby AIPAC has also previously not only defended Israel’s war crimes but defended, against the Obama administration in 2013, the Egyptian army’s ouster of an elected president, and prevented the implementation of the Leahy Law against Egypt afterward during the Obama and Biden terms.
My question here is: does this mean that Abdul’s opponents in the coming general election against Republican candidate Mike Rogers, who is backed by Trump, will not be limited to supporting and financing his rival, who is backed by the Zionist lobby AIPAC and Israel, but will also include, among his enemies, the advocates of the interests of those Arab and Islamic countries he spoke about, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan?
We will wait for the result of the November elections, and before the elections we will follow how the Egyptian, Saudi, and Arab media directed at Abdulrahman’s campaign cover it, as he seeks to become the first member of the US Senate!
Editor’s note from Mahjar Post: [Time references in the text (today, yesterday, three days ago, three months) date from the original August 5, 2026 publication.] The author’s text is published as received, with light copyediting only. For the record: Dr. El-Sayed earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (not Michigan State University), and served as public health director for Wayne County and the city of Detroit (not at state level). Official Wayne County results show Stevens ahead there, about 51% to 45% for El-Sayed, contrary to what the article states. Documented spending figures are independent outside expenditures (over $30 million from an AIPAC-linked committee and more than $52 million in total, most of it benefiting Stevens, per the Detroit Free Press), not direct campaign donations; we could not verify the $7 million figure for the El-Sayed campaign or the 20-point youth margin, while a Washington Post analysis found El-Sayed leading by 24 points in the youngest-skewing counties. Finally, the author’s closing phrase omits the qualifier: if elected in November, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim (Arab American) member of the US Senate.
First published on Facebook on August 5, 2026. Published on Mahjar Post on October 18, 2026.
