Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed headlined an Islamic conference in Detroit that featured a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and a cleric who once called himself "extremely anti-American", days before the 25th anniversary of September 11.
El-Sayed appeared on a panel at the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention titled "Cultivating God Awareness in a Turmoiled America," sharing the stage with Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur and New Jersey-based cleric Zaid Shakir. The convention drew additional controversy after ISNA quietly removed Pakistani cleric Mufti Tariq Masood from its speaker lineup following backlash over Masood's past remarks appearing to praise Hitler's persecution of Jews and defending child marriage, Fox News Digital reported.
The timing and the company raise pointed questions about the judgment of a man asking Michigan voters to send him to the United States Senate. El-Sayed has not publicly addressed why he chose to sit alongside figures with records of incendiary statements about America and the September 11 attacks, and neither he nor ISNA responded to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Mufti Tariq Masood's removal from the ISNA speaker list came after the Washington Free Beacon first reported that the Pakistani cleric had been scheduled to appear. Dr. Andrew Bostom, who reviewed one of Masood's sermons, told Fox News Digital that Masood "basically said that the Quran had foreshadowed Hitler 1,400 years ago." Bostom argued Masood's remarks should not be viewed in isolation but as part of a larger pattern of antisemitic themes in the writings of certain Muslim scholars, citing the late grand imam of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, a figure Bostom described as "the near papal equivalent for Sunni Islam" in terms of influence.
Zionist Organization of America National President Morton Klein did not wait for ISNA to act. In an August 19 letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Klein asked the administration to deny or review any visa issued to Masood. Klein's language was blunt:
"Masood is a racist, Jew-hate-mongering, anti-American, anti-British, conspiracy-promoting, murder- and terror-inciter. Masood even praises Hitler's genocide of Jews as doing the right thing, similar to the Quran's instructions."
Whether Rubio acted on the letter, and whether Masood ever entered the United States before or during the convention, remain unanswered. ISNA pulled him from the published itinerary, but that alone does not confirm he stayed away from Detroit.
El-Sayed's co-panelist Cenk Uygur brought his own baggage to the stage. In a February post on X, Uygur wrote, "I no longer believe the official 9/11 story." He characterized anyone outraged by that statement as having been influenced by corporate media.
Uygur made those remarks publicly, on a platform with millions of users, months before sitting on a panel at a major Islamic conference held just days before the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. El-Sayed chose to appear beside him anyway.
The third panelist, Zaid Shakir, carries a record that stretches back decades. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Shakir has described himself as "extremely anti-American." In 1992, Shakir urged Muslims to embrace "extrasystemic political action," including "noncooperation tactics to guerrilla war," to influence government policies. That was nine years before 19 hijackers turned commercial airliners into weapons over New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.
El-Sayed's association with provocative figures is not new. He previously campaigned alongside Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, Uygur's nephew, who in 2019 said "America deserved 9/11." Piker later apologized and retracted the remark, but El-Sayed has offered only partial criticism of some of Piker's statements without fully disavowing him. That pattern, proximity to inflammatory rhetoric followed by hedged distance, has become a recurring feature of El-Sayed's political career, as Just the News documented in its reporting on his longstanding ties to activist Linda Sarsour and other radical figures.
The ISNA appearance landed amid a separate controversy. The New York Post reported that El-Sayed had posted a now-deleted tweet on September 11, 2021, drawing a moral equivalence between the 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S. military operations:
"Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I'll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country."
El-Sayed deleted the post. He did not explain why. The tweet surfaced publicly earlier the same week as the ISNA convention, compounding questions about how the candidate views September 11 and its aftermath.
At the convention itself, El-Sayed struck a different tone, framing Muslim Americans as targets of prejudice rather than addressing the records of the people sharing his platform. The New York Post reported El-Sayed told the audience: "We found ourselves in a moment now where, as people point to us, Muslim Americans, they want to tell us that we don't belong." He added: "They want to tell us that this country is not ours. They want to tell us that because of our names or how we pray, that somehow we are less than."
Those are sympathetic words. But they sidestep a harder question: whether a serious Senate candidate should lend his name and presence to a stage shared with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and a cleric who once endorsed tactics up to and including guerrilla warfare. El-Sayed's conference remarks focused on anti-Muslim sentiment. He did not publicly address Masood's removal, Uygur's 9/11 post, or Shakir's decades-old call for extrasystemic action.
The ISNA panel's own description, drawn from the published itinerary, aimed at turning taqwa, God-awareness, "into actionable guidance, equipping participants not merely to survive but thrive in workplaces, schools, digital spaces, and community life, and to succeed on their own terms." On paper, a benign mission. In practice, the lineup told a different story.
The ISNA controversy does not exist in a vacuum. The New York Post separately reported that El-Sayed collected more than $115,000 in campaign donations from at least 41 individuals connected to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization designated as a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates and labeled as such in Florida and Texas. Among the donors was CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, who drew national condemnation after saying he was "happy" to see Hamas break out of Gaza on October 7, 2023, and arguing Israel "does not have the right to self-defense." El-Sayed has campaigned on getting "money out of politics."
Separately, resurfaced audio captured El-Sayed downplaying a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue, adding to a growing file of statements that sit uneasily beside his public image as a mainstream Democratic candidate.
El-Sayed has also faced scrutiny over a planned fundraiser co-hosted by a lawyer who honored a Nazi-era grandfather. Taken individually, each episode might be explained away. Taken together, they form a pattern of associations and choices that a candidate running for statewide office should have to answer for directly.
And voters might never have heard about most of it. A media watchdog found that Apple News and Google News buried negative coverage of El-Sayed, raising questions about whether major tech platforms are filtering what the public sees about a candidate with a growing list of controversial ties.
Fox News Digital reached out to both El-Sayed and ISNA for comment. Neither response appeared in the reporting. That silence is itself a choice, and one Michigan voters deserve to weigh as El-Sayed asks for their trust.
The convention took place in Detroit, the heart of El-Sayed's political base. He was not ambushed into appearing. He was not accidentally seated next to Uygur and Shakir. The ISNA itinerary listed all three on the same panel. He walked onto that stage voluntarily, days before the nation marked a quarter-century since 3,000 Americans were murdered by terrorists, and he has yet to explain why that lineup did not give him pause.
The broader pattern among certain Democratic figures, proximity to anti-American and antisemitic rhetoric, followed by silence or hedged disavowals, is not unique to El-Sayed. Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently drew fire for rallying against two Jewish Democrats in Florida primaries. The question is not whether individual politicians hold objectionable views. The question is why the Democratic Party continues to tolerate candidates who treat accountability as optional.
Voters can see a stage. They can read an itinerary. They can look at a deleted tweet. What they cannot find, so far, is an honest explanation from the man who wants to represent Michigan in the Senate.