El-Sayed Disavows the Muslim Brotherhood. Now He Should Back the Terror Designations

Written By TNT Staff, Posted on October 18, 2026

Featured photo: Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, meets voters at Michigan Technological University, Oct. 22, 2025. Photo: Conlan Houston (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

Abdul El-Sayed has now said it plainly: he disavows the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s the right answer, and it should be on the record. But the Michigan Democrat’s next move was to turn the question into a story about bigotry, and that skips the issue voters actually care about. The Brotherhood is a political organization with a long record of extremism, and the United States has already named three of its branches as terrorists. The question is whether a man who wants a Senate seat will back those designations, not how he prays.

At a town hall in Caro, Michigan, on Friday, a voter who gave his name as Tommy asked El-Sayed, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” CNN reported. “Absolutely,” El-Sayed answered, according to video his campaign posted. When Tommy said he hadn’t heard him do it before, El-Sayed replied, “I’ve disavowed them.”

Then he turned the question around. “You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties,” he said. “And now you assume, Tommy, that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.” He compared himself to John F. Kennedy, who as a Catholic candidate was asked about allegiance to the Pope, and said Kennedy “was not running to be a Catholic president. He was running to be president and happened to be Catholic.” He added: “For me, that Constitution is the guiding light.”

He made the same case to MS NOW’s Ali Velshi the same day. “The whole reason this question is being asked is to insinuate that somehow I have dual loyalties,” he said, according to Mediaite.

What the half-sister’s posts say, and what he says

The question took off after the Washington Free Beacon reported on Oct. 11 and 12 on old social media posts by El-Sayed’s half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, now a University of Chicago professor. These are her words, not proven facts, and El-Sayed rejects them.

In June 2012, according to the Free Beacon, Abdelhadi wrote that she “had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.” On June 24, 2012, she wrote, “My family has long been MB.” In July 2013, she wrote, “I have had family jailed for being a part of it.” The mother she was describing, Fatten Elkomy, is also El-Sayed’s mother. No public evidence has shown that El-Sayed himself was ever a member of the group, and TNT has found none.

El-Sayed has denied any ties again and again. Asked on NBC’s Meet the Press on Oct. 11 whether he or his family had ties to the group, he said no. “I have no ties. We have no ties,” he later told NBC’s Tom Llamas, according to the Washington Post. “I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother … You’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s just not serious.”

At a rally in Marquette on Oct. 15, he said his parents divorced when he was about 3 and that, “to the best of my knowledge, nobody in my family’s been a member of this organization,” Semafor reported. “Judge me by my actions and my work, but please do not assume that because I might pray differently,” he said.

That’s a fair request, and it cuts both ways. A man isn’t responsible for what his mother may have done in college in Egypt half a century ago, before he was born. President Trump went further than the evidence this week, posting a video Thursday that called El-Sayed a member of the Brotherhood, Semafor reported. Nothing in the public record supports that, and conservatives shouldn’t repeat it. The strong case against El-Sayed rests on his own words.

The organization is the issue

The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a faith. It’s a political movement founded in Egypt in 1928, and Washington treats parts of it as terrorist groups. On Nov. 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order starting the process of designating the Brotherhood’s Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese chapters. On Jan. 13, 2026, the Treasury Department designated the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhoods as Specially Designated Global Terrorists for providing material support to Hamas. The State Department designated the Lebanese branch, al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective Jan. 14, and named its secretary general, Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The State Department notes that Hamas’s own 1988 charter called it a wing of the Brotherhood.

So when voters ask about the Brotherhood, they aren’t asking whether a Muslim can serve. Muslims can, and the Constitution El-Sayed quoted says there’s no religious test for office. They’re asking whether a would-be senator stands with the U.S. government’s judgment about a group that has funded Hamas.

On that, El-Sayed has been slippery. When Fox News’s Martha MacCallum asked him on Oct. 5 whether he supported the designations of the Brotherhood branches in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, he said, “I will support a terrorist designation for any organization that is engaged in or committed to political violence.” Pressed again, he repeated that he would back designations for groups “engaged in political violence or calling for political violence.” He never said yes to the three designations already on the books. TNT found no public statement in which he has endorsed them by name.

A disavowal is a feeling. A designation is policy. If El-Sayed agrees the Brotherhood branches that bankrolled Hamas are terrorists, he can say so in one sentence.

His words on Hamas and Israel

His record on Israel is why voters keep asking. In an April 19 interview on CNN’s Inside Politics, Manu Raju asked him: “You said the Israeli government is evil. Do you think they’re just as evil as Hamas?”

“Yes,” El-Sayed answered, according to CNN’s transcript. “Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. It’s not how evil is this one versus that one? Hamas, evil. Israeli government, evil. We can say both.” He also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal: “When you conduct a genocide, you’re a war criminal.”

Putting a democracy that is fighting a terrorist group on the same moral plane as the group that launched the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre is a position, not a prayer. Voters can judge it on its merits, and many will find it disqualifying.

The race

El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman, in a race that could decide control of the Senate. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim U.S. senator. He leads in most polls tracked by the New York Times, Mediaite reported.

He’s right that no American should face a religious test. But he’s asking voters to judge him by his actions and his work, so they should. On the Brotherhood, that means more than “absolutely” at a town hall. It means backing the terror designations without hedging, and explaining why he thinks Israel’s government is as evil as Hamas.