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Michigan’s progressive Democratic Senate nominee, while sitting atop an organization with ties to an alleged terrorist group, once protested an event where a trio of “ex-terrorists” discussed their conversion to Christianity.
Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan’s highly watched and hotly contested race for Senate against GOP nominee and former Rep. Mike Rogers, was a leader of a protest against three “ex-terrorists” that spoke on-campus at the University of Michigan in 2007, according to an unearthed report.
The protest, chronicled by the Michigan Daily at the time, was against three speakers, Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Annani and Kamal Saleem, self-described former terrorists who were making the rounds during the mid-2000s to discuss their lives in the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Muslim Brotherhood before converting to Christianity.
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Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, speaks at the Michigan Democratic Nominating Convention in Lansing, Mich., on Aug. 29, 2026. (Anadolu via Getty Images)
Students attending the talk staged a walk-out, which El-Sayed cheered afterward.
“We’ve done something good today, and we need to keep that going in the future,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed’s campaign spokesperson, Cole Wozniak, told Fox News Digital that the candidate had “unequivocally denounced terrorism.”
“Two decades ago, he protested against speakers who have been widely condemned by experts, including in national security, for spreading misinformation and fabricating their backstories,” Wozniak said. “Mike Rogers and his allies are pushing lies because they don’t want to talk about the record-high prices Michiganders are paying for gas and groceries because of Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”
There are also questions about the backgrounds of Shoebat, Annani and Saleem. The New York Times reported in 2008 that before speaking at the Air Force Academy, organizations criticized their appearance and several Arab-American civil rights organizations questioned why they had not been arrested or deported given their apparent connections to terrorist groups.
Event organizers told the Michigan Daily that it was meant to educate people about the dangers of Muslim extremism, not promote intolerance. On the other hand, the protesters, who were clad in yellow, argued that their pushback was highlighting that the event was “generalizing an entire group of people.”
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El-Sayed at the time was the vice president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which is alleged to have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that the White House requested last year that the State and Treasury departments determine whether certain chapters should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
By the early 1960s, the Muslim Brotherhood had built a presence in the U.S., where its members functioned primarily through student unions on college campuses, most particularly through the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
Lara Burns, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month in written testimony that by the 1960s, the Muslim Brotherhood had built a presence in the U.S., “where its members functioned primarily through student unions on college campuses, most particularly through the Muslim Students Association (MSA).”
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ISGAP is calling on the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. (J. David Ake/Getty Images; Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)
The MSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to label a handful of chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
Trump ordered that the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood chapter, Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood chapter and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood chapter be considered for the designations for their connections to Hamas and the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
