First They Came for Abdul El-Sayed

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM ET. Our guest will be Norman Finklestein, the longtime critic of Israel, and critic of the way the memory of the Holocaust—which both his parents survived—has been exploited to justify Israel’s actions. I don’t really know Norman. But watching him over the years, I’ve often thought that he has a prophetic personality. Having a prophetic personality doesn’t mean you’re always right. What it does mean is that you are tormented by injustice. And this torment can make you hard to be around—since you can’t restrain yourself from speaking out against injustice, no matter what the circumstances, in the bluntest possible way. I want to talk to Norman about what it’s like—after all these decades as a political outcast—to see his views becoming mainstream. I want to ask him about his concern, which I share, that legitimate fury at Israel is fueling conspiracy theories that exonerate the United States. And I want to ask about his friend and mentor, Noam Chomsky, and what he thinks Chomsky might have said in response to October 7 and the Gaza genocide. Please join us.

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Cited in Today’s Video

Donald Trump posts a photo of El-Sayed’s wife in a hijab.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee begins calling Abdul El-Sayed “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”

Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace tweets that “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

Donald Trump’s final ad in 2016.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Jessica Goldschmidt reviews the play “Giant.”

In The Guardian, I argued that Abdul El-Sayed offers a model for Democrats for how to respond to Donald Trump.

I talked to Slate’s “What’s Next” podcast about AIPAC’s role in American politics.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, in a completely predictable turn of events, the Republican Party has greeted Abdul El-Sayed’s primary victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan by launching these kind of, like, cartoonishly Islamophobic attacks. So, Donald Trump posts this picture of himself and Melania Trump on the one side, and then Abdul El-Sayed and his wife, who’s wearing a hijab, on the other. And the caption is ‘two very different Americas.’

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has started referring to Abdul El-Sayed as Abdul Rahman Muhammad El-Sayed, right, because his name wasn’t Arabic-sounding enough before, right? It’s exactly the same thing they did with Barack Hussein Obama, because Barack Obama wasn’t alien and scary enough. And a congresswoman from South Carolina named Nancy Mace put out this lovely tweet. She wrote, ‘every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse and a threat to both national security and our republic.’ Just utterly sickening.

And so, I think the question for anyone in Michigan, but particularly for Jews, is this: do you want to be associated with this, right? It’s the same question you had with Zohran Mambani. Do you want to be associated with a political party and a political ideology that, in order to maintain power, is willing to be nakedly bigoted against a group of people—in this case, Muslim Americans.

And what I would suggest is that if the Republican Party is willing to do this to Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed today because they see a political advantage in making them seem alien and frightening because they are Muslim, they would do the same thing to Jews, right? This was done to Jews early in the 20th century when Jews were depicted as socialists, anarchists, communists, left-wing radicals, dangerous. This is part of the reason that the United States would not let Jews in even after the Shoah, even after the Holocaust, when Jews were sitting in displaced persons camps in the late 1940s, the perception of Jews as communists was so thick that the United States was literally willing to allow people who were former Nazi war criminals into the United States before they allowed Jews, because of the same association of one particular ethnic, religious group with the idea of being a threat to the United States.

And we know that Donald Trump and his Republican Party do this for political advantage, right? There’s no principle here. Anyone who knows anything about Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s Republican Party knows that they’re not doing this because Abdul El-Sayed is Muslim per se. They’re doing it because there is a political advantage to demonizing Arab and Muslim people today, right?

And if the politics were to shift, and it would become more politically advantageous to do this to Jews, they would do this in a heartbeat, right? They would do this in a heartbeat because it’s only about maintaining their political power. And I’ve got news for you. Given the shift that’s taking place in public opinion on the right—listen to Candace Owens, listen to Nick Fuentes, listen to even Tucker Carlson—it is becoming increasingly politically advantageous to do this to Jews, too.

So, you need people of principle who believe that bigotry is wrong. If you think it’s a wise move to make a political alliance with people who are willing to use racism, Islamophobic, you know, bigotry against Arabs and Muslims now, because you think somehow they care about Jews, let’s just remember the ad that Donald Trump ran in 2016, his final ad in 2016, which was about the menacing global special interest, and just happened to show pictures of George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein, who was then the head of Goldman Sachs, right? Three Jews in this image of these kind of classical notions that there were these shadowy interests that were out there basically trying to rob ordinary Americans blind, and mentioned Jews, right?

So, this idea that it is a safe bet to ally with a Republican Party that’s willing to practice the most crude and blatant Islamophobia now, they will do the same thing to Jews the minute they start to see focus groups, and the minute they start to see polls that show that’s in their interest.

And I know that there are pro-Israel folks that say that Abdul El-Sayed is doing that today, or Zohran Mamdani, because they’re attacking AIPAC. No, not true. What Mamdani and El-Sayed are doing are attacking AIPAC because they are morally opposed to the policies of the Israeli government, and because they believe that American politics is corrupted by big money, especially big money that works in secret. There is nothing antisemitic about that.

It is completely different than the principle that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are operating on. El-Sayed, like Mamdani, says again and again and again that he believes in the principle of equality under the law in the United States, and equality under the law in Israel-Palestine. That’s what Jews should want here. It’s what Jews should want there. It is not bigoted to say that Jews and Palestinians should be equal in Israel-Palestine, and it is not bigoted to say that Jews should be treated equally in the United States. It is the antithesis of bigotry.

And when I think about the way I would like American Jews and American Jewish leaders to respond to this rise of Muslim politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, I think about something that happened more than 20 years ago at the 2004 Democratic Convention. I remember going to the 2004 Democratic Convention to cover it. I was writing about it. And it happened that the convention coincided with Tisha B’Av, which is the day in which Jews mourn the destruction of both of the temples and other, supposedly other terrible events in Jewish history.

And I thought, what is it going to mean for me as a Jew, both observing Tisha B’Av fasting, and also, you know, going to this convention? And what I saw was that at the end of the night’s proceedings, on one of the nights of the conventions, a group of Jews in the Democratic Party went to the floor of the convention—the floor of the convention!—sat down on the ground, as we are commanded to do on the holiday of Tisha B’Av, and began to read the Book of Lamentations, and these keynotes, these medieval dirges that are traditionally read on Tisha B’Av.

And I can’t tell you how beautiful a moment that was for me as an American, as a Jew, to be able to do that on the floor of the Democratic Convention. This is what we should want for Abdul El-Sayed and every other Muslim in the United States. We should want them to be able to have that same sense of ownership over the United States, that they can practice their faith anywhere and everywhere, and still be understood as an owner of this country, not as a guest.

And you know what? It is people who have that experience of exclusion, and people who understand the taste of being discriminated against, and people who speak in the name of equality under the law, that are going to be our best protection for maintaining our ability to be proudly and openly Jewish and safe and free in the United States.

If you think that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and Nancy Mace and their National Republican Senatorial Committee will protect Jewish freedom and safety when they’re willing to act this way towards another minority religious group just because they think it’s good politics at the moment, you’re making a profoundly, profoundly foolish decision.