Editors at National Review Online explore the links between Michigan’s Democratic US Senate candidate and an infamous internet personality.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent this week trying to create the appearance of daylight between himself and poisonous internet personality Hasan Piker. There is no reason for Michigan voters to take his statements, which don’t even directly criticize Piker, as anything more than a desperate general election gambit.
Piker garnered attention for a livestream this week in which he claimed that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He made the statement while the screen showed a photo of Jeremy Moss, a Jewish Democrat who is running for a U.S. House seat in Michigan.
There is a long history of blaming Jews for bringing antisemitism on themselves, including in Nazi propaganda. The idea that a particular religious group cannot hold a given set of views without inviting violence is deeply un-American. While Piker’s comments could be charitably interpreted as his sympathetically noting the way things are, rather than arguing that this is how they ought to be, there is very little reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defended terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.”
Headlines that El-Sayed has “distanced” himself from Piker are overstated. In response to Piker’s latest comments about American Jews inviting violence on themselves, the candidate released a statement that could have been generated by AI, declaring generically, “Americans deserve the right to advocate what they believe without fear of violence.” Notably, he avoided directly criticizing Piker, merely claiming that “while politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer,” he wanted to focus on affordability.
