There's a version of Abdul El-Sayed that Michigan Democrats nominated a few weeks ago and another version campaigning across the state right now. The first one built a reputation on incendiary rhetoric that even his own party found alarming. The second one just delivered a carefully worded apology that barely qualifies as one. Nothing about El-Sayed's past changed.
So why is he suddenly acting as if it did?
That's the pattern with radical leftists every election cycle. Build a record that thrills the base, then spend the general election pretending it doesn't exist. El-Sayed is running that play right now, and Jewish voters are the reason why.
He needs them. And he knows it.
On Saturday, El-Sayed apologized to Michigan's Jewish Democratic Caucus for comments he made in March linking a deadly Detroit-area synagogue attack to Israel's Middle East military campaign.
"My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify," El-Sayed told reporters. "To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I'm really sorry. That was not my intention," he said.
El-Sayed “apologized” for how people felt about his comments. Which not only isn’t a repudiation of what he said, but basically blames voters for misinterpreting what he “really meant.”
He didn’t actually apologize for making the comments.
Go back to what El-Sayed said in March, and the apology looks even less convincing. In a video statement, he tied the shooter's motives to a family tragedy in Lebanon. "Ayman Ghazali lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week," El-Sayed said.
There’s a problem with his version of the story: The brother who died in that strike was a Hezbollah commander.
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"Ayman Ghazali hurt people," he said, before a lengthy meditation that treated the shooting like geopolitics rather than an attack on a house of worship. "There is no justification for what he did. It was wrong and he never should have done it. Hurt people hurt people. A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew... Imagine if his family had never died. Imagine there was never an attack on Temple Israel. That's the world that we want to live in. That's the world we need to build for," El-Sayed said.
Five straight sentences build sympathy for shooter Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who drove his car into a synagogue and opened fire before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His car also struck a security guard, sending him to the hospital, and more than 30 officers needed treatment for smoke inhalation after the car caught fire.
That's who El-Sayed really is. He’s a guy who defends Hezbollah commanders and blames Israel for defending itself.
So why is El-Sayed trying (and badly, I might add) to sanitize his past statements? Well, the Cook Political Report rates the El-Sayed-Rogers race a "Toss Up." Five of six polls taken in August show El-Sayed with a slight lead over Rogers. Only a Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research poll shows Rogers ahead. In a race this close, El-Sayed needs to dupe Jewish voters into believing he’s not a rabid anti-semite.
Otherwise, he’ll lose.
