Some questions in politics are hard. Asking a candidate for the United States Senate to condemn terrorists who murder Americans is the easiest one there is. It costs nothing, it risks nothing, and any serious candidate in either party can answer it in a single sentence.
So what does it say about a candidate when he can't?
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed gave Michigan voters plenty of reason to wonder Thursday night, when he faced off against Republican Mike Rogers for their Senate debate at WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids. Moderator Rick Albin asked El-Sayed whether Iran, the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism, or Israel poses the greater threat to the United States. El-Sayed waved it off as a ridiculous hypothetical.
Albin pressed him again. El-Sayed called the question ridiculous a second time and said of Iran and Israel, "both of them have proven dangerous in their own way."
This was no slip under the lights, either. El-Sayed had already ducked the same question on the campaign trail.
The evidence kept piling up from there. Rogers hammered El-Sayed for putting out no statement on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, which killed about 1,200 Israelis.
Rogers also raised El-Sayed's first reaction to the March 2026 attack at Temple Israel in Michigan, when a man rammed a truck loaded with fireworks and gasoline into the synagogue's daycare.
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Then came the money. Rogers charged that El-Sayed's biggest funders come from a group that supports the Muslim Brotherhood, and that he takes donations from people who openly back Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda. He alluded to Muslim Brotherhood ties on the part of El-Sayed's father-in-law, a donor, and to El-Sayed's birth mother, Fatten Elkomy, having worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which the Treasury Department targeted over support for Osama bin Laden.
El-Sayed's response was to criticize Rogers for asking him to condemn Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda at all, dismissing the names as scary words. He still hasn't condemned them.
Why can't he do that?
Former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who acknowledged he is voting for Rogers but called El-Sayed talented and smart, couldn't make sense of it.
"Three times he was asked that. He refused to answer," Meijer told CNN's NewsNight on Thursday. "Afterwards, he said, that's a dumb question. And he was right. It is a dumb question because the answer is so painfully easy, but he couldn't say that."
Meijer had an answer for the scary words line, too.
"And they are scary words, because they've killed hundreds of thousands of innocents, including 3,000 Americans three miles south of here," he said. "So, at a certain point, it goes from either this is political malpractice at the best, or he can't or he won't because of something deeper, and that is far more troubling."
He added, “And I just — I don't get it because I don't want to get it because it really is dumb.”
National Review senior writer Noah Rothman, sitting on the same panel, was less puzzled.
“I do. I get it,” he said. “It's hard not to at this point. I mean, the associations are clear. Yes, Muslim Brotherhood, he's said it a million times, but has the advantage of being correct. The man has surrounded himself, including high-profile family members, with individuals who have ties to CAIR… which has been implicated in terrorism financing scandals, can't condemn the attack on the synagogue without condemning Israel in the same voice, can't celebrate the death of the Ayatollah Khamenei, who killed Americans, and so on and so forth. Eventually, you have to confront the evidence of your own eyes," Rothman said.
The entire CNN panel was left stunned on-air after Abdul El-Sayed refused to condemn terrorist groups on the debate stage. How hard is it to say Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda are bad? They can no longer defend this. Brutal. https://t.co/rBg8trn8zY
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 9, 2026
And the evidence is clear. Condemning evil shouldn't be hard, but El-Sayed can't seem to do it. A candidate who treats the denunciation of terrorists as a trap has told voters what they need to know about his judgment. Moral clarity is the lowest bar in public life, and anyone who can't clear it shouldn't be trusted with a U.S. Senate seat.
