During his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, he pointed to a bookshelf and told documentary filmmakers, “You’re going to want to not get these things in the shot. We’re trying to keep the shot secular.” That year, when journalist Laura Loomer asked whether he had described himself as “Sharia-compliant,” he replied, “I didn’t say that.”
On March 12, Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon, rammed a car into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and opened fire. Four of his relatives had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon the previous week. The Israel Defense Forces said two of his brothers killed in the strike were members of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
El-Sayed condemned the attack in a video but said “hurt people hurt people” and “violence is a cycle,” according to NOTUS, a Washington political news site. On Aug. 29, he apologized to the Michigan Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus, saying, “What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context.”
