A young couple are shopping for groceries for their children in Michigan. The husband puts some bananas and eggs in the trolley. “You’re gonna have to put those eggs back,” his wife says. “We have to set those seven dollars aside – for killing Palestinians.” “Don’t we give Israel $4 billion a year anyways?” the husband asks.
“Yeah, and now we’re giving them another $26 billion,” she says. That costs $161 per American taxpayer, she tells him. And, she adds, Americans are “probably” paying for Israelis’ free healthcare too, so “might as well put the bananas back”.
This is the script of a TV ad released on October 24 by Rebellion PAC in support of Abdul El-Sayed, the doctor who is the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. The ad says that El-Sayed’s opponent, the moderate Republican Mike Rogers, works for “them” (cue heads of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir).
How has 21st-century America ended up with demagoguery and lies that are little different from a local lord telling the peasants that they’re hungry because the Jews control food prices? The analyst Zineb Riboua, a Moroccan-born scholar at the Hudson Institute, call it “Third-Worldism”. All immigrants add something to America. Some come from cultures that blame the Jews for everything. They import their grievances along with their cuisine.
I once spent two weeks in Michigan in the dead of winter. I can confirm: the Jews do not control the weather there. It’s the Democrats who control Michigan. The activist tail is wagging the Democratic dog in this campaign and elsewhere in the midterms. The moral climate of El-Sayed’s campaign is more chilling than January in Michigan.
The ad is independent of his campaign; it’s funded by Rebellion PAC, whose co-founder is Turkish-born Israel-hater Cenk Uygur, a regular on Piers Morgan’s circus of shame. Still, just as Uygur’s nephew Hassan Piker, a self-confessed communist who says “America deserved 9/11”, campaigns with El-Sayed, so the ad is just a cruder version of El-Sayed’s pitch that Israel is at the root of Michigan’s failings.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people, but they are not the same as AIPAC and Israel,” El-Sayed said in August. “I want our tax dollars spent to provide good schools, pay for healthcare, rebuild our roads here in Michigan, rather than sent abroad to subsidise foreign militaries.”
Whatever the merits of US aid to Israel, this is a false opposition and a fiscally baseless argument. But it’s how the Democrats now campaign.
Even Barack Obama turned out to support El-Sayed, claiming the candidate is unfairly targeted for being Muslim. Like everything Obama, this is suave nonsense. El-Sayed received the usual background checks. The results suggest a pattern.
His mother Fatten El-Komy worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency. In 2004, after she left, the Treasury Department designated its global network as a terrorist organisation.
In social media posts, El-Sayed’s half-sister Eman Abdelhadi said her family had “long been MB” (Muslim Brotherhood) and described her mother’s past activism with the group. Abdelhadi is a far-left college professor who in 2024 celebrated the first anniversary of October 7 by saying “Allahu akbar” as part of an “October 7th blessing”.
El-Sayed was raised by his father and stepmother. He denies any connection to the Brotherhood. In 2012, he was among the signatories of an open letter by Egyptian Americans endorsing the “revolutionary decisions” of senior MB official Mohammed Morsi, who won the 2012 elections.
“Abdul shares my values,” Obama said in Michigan.
El-Sayed refuses to accept Israel should exist as a Jewish state. He says he doesn’t consider Israel a US ally, and that it is dragging America into wars. He opposed military aid, even for life-saving systems such as Iron Dome.
The federal education budget for 2025 was $103 billion. In July, Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, signed off on a $22.9 billion state education budget. The federal healthcare budget for 2025 was $2.2 trillion, plus Michigan’s $37 billion.
The US sends about $4 billion to $5 billion a year to Israel in “aid”. About 80 per cent of it is earmarked to spend on US-made military exports: an indirect federal subsidy for Americas defence sector. Either El-Sayed is profoundly ignorant (always a possible in Senate races) or he is dissembling.
The real target of Third Worldism is America. Jews are just collateral damage. “The same framework that condemns Israel also condemns American power: Israel as the local embodiment of Western domination, the US as the global structure that sustains it,” Riboua says. “Hostility toward Israel becomes a socially acceptable proxy for hostility toward American identity, institutions and global leadership.”
As of October 25, the polls put El-Sayed three points ahead of Rogers.
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