Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed's Mother Was an Active Member of the Muslim Brotherhood In College

You don't say.

Abdul El-Sayed's mother--whom the left-wing Michigan Senate candidate has described as "smart, warm, charismatic" and whom he called on camera in a May campaign video--was active in the Muslim Brotherhood while in college in Egypt, a revelation that further contradicts El-Sayed's recent claims that neither he nor his family have ties to the radical Islamist group.

Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor and El-Sayed's half-sister, wrote about her mother and other family members' ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in social media posts in June 2012, just after Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt.

"Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college," wrote Abdelhadi, who is five years younger than El-Sayed and has a different father.

Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, is a nurse in Missouri who attended Alexandria University, one of the largest universities in Egypt. The school was known as a hub of Muslim Brotherhood activity in the 1970s, according to a 2012 report from the Brookings Institution, which noted that "the Muslim Brothers dominated the Islamic Group at Alexandria University" at the time.

El-Sayed himself recounted his mother's campus activism in his book, Healing Politics, writing that she was a "leader on campus" but omitting any mention of the Muslim Brotherhood. A 2012 Columbia Medicine Magazine alumni profile of El-Sayed notes that El-Sayed's mother "studied medicine" in "Alexandria, Egypt" and was an outspoken opponent of military rule in the country, which was briefly interrupted by the election of Morsi. El-Sayed signed a 2012 statement identifying himself as part of a group of "Morsi Supporters in America," the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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The revelation of Elkomy's role as a Muslim Brotherhood campus activist comes as El-Sayed denies any ties to the Islamist group, which spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s. In a Sunday Meet the Press appearance, El-Sayed said neither he nor his family have connections to the Brotherhood. "You don't have any ties, and your family doesn't?" NBC's Kristen Welker asked. "No," El-Sayed said twice.

She did not ask any follow-ups. She did not read his sister's words to him, in which his sister identified his mother as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But Abdelhadi, who was arrested for assaulting a police officer during an anti-ICE rally in Chicago last year, has repeatedly discussed her family's ties to the Brotherhood, the Free Beacon reported.

"My family has long been MB," she wrote on June 24, 2012. "I have had family jailed for being a part of it," she wrote on July 3, 2013. "Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe" she said.

El-Sayed has faced intense scrutiny over his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood from his Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers.

His father seems to be Muslim Brotherhood, too, although no one is on record saying so:

It is unclear whether El-Sayed's father, Mohamed, has any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. According to El-Sayed, his father studied and taught at Alexandria University until leaving the school in 1978. El-Sayed wrote that his dad "had to leave" Egypt over his "political agitation" against Egyptian military rule. El-Sayed has also said his father left Egypt because he believed "he could express his religion in America better than he could in Egypt at the time."

Kristin Welker did not question Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed's deep family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. She did instead what all left-wing "journalistic" activists do, give him an easy opportunity to deny the facts without any push-back that might cause him discomfort.

NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker asked El-Sayed about allegations his family has connections to the Islamic group. El-Sayed denied any such connections twice in the interview with one-word responses. Welker asked no follow-up questions on the issue and moved on to other issues.

She was allowed to "moderate" presidential debates.

Meanwhile, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed's terrorist and communist wingman Hasan Piker has a long history of attacking the very idea of democracy, instead favoring sharia law and communist tyranny, left-wing liberal Jonathan Chait reports.

As I prepared for the interview by researching his commentary, I realized that Piker is right to complain that the handful of frequently repeated controversial statements fail to accurately represent his worldview. In fact, it's much worse than those quotes suggest.

The most important problem with inviting Piker to join the pro-democracy coalition is that, by any reasonable definition of the term, he does not believe in democracy.
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Piker declared at a debate this year, "I say we put the power back in the hands of the many rather than the power in the hands of the few. If a dictatorship is inevitable, I'd rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat than one that is designed around the needs of the bourgeois class." On his Twitch stream he has said: "I love Lenin. I love Fidel Castro. And I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely fucking heroes."

When asked to cite an example of socialism that he admires, Piker replied, "China is probably the closest," while conceding that "there are still plenty of failures within the Chinese system." Although he cites China's economic model, rather than its single-party Communist regime, as the source of his admiration, other countries have exhibited the same rapid industrialization without attracting Piker's fawning praise.

He has dismissed Mao's campaign of mass terror as mere mistakes. "Do I believe that it was intentional? No, I don't believe that it was intentional." In fact, as the Brookings scholar Kenneth Lieberthal, who has taught a course on China under communism at the University of Michigan, told me, "Mao never shied away from violence among Chinese civilians to achieve his goals, and he never expressed regret for any deaths that occurred as a result of his initiatives."

Piker has extensively praised economic development in North Korea, a country that he has acknowledged engages in repression, while maintaining that "it's certainly not as bad as the way that Western media presents it." In one segment marveling at economic development in the Stalinist kingdom, where even the slightest acts of dissent are met with confinement and torture, he said, "It is fucking mind-boggling to me that a country so fucking poor and so distraught, a country that withstood a fucking genocide, could get to this level, dude. Like, how does this not make you mad as an American citizen? How does this not fucking piss you off, where you look at this shit and you're like, if they can do it, why the fuck can't we?" Piker concluded by saying that North Korea's achievement "shows you that a better future is possible for all of us."

...

In one especially revealing episode, he attacked a refugee from Vietnam. Piker's stream typically includes snippets of videos that he and his audience watch together, interspersed with his own commentary. As the video showed the refugee saying "We have endured suffering under the Communist regime," he threw back his head in disbelief and began to rant: "Okay, fuck you, dude. I mean seriously, fuck you, old lady. Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking idiotic old lady with your stupid fucking gamer headest. Who has fucked you harder, America or fuckin' Ho Chi Minh? Suck my dick, old lady. Goddamn, dude. Fuck this refugee."

A black female comedienne -- I think -- embarrassed Piker by asking him about his Champagne Socialism. Worth the watch.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:20 PM

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