Abdul El-Sayed Called on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood To ‘Purge the Media and Police’ Shortly Before Islamic Government Arrested Reporters for ‘Insulting Islam’

 

Abdul El-Sayed Called on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood To ‘Purge the Media and Police’ Shortly Before Islamic Government Arrested Reporters for ‘Insulting Islam’

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed demanded in 2012 that the repressive Muslim Brotherhood "purge" media and police in Egypt after the radical Islamic group seized control of the country. 

A brutal religious crackdown on the press was soon to follow. 

The demand was made in an Arabic-language statement on Al-Ahram Gate, an Egyptian news portal, and was signed by 46 "leaders of the Egyptian community" in the United States, one of whom was El-Sayed, who was born in Michigan to Egyptian immigrants. 

The November 2012 statement came just days after the country's Islamist then-president, Mohamad Morsi, granted himself broad new powers in an effort to quell growing unrest. Morsi had five months earlier become Egypt's first elected president after longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak was toppled in the Arab Spring. But Morsi himself was starting to act like a strongman.   

"Statement by Morsi Supporters in America Backs His Decisions and Calls on Him to 'Purge the Media and Police,'" blares the headline published on Nov. 25, 2012. "We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible," the letter reads. "We affirm, as Egyptian Americans, that we strongly reject those voices that are courting America and Europe to take a position against the Egyptian regime," the letter adds. 

"Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed" of New York was the 33rd signature affixed to the letter, the publication of which coincides with the future candidate's time attending medical school at Columbia University.

Sources familiar with Arab-language media confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic political candidate, is the same "Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed" who signed the letter. El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to requests for comment regarding the letter and the candidate's current position on the Muslim Brotherhood. The original declaration, in Arabic, remains online to this day and has already made the rounds in Arabic-language social media. The existence of the declaration was reported this past April by Laura Loomer.