Spitting Image: El-Sayed Sis Charged With Assault on Illinois State Trooper

The family that spits together, sticks together? Michigan has it bad enough with Abdul El-Sayed. Do they really want to adopt the Marxist Family Plan? 

Over the weekend, it became clear that antipathy toward police runs in the genes. Last fall, El-Sayed’s half-sister—a radical professor at the University of Chicago – got charged with aggravated battery while protesting at an ICE detention center. Eman Abdelhadi literally spit on police just a few months before her brother first tried dodging his Defund the Police track record:

Controversial socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing fresh scrutiny after it was revealed that his close relative is a far-left professor who was arrested on a felony charge last year for her role in an anti-ICE riot.

Eman Abdelhadi is a polarizing figure. She works as an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development, and has a years-long history of landing in the national spotlight for radical activism and inflammatory statements.

She’s also El-Sayed’s half sister.

Last fall, as leftist zealots spent months protesting, sometimes violently, outside an ICE detention facility in suburban Chicago, Abdelhadi was booked after allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper. She was charged on Oct. 3 with two counts of aggravated battery to a government employee, a Class 3 felony, and two counts of resisting/obstructing peace, a Class A misdemeanor.

A day before her arrest, she appeared on a podcast called “Movement Memos,” which is affiliated with the far-left publication Truthout. During that interview, she recalled her previous experiences at the riots at the Broadview facility.

El-Sayed and Abdelhadi share a mother, but were raised separately. In terms of radical politics, it doesn’t matter much, as they both have fully invested in hard-Left positions. Even the University of Chicago isn’t radical enough for Abdelhadi (via Twitchy):

Eman Abdelhadi: “F*** the University of Chicago… but it’s my best shot at power.”

At Socialism 2025, @UChicago professor Eman Abdelhadi called her employer “evil colonial landlord.”

Use it. Organize it. Seize its structural leverage.

“We don’t have power… but I work at one… pic.twitter.com/Mes06SYMEp

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) July 6, 2025

“I’m more Muslim than I’ve ever been… still not Muslim enough to stop drinking, so that’s kind of an interesting thing.”

Abdelhadi uses her evolving relationship to Islam as a framework for political resilience and emotional coping:

“All I have to do is do my best… The… pic.twitter.com/cbhktqaqeS

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) July 6, 2025

“I have cried so many times on campus in ways like as a, you know, young brown, queer woman… and then like the genocide started and people are like how are you? I’m like—”

“I cried during every rally speech I gave on campus… and how dare you expect these students to be OK? Like why? Why would I be OK?”

“It would be sick if I was able to put on this performance for you that I’m fine.”

She frames public emotional unraveling not as something to manage, but as a necessary political act:

“As a Palestinian there is a political tool to that… I think being incredibly sad is important.”

And she’s open about canceling work or redirecting student meetings around her emotional state:

“We’re not meeting today because I’m actually too upset to meet.”

“After our encampment was raided… my students were main organizers… So we don’t do this weird inhuman thing where we pretend you didn’t just get a tent ripped out from under you by the police. Let’s talk about that first.”

This isn’t support. It’s not pedagogy. It’s ideology via emotional exhibition—politicized despair as a teaching method. You decide if that belongs in a university classroom.

So why stay at all? Tenure, baby!

“Turns out, I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago. I work at a place that is a landlord, a healthcare provider, a police force, f— that s—, but, they are, and a place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize… actually, this is where I need to build power. That’s possible structural leverage,” she said.

And here’s an interesting nugget from the AP photo library. When I checked to see whether we had a photo from last year’s arrest, the only image in our licensed library for Abdelhadi came from ten years ago, which I have used for the front-page image for this post. At that time, the AP caption identified Eman Abdelhadi as a “lesbian doctoral student” at New York University. She used the Orlando nightclub massacre to make herself into a victim at a protest:

In this Tuesday, June 14, 2016 photo, Eman Abdelhadi, a lesbian doctoral student at New York University, poses near the campus. Gay Muslims said the shooting in an Orlando nightclub sparked a complex set of emotions. They were devastated for their fellow gays and lesbians, while deeply concerned about anti-Muslim bias the shooting would generate. At the same time, they were caught at the intersection of two mutually wary groups: LGBT people who consider Islam uniquely anti-gay, and Muslims prejudiced against gays and lesbians. Abdelhadi said she feared “Islam and queerness being pitted against each other in a sort of battle and that just making it impossible for me to exist as I am.” 

Why did anyone from the AP bother to interview Abdelhadi in New York about a shooting in Florida? What was the point of it, other than self-promotion for Abdelhadi? Your guess is as good as mine. According to her UC CV, though, UC’s Eman Abdelhadi got her post-grad degrees from New York University in that time frame. 

Looks like the battle is over, and radical Islam has won.

El-Sayed isn’t responsible for his sister or vice versa. However, both of them have pushed themselves into the public square in service to both radical Leftism and Palestinian grievance, and that connection is very much fair game for voters to consider. So are both of their track records of spitting on law enforcement, literally in one case and figuratively – so far – in the other. 

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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