‘America Is Going Down’: El-Sayed’s ISNA Convention Exactly What You’d Expect

Republicans will launch their midterm narrative tonight, painting this election cycle as a choice between American values and insurgent radicalism, both Marxist and Islamist. Democrats seem determined to offer the exact same choice, especially in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed spent the weekend producing material for the GOP Midterm Convention. 

Last week, the Detroit Free Press reported that El-Sayed would come off the campaign trail just as the general-election season launched to spend some time with his friends … at a conference held by an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal prosecution for laundering money to Islamist terrorists. The DFP never bothered to mention this context in its reporting, and waited six paragraphs to mention El-Sayed’s participation as a panelist at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Nor did they question why El-Sayed would take time off the campaign trail for ISNA’s conference the same week as the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Maybe El-Sayed’s campaign should have thought twice about it before he and ISNA provided even more fodder for the GOP’s big party this week. The Free Beacon reports that El-Sayed’s choice went about as well as you’d expect:

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s speech at a controversial Islamic convention in Detroit this weekend was sandwiched between a video montage featuring a firebrand imam declaring that “America is going down” and a speech from another cleric who said members of Congress who voted for an antisemitism bill were “guilty of treason.”

The embarrassing spectacle on Saturday underscored the awkwardness of El-Sayed participating in a conference featuring a rogues’ gallery of Islamic extremists including 9/11 truthers and a Holocaust-denier.

The Islamic Society of North America kicked off day two of its annual confab on Saturday with a montage of clips from various convention speakers, including imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

“I am ashamed of what America has become,” Wahhaj says in the undated clip. “Look at the newspaper every day, how America is going down.”

In case you think this might be overblown, Chuck Ross includes the video presentation that preceded El-Sayed’s address:

El-Sayed then went on to deliver a relatively anodyne speech, according to Ross, that focused mainly on kitchen-table economic issues, with a soupçon of Muslim victimization and Islamophobia. The next speech from the dais came from New Jersey cleric Zaid Shakur, who went on to declare that support for Israel was “treason”:

Shakir, who once asserted that “Zionist forces” were behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, railed against the U.S. government over its support for Jews and Israel, singling out a congressional vote to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of “anti-Semitism.”

“When the United States Congress passes laws on behalf of a genocidal, rapacious, nefarious foreign country to deny us the freedom of speech … that is a domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States,” Shakir declared. “And as such, they are guilty of treason.”

That clip does not appear in the above video. Will it appear in the GOP’s midterm convention presentations? Perhaps, although the organizers may be pressed for time, given all of the evidence El-Sayed and Democrats have already provided of their radicalism. Eliana Johnson and Alana Goodman also provide video evidence of the radical nature of El-Sayed’s mosque, which belies his attempts to pass himself off as a moderate. The imam of the mosque explicitly rejects moderation in pursuit of assimilation:

Unlike Jews and some Christians, most Muslims do not formally join a mosque in order to attend prayer services there, and many pray at several different mosques. But El-Sayed typically prays at the MCA of Ann Arbor, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

Algizawi’s sermons are littered with inflammatory remarks about gays and homosexuality, bemoaning its prevalence in America and arguing that it is incumbent upon Muslims to reject it because “it cannot bring stability to life” and “people cannot give children from this relationship. You understand?”

“Here in America—in America, there is, you know, it became a fashion these days: homosexuality and LGBTQ and something like that becomes a fashion everywhere. And even this has reached the Muslim community, and people ask what the [sic] Islamic stand on that … Islam as a religion refuse,” Algizawi said in 2022 remarks at a Sacramento-area Islamic center. “Why? Because there is purposes for marriage … This relationship cannot bring stability to your life … We are looking for children when we get married. People cannot give children from this relationship. You understand?”

He continued: “So this is against human nature, by the way. Also, Muslims cannot compromise their religion. We cannot say: ‘Hey, because I am a Muslim, I’m American, we are living in America, we have…’ No, we cannot compromise our religion.”

With this as context, one would have predicted that El-Sayed would have found reasons to distance himself from ISNA and its connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and radical Islamism. Instead, El-Sayed chose to spend Labor Day weekend immersing himself among the radicals. Let’s hope Michigan voters paid attention, and that GOP organizers and Mike Rogers are prepared to enlighten them if those voters only hear what the Detroit Free Press bothers to report. 

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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