by Ben Weingarten
A small but loud cohort on the right has sought to put an America First spin on anti-Israel and what some see as antisemitic activism, in advocating against the U.S.-Israel alliance, railing against the so-called “Israel lobby,” and insinuating that Israel and pro-Israel Jews are manipulating U.S. policy to Israel’s benefit.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democrats’ U.S. Senate primary in
Michigan last Tuesday was the latest sign of an emerging kingmaker in
U.S. politics—a little-known super PAC that has tapped the wealth of a
new cadre of Muslim-American mega-donors to support far-left candidates.
Since it was launched just six months ago, American Priorities has channeled millions of dollars, primarily from donors with Arab, Muslim, and/or Middle Eastern backgrounds, to a string of winning candidates in high-profile races.
Most of the entity-supported candidates are running on various democratic-socialist policies, such
as single-payer health care, abolishing ICE, and slashing the military.
But one area in which all candidates are aligned, consistent with the
PAC’s mission, is in their antagonism towards Israel.
With several such candidates considered locks for the U.S. House in
deep blue districts and potentially Michigan’s Senate seat in November,
the independent expenditure vehicle is at the forefront of an
increasingly politically influential and growing Muslim-American
community—one that has ascended as the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict
has become a central U.S. political issue following Hamas’ massacre of
1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023.
In some ways, this is a very American story: As new groups of
immigrants establish themselves in America, they eventually seek room
for their voice in politics and culture. The key issues that have
mobilized Muslim-Americans and the positions held by associated
organizations, however, are seen by some as radical. Polls show such
voters are significantly more hostile towards Israel and Jews and
tolerant toward groups and ideas the U.S. government has linked to
terrorism than the general public—views reflected by the insurgent crop
of leftist candidates they are increasingly backing.
A recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing convened by Sen. Ted Cruz raised a more chilling issue. The Texas Republican alleged, and witnesses concurred that—in a parallel
to what has transpired in countries like France, Germany, and the
United Kingdom—the Muslim Brotherhood, a subversive transnational
Islamist organization, has cultivated an “entrenched institutional
network” in America of NGOs, advocacy groups, and political
organizations to advance its leaders’ recorded mission to “destroy …
Western civilization from within.” That network, terrorism expert Kyle
Shideler found, has actively partnered with the Democratic Socialists of
America, as part of what Cruz called a “Red-Green Alliance,” that
Shideler said is “united around a revolutionary objective advocating for
the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution.” Democrats on the panel
boycotted the hearing in protest, claiming in a statement the Texas senator was “[s]capegoating Muslims.”
While such partisan conflicts simmer, Muslim-Americans, who represent
meaningful percentages of the population in dark blue New York and
purple Michigan alike, are buoying the leftists increasingly dominating
the Democrat Party. All indications are that this bloc is positioning
itself not only to play an outsize role in shaping the next Congress but
also in defining the 2028 presidential contest and America’s future.
Pro-Palestinian Leftists
American Priorities was founded in February as a self-styled “countervailing force”
to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though the
largest such group, it is just one of several relatively new PACs with
overlapping donors centered on opposition to Israel (see sidebar). The super PAC is led by Hannah Fertig, a strategist self-identifying as
Jewish who figured prominently in the 2020 presidential campaign of
Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish and a backer of staunch anti-Zionist
candidates. The group’s treasurer is Mark Hanna, an assembly district
leader in New York who began his political career as an organizer focusing
on Muslim-related issues, including through forming Yalla Brooklyn, an
NGO dedicated to mobilizing Arab and Muslim voters. American Priorities
has pledged to put up $10 million this cycle to elect Democratic
candidates who believe the party establishment is too pro-Israel. AIPAC
and its affiliates have also poured tens of millions of dollars into
recent election cycles as support for the Jewish state generally has
declined—a long–term trend among
Democrats correlating with the rise of the anti-Israel progressive
left. To support its political claims, American Priorities cites polls
showing a majority of Democratic voters oppose U.S.
military aid to Israel, are more sympathetic to Palestinian Arabs than
Israelis, and shun candidates who accept AIPAC support.
Many of the super PAC’s top donors are first-generation Muslim immigrants who have made their fortunes in the U.S. They include:
- Hussein “Sam” Mahrouq, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in
Jordan and later grew a single car dealership in Texas into Mahrouq
Enterprises International, a conglomerate encompassing
25 companies, spanning 3 continents, and employing more than 650 people
across the automotive, technology, and real estate sectors.
- Idris and Haroon Mokhtarzada, brothers who as children fled
Afghanistan with their family amid Russia’s invasion before settling in
the U.S. They became serial entrepreneurs, most notably founding
personal finance app Truebill in 2015—which six years later was sold to
the Rocket Companies for $1.275 billion and became today’s Rocket Money.
- Nazar Khan, born in India and who likewise immigrated to the U.S. as
a child, commencing a journey that would take him from the University
of Pennsylvania to the perch where he sits today as co-founder and chief
technology officer of AI energy infrastructure developer and operator
Tera Wulf, valued at around $9 billion.
These are highly successful immigrants who, by all accounts, have
lived the American dream. Nevertheless, the super PAC they have written
six-figure checks to is partnered with
groups advocating far-left social and economic policies aimed at
fundamentally transforming America, including Justice Democrats, the
Working Families Party, Leaders We Deserve, and the IMEU Policy Project.
RealClearInvestigations could not reach or did not receive responses
to a series of questions posed to Mahrouq, the Mokhtarzada Brothers,
Khan, and other top American Priorities donors about their views.
For his part, Mahrouq told CNN in connection with a July 2026 report that he believes in “a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that respects the dignity of all people in the region.”
“My focus is not partisan politics, but rather promoting policies
that strengthen America, encourage opportunity, and serve the interests
of American citizens. I believe decisions affecting our country should
be made based on what is best for the United States, independent of
pressure from any foreign government, foreign interest group or partisan
agenda,” he told Jewish Insider via a spokesperson earlier this year.
Some on the right in the U.S. and Israel alike have advocated for
phasing out aid—on good faith grounds that it would redound to both
countries’ benefit.
In contrast to those boosters of the U.S.-Israel relationship, nearly
every candidate backed by American Priorities has characterized Israel
as an “apartheid” state engaged in “genocide” in Gaza, downplayed or
rationalized the violence of its jihadist foes, and disparaged their
primary opponents by accusing them of being “bought and paid for,” directly or indirectly, by the Jewish state.
Some of the candidates it has supported thus far—many of which its donors have also contributed to individually—include:
- Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, boosted by $678,000 of support from American Priorities. An Egyptian-American, during the Arab Spring in 2012, he signed a letter backing Egyptian president and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi against his opponents. In 2022, he compared a
proposed ballot measure in Oklahoma prohibiting judges from considering
Islamic law in rulings to “the Trail of Tears,” which followed comments
in 2021 in which he drew equivalence between the War on Terror and “the
decimation of Native Americans, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow
segregation, [and] Japanese interment (sic).” He refused to address
the U.S. military’s assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader—who had
authorized the killing of perhaps 42,000 Iranian protesters in
February—so as not to inflame the many “people in Dearborn [Michigan]
who are sad.” This past spring he also suggested that a jihadist attack
on random members of a West Bloomfield, Michigan, synagogue in March
made sense on one level because several of the attacker’s family
members—including a brother who was a commander of the terrorist
group—had been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon. El-Sayed frequently
appears with the antisemitic, terror-sympathizing, and Mao-revering streamer Hasan Piker, dismissing criticism of Piker’s assertion that “America deserved 9/11” as an example of “cancel culture.” El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, a contributor of $200,000 to a super PAC backing his son-in-law, has reportedly
served on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North
America (ISNA) since at least 2007. ISNA was identified as an unindicted
co-conspirator in the then-largest terrorism financing case in U.S.
history, concerning the Hamas-funding “charity,” the Holy Land
Foundation. The organization emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, which
has also helped birth Hamas and other jihadist groups. El-Sayed
previously served as vice president of the University of Michigan’s
chapter of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA), an organization that
also has Brotherhood roots and
helped birth ISNA. He made his “Trail of Tears” remarks in front of the
Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Oklahoma chapter. The candidate
has spoken before the national organization at multiple events. CAIR, another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case,
has been designated as a terrorist organization in several Arab
countries along with the states of Florida and Texas. Fox News reported
that some 41 individuals linked to CAIR have contributed over $115k to
El-Sayed. Sen. Cruz and the witnesses collectively identified each of
these entities—ISNA, Muslim Students Associations, and CAIR—as part of
what Cruz called an “entrenched institutional” Muslim Brotherhood that
sits “[b]ehind El-Sayed’s political rise.”
- Dr. Adam Hamawy, the Democrat’s nominee for
Congress in New Jersey’s 12th District, boosted by $1.5 million of
support from the super PAC—slightly more than he raised from all direct
contributors as of this writing. An Egyptian-American, as a young man
the future plastic surgeon sat in on the lectures of, traveled with, and
served as a translator for the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman. In
1995, Dr. Hamawy would testify, potentially untruthfully,
on his behalf during the terrorism trial linked to the first World
Trade Center bombing that resulted in the cleric’s conviction for, among
other things, conspiring to bomb six New York landmarks. A year prior,
he volunteered
as a doctor in Bosnia during the height of the jihadist insurgency
there, under the auspices of an NGO in the Benevolence International
Foundation, subsequently identified as an Al-Qaeda front group. Most
recently, he served for several weeks in 2024 at Gaza’s European
Hospital, which he called “a completely benign civilian hospital with no
tunnels underneath it”—only to be disproven when
Israeli forces identified a military base underneath the facility and
eliminated senior Hamas leaders operating there, including commander
Mohamed Sinwar, brother of October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. Like
El-Sayed, Hamawy has defended Piker’s 9/11 comments, stating, “I think
we have to put it all in perspective,” and that “I still love the guy.”
- Daria Avila Chevalier, the Democrat’s nominee for
Congress in New York’s 13th District, boosted by $1.3 million of support
from the super PAC, including spending in opposition to her primary
opponent—matching what she raised from all direct contributors as of
this writing. A self-described “working-class
Dominican New Yorker who has been organizing in upper Manhattan for a
fairer, more equitable, and more affordable New York City since she was a
teenager,” Chevalier joined an anti-Israel protest
in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, where participants openly celebrated
Hamas’ atrocities from the day before. While an undergraduate, she
co-founded the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group, which has
endorsed the “total eradication of Western civilization”; she later led
the anti-Israel and antisemitic takeover of the campus after the Hamas
attack. Chevalier converted to Islam,
she says, as a byproduct of her experience interning in Nablus and
being surrounded by Muslim activists. The Democrat nominee, who is said to have “oriented her whole adult life around” Palestinian activism, tweeted that “Israel doesn’t exist” amid a series of since-deleted posts.
Democrat Establishment Fears Antisemitic Takeover
Opponents see such candidates’ anti-Zionism as ultimately indistinguishable from antisemitism, with their rhetoric aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing a free and democratic Jewish state. They hear the AIPAC
attacks as dog whistles for age-old tropes about cabals of wealthy Jews
controlling policymakers and as insinuating Jewish dual loyalty—ginning
up Jew-hatred and sowing domestic discord.
Pennsylvania Democrat Sen. John Fetterman has been perhaps the senior-most party official to make this case,
indicating, “I’m deeply alarmed by the way the Democratic Party is
going after Israel and allowing just rank anti-Semitism to just
flourish, you know, on the left and on the campuses too.”
His lower-chamber colleague, Jewish New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer,
one of the few other non-lame ducks in Congress to speak out, recently
wrote in the Free Press that “Abdul El-Sayed’s victory…is only the latest evidence that my party is being overrun by antisemitism.”
Joel Rubin, the Jewish outreach leader on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, has likewise said
that “I think what Sanders and the Sanders operation have done is shove
into our system the most categorically anti-Israel, antisemitic
candidates that we’ve seen in a generation—if ever, certainly within the
Democratic Party”—a reference to the Vermont socialist’s leadership on
the left.
Outgoing New York Rep. Dan Goldman expressed similar concerns. A
noted progressive who is Jewish, Goldman’s primary contest came to be
defined in part by his pro-Israel positions and AIPAC ties, which his
Jewish opponent, American Priorities-endorsed Brad Lander, seized on
critically, en route to a 66-34 trouncing of the former Trump
impeachment manager. Lander, like many left-wing Reform Jews, has argued that his progressive principles flow from his faith. In contrast to Goldman, speaking before a Queens mosque in May, Lander told worshippers
that Israel is committing “genocide in Gaza” and “potentially” in
Lebanon, vowing to cut military assistance and partner with the likes of
anti-Israel Muslim Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in Congress. The
former New York City comptroller also disavowed AIPAC
and pressed Goldman to sign a pledge to avoid taking such outside
political support. An event in the waning days of the campaign
illustrated its tenor. Goldman patronized a Brooklyn coffee shop with an
activist owner. Upon realizing it had served him, the cafe wrote in
a public social media post that it does not serve “genocide enablers,”
and it would have turned him away had it known. “[W]e don’t need your
money (it’s probably coming from AIPAC anyways),” the since-deleted
diatribe read. In Goldman’s concession speech, he lamented
that “antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, some of which I heard
personally on this campaign, will ultimately be the undoing of our
democracy if we all don’t lean in and speak out—even if it’s not
politically expedient.”
In advance of a recent failed House vote forced by renegade
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie to cut foreign military assistance to
Israel, Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and
Means Committee, decried
the “tactics used by those on the far left to advocate for cutting off
aid to Israel,” indicating he had had his home “vandalized,” his
driveway set on fire, and that a staffer had been “physically
assaulted.” Smith revealed this intimidation campaign in a post
explaining why the avowed “supporter of Israel” would nevertheless be
voting in favor of the amendment. Nearly half of House Democrats—more
than 100 in all—joined him, in a marked historical shift. Rep. Massie,
the sole Republican to vote in favor of the amendment, is one of the few
GOP members to receive direct or indirect contributions from American
Priorities supporters, alongside anti-Israel former Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene.
Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general in Michigan—and first
Jewish American to hold that post—has raised similar concerns. She
recently indicated at
an event organized by the Anti-Defamation League that she will not
attend her party’s next convention, after a prior one resulted in its
selection of a pro-Hezbollah candidate over a pro-Israel Jewish
incumbent for Michigan University regent, and attendees heckled El-Sayed
primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens. “I don’t feel safe going,” she
said.
“I have profound fears about what is going to happen to this state,
and what is going to happen to this country if we don’t have a
significant change of course,” she added.
For their part, most of the American Priorities-supported and
adjacent candidates have denied that they are antisemites, claiming
instead that there is a distinction between Jews, the Jews’ ancestral
and biblical homeland where nearly half of the Jewish people live today,
and its Jewish leaders. “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism
and the Jewish people,” El-Sayed has said.
“I love Judaism and I love the Jewish people…And the single most
dangerous thing that they’ve tried to tell us is that somehow they can
extend the definition of anti-Semitism to include a foreign government
and its leaders.” Virtually every candidate has likewise run on some
variation of the argument that, as El-Sayed put it in a recent interview,
“we send our money abroad to Israel to drop bombs on other people’s
kids. That money should be spent here at home.” The Michigander has also
called for cutting aid specifically to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—all countries that have designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
The Mamdani Effect
These candidates are following in the footsteps of, and in some cases
with the blessing of, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—whose rise captured
the attention and support of several of American Priorities’ donors
prior to its launch, including its two biggest backers, Mohamed Waqas
Javed and Omer Hasan. Both have contributed over $1 million to the super
PAC to date. While little is publicly known about them, they and a
third donor, Tariq Afaq Ahmed, who has contributed $500,000, were pre-
and post-IPO employees at AppLovin, today one of the world’s most
valuable ad tech companies, from which they likely made a fortune.
AppLovin has come under scrutiny for,
among other things, its funding from Chinese Communist Party-linked
individuals and entities. Javed and Hasan burst onto the scene as power
players when they each contributed $250,000, the largest such donations,
to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, an independent expenditure vehicle
supporting Mamdani’s election. Ahmed would contribute $25,000 to the
mayor’s campaign.
In the final hours of the Democrat primary, brothers Haroon and Idris
Mokhtarzadeh would donate $189,000 to Mamdani. Haroon has created
Islamic-centric businesses and participated in explicitly Muslim business forums, and sits on the board of the likes of Israel–hostile Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, and Drop Site News, co-founded by jihad-sympathetic journalist
Jeremy Scahill. His brother Idris has taken a lower profile, albeit
likewise seeking to promote Muslim businesses, via his involvement in Collective Continuum, a group that seeks to “empower 1,000 Muslim-led ventures by 2030.”
American Priorities’ treasurer, Hanna, previously served alongside
Mamdani in the 2017 campaign of Palestinian-American Rev. Khader
El-Yateem. Mamdani said that El-Yateem “transformed” his life, in part by connecting him with
“a political movement that understood Palestine as being a central part
of the struggle, which is something that I had often struggled with…all
of these politicians I had admired…found every way to not address
Palestinians when it came to their seemingly universal struggles.”
The Mamdani campaign, which emerged from the city’s Muslim Democrat establishment and
made Israel and the Palestinian Arabs a major focus, appears to have
catalyzed Muslim donors nationally, while demonstrating a proof of
concept for how targeted contributions could dramatically increase their
political clout going forward.
“After Mamdani’s upset victory over the presumed favorite, [former
Gov. Andrew] Cuomo, some of those who supported Mamdani told ABC News
they felt their contributions toward his victory could forecast a rise
in a larger network of Muslim Americans fundraising in national
politics, which they say might influence who will run, and who might
win,” the outlet reported at the time.
Ahmed, the former AppLovin employee turned angel investor, called the groundswell of national Muslim support behind Mamdani perhaps “the infancy of something to come.”
Palestinian Cause Binds American Muslims and the Left
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is seen as a unifying issue among a Democrat–aligned but ideologically heterodox Muslim American community estimated at somewhere between 3.5 (by Pew) and 8 million (by CAIR)—60 percent of whom are immigrants. Writing in City Journal,
Zainab Al-Suwaij, co-founder of the American Muslim League, says that
for her co-religionists, “the Israel-Palestine conflict has become a
defining aspect of their identity, though it directly affects only a
tiny portion of the community. No one assumed that all
Catholics supported the IRA. By contrast, the Palestinian cause attracts
millions of Muslim Americans who have nothing to do with the conflict
but who have been told by clerics, community leaders, and professors
to think of it as a religious duty.” The war in Gaza ranked as the
second most important issue for American Muslims after the economy, at
35 percent, according to a 2025 Institute for Social Policy &
Understanding poll. Likewise, a survey of Muslim-American voters in the 2024 election produced by CAIR found that
of all Muslim-related foreign policy issues during that cycle, the most
important one to respondents was “Israeli Genocide.”
Suwaij made her assertion in response to polling of Muslim Americans
commissioned by her organization. That survey found that among
respondents, some 66 percent support the Muslim Brotherhood, 35 percent
support Hamas, and 17 percent harbor unfavorable views towards Jews. The
Hamas figures dovetail with a Pew poll indicating 44 percent support
among American Muslims—in line with polling of Palestinian Arabs themselves.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, leader of the Atlantic Council’s Realign for Palestine project, says,
“Based on countless interactions, trends, and observations since
October 7, this number is almost certainly an undercount.” Like Suwaij,
he has written that “Many parents import rigid political narratives from
their countries of origin and pass them to their children, leaving
first‑ and second‑generation Muslim Americans trapped between inherited
dogma and their own attempts to think more broadly. The near-absence of
healthy institutional infrastructure then reinforces that foundation.
National organizations like CAIR, AMP [American Muslims for Palestine],
SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], and MSA have filled the vacuum
with grievance‑based politics, enforced conformity, and a culture where
dissent is punished as betrayal.” Sen. Cruz and his witnesses also
assessed that, like CAIR and MSA, AMP and SJP are Muslim
Brotherhood-linked. Shideler, during the Cruz-led hearing, likewise
identified Emgage PAC, the self-described largest Muslim American PAC,
as linked to the Brotherhood’s U.S. network, noting it “was created by a
former CAIR member who at one time was on a terror watch list and was
also a consultant to convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian.” American
Priorities donor Khan, among his other Islamic philanthropic pursuits, sits on the board of Emgage Action, that organization’s lobbying and advocacy arm.
The Pew poll
also showed that Muslims have a more favorable view of Palestinian
Arabs than any other religious cohort at 78 percent and a less favorable
view of Israelis than any other religious cohort at 26 percent support.
Following the October 7 attack, nearly 58 percent of American Muslims
surveyed found that Hamas was at least somewhat justified in carrying
out the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust “as part of their
struggle for a Palestinian state.”
Each year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) surveys populations
around the world using questions to assess animus towards Jews via
acceptance of derogatory stereotypes. Globally, in its 2025 survey, the
ADL found that 46 percent of adults harbored antisemitic attitudes. In
the predominantly Muslim Middle East and North Africa—comprised of
nations rendered virtually judenrein during the 20th century
after hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled or fled under
antisemitic threat—that figure rises to percent. There is little polling
on American Muslim views of Jews, but ADL figures from 2017 show
that 34 percent of Muslim Americans held antisemitic views—more than
two times the rate of non-Muslims. More recently, a Heritage Foundation poll
from September 2024 found that American Muslims believe Jewish people
have “too much power” by a rate of 57 percent to the general public’s 17
percent.
Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam, the son of Muslim
immigrants, has identified what he sees as two problematic “ideological
tendencies” among American Muslims that are of increasing relevance as
Islam is set to surpass Judaism as America’s second largest religion
within the next generation and as Muslims’ political power grows. The
first is “Islamism” and its violent manifestation in jihad. The second
that he hypothesizes
persists among upwardly mobile, educated, and often relatively secular
Muslims is their rejection of “the quiet gratitude that one associates
with immigrants and their children of earlier eras.” This, he says, is
not so much due to the dictates of their faith as they understand it but
due to “‘anti-West westernization’ or ‘adversarial assimilation’: a
process by which incorporation into American institutions produces not
attachment to patriotic narratives of American freedom, individualism,
and benevolence but hostility toward them.” He says that this cohort is
in thrall to “Third Worldism,”
which Salam defines as “a fusion of anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and
anti-capitalism that places the sacralized victimhood of Palestinian
Arabs at the center of a larger struggle against American imperialism.”
Of the two tendencies, “in important respects,” he argued recently in the Sapir Journal, Third Worldism “presents the more consequential long-term ideological challenge.”
“Where jihadism targets American civilians as part of a larger
struggle to overthrow ‘apostate’ regimes in the Muslim world, Third
Worldism endeavors to transform the nation’s ideological-intellectual
milieu, shaping how Americans – well beyond the Muslim
minority – understand their country and its place in the world.”
This “Third Worldism,” as I detailed in a 2020 book on the growing
nexus between Islamic supremacism and the left in the U.S., titled “American Ingrate,”
can be traced in part to the Soviet Union’s championing of the
Palestinian Arab cause, and the terror fomented by PLO leader Yasser
Arafat, during the Cold War—which became a cause célèbres of the global
left.
From the Uncommitted Movement to the 2028 Presidency
The Muslim community’s influence on U.S. politics this electoral
cycle comes on the heels of the so-called Uncommitted National Movement
during the 2024 presidential election.
Led by Lebanese-American political strategist Abbas Alawieh and
Palestinian-American activist Layla Elabed, the protest group organized
some 700,000 voters to oppose then-President Biden and Vice President
Harris in the primary over policies perceived to be too pro-Israel with
respect to the war in Gaza. That movement started with 10,000 mostly
Arab and Muslim Michigan voters, a swing state consisting of nearly
250,000 Muslims, and grew across the country. El-Sayed himself was among
them, supporting the
cause. Alawieh ran for state senate in Michigan as a Democrat this
cycle and won the nomination. Harris, who is expected to once again seek
the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, just endorsed El-Sayed.
President Trump courted such disaffected voters with his own anti-war platform, cutting into Democrats’
generally dominant margins among Arab and Muslim communities in
Michigan and helping him win the state in the 2024 election.
A small but loud cohort on the right has sought to put an America
First spin on anti-Israel and what some see as antisemitic activism, in
advocating against the U.S.-Israel alliance, railing against the
so-called “Israel lobby,” and insinuating that Israel and pro-Israel
Jews are manipulating U.S. policy to Israel’s benefit. American
Priorities-supported Democratic nominee for the U.S. House from Colorado
Melat Kiros, who says “there
is no greater concern for me than ending the occupation, apartheid, and
genocide in Palestine and guaranteeing Palestinians right to
self-determination, statehood, the right to return, and reparations for
Israel’s crimes,” has bemoaned that
when the Democratic Party “refuses to lead morally on this issue, they
are “leav[ing] a vacuum for those on the far right” and “letting
antisemites on the right co-opt the movement for Palestinian liberation
while giving fodder to AIPAC talking points.” But while prominent on the
podcast scene and on social media, there are few successful candidates reflecting such views.
By contrast, as Waleed Shahid, former spokesman for the Justice
Democrats and Bernie Sanders, now working for Mayor Mamdani, recently tweeted, “The
politicians who were supportive of Uncommitted’s primary campaign
(Mamdani, [New York congressional nominee Claire] Valdez, Darializa,
Lander, Abdul, [Wisconsin Gubernatorial Candidate Francesca] Hong) are
ascendant.” Among those candidates running since American Priorities’
establishment, it has supported all of the names referenced by Shahid
save for Hong.
In the run-up to the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, and
specifically touting that race, CAIR launched a “Muslims.Vote” platform
as a “one-stop hub for civic engagement.” It noted that
“With more than 8 million Muslims in America and over 3 million
registered voters, our community already has the power to shape
elections, especially in key swing states. But millions more eligible
Muslim voters must register, show up, and make their voices count.”
Hamawy and Chevalier are slated to serve as the keynote speakers at its forthcoming annual gala.
Meanwhile, American Priorities has made its ambitions clear. In a press release following El-Sayed’s victory, it wrote:
“After a string of eight House victories this cycle, the Michigan
primary marks [the] first direct statewide challenge to the Democratic
establishment with national implications. El-Sayed’s win tonight will
force a reckoning within the party over its backward-looking foreign
policy and relationship to Israel—just as the contours of the 2028
presidential cycle come into focus.”
* * *
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Ben Weingarten
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/15/how-hamas-attack-on-israel-is-transforming-american-politics/
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