Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed responded to allegations of antisemitism lobbed by his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, Sunday morning on MS NOW. “Let me just be very, very clear. You know who benefits from guaranteed health care in this country? Jewish Americans,” he said. “Judaism and the Jewish people are a light unto the world-a beautiful faith, a beautiful people. The contributions they’ve made to this country alone are staggering,” he said. “I’m looking forward to standing with the Jewish community against antisemitism. After all, antisemitism and Islamophobia are one and the same, and we need to take them on.” On the question of aid to Israel, he said: “I’ll say the same thing about the money we send to Egypt, which is where my family comes from. So, if you want to go ahead and call me anti-Egyptian, go ahead and do that.” “But the reality is that, on principle, I don’t think we should be sending unconditional foreign military aid to any government,” El-Sayed said. The MS NOW host asked: “On principle, are you against ethno-religious states writ large? “On principle? I absolutely am,” he said. <\/p>\n
ABDUL EL-SAYED: We can have a movement where we finally guarantee every single person health care, stop sending our money to drop bombs somewhere else, start building our schools and our roads and investing in one another. MSNBC HOST: Abdul, thank you so much for coming on this morning. Your race has exposed, more so than any other race in the country right now, the major intraparty debate in the Democratic Party over the issue of Israel. Your campaign has been largely and loudly populist, but also anti-Zionist, and you’ve sort of married those two things, equating funding for Israel with underfunding health care, for example. Are you worried that framing-juxtaposing funding for the Jewish state against the needs of, in your own words, our own people-echoes an old antisemitic trope? ABDUL EL-SAYED: Let me just be very, very clear. You know who benefits from guaranteed health care in this country? Jewish Americans. The idea that somehow we are going to use the specter of antisemitism to defend what a foreign government is doing actually does a deep disservice to the well-being of Jewish Americans in this country. Judaism and the Jewish people are a light unto the world-a beautiful faith, a beautiful people. The contributions they’ve made to this country alone are staggering. I’m looking forward to standing with the Jewish community against antisemitism. After all, antisemitism and Islamophobia are one and the same, and we need to take them on. But we cannot sit idly by and ask why our $ 3.3 billion a year, at baseline, is used to fund apartheid; at baseline, genocide over the last several years; a war we have no business fighting; and the attempt to annex the southern part of a neighboring country-and then wonder why our kids’ schools look like they did 50 years ago. MSNBC HOST: Respectfully, you haven’t made that same trade-off argument with regard to other items in the U.S. $ 800 billion- ABDUL EL-SAYED: I don’t- MSNBC HOST: -cover it. ABDUL EL-SAYED: No, no, no. I have. You just don’t cover it. I’ll say the same thing about the money we send to Egypt, which is where my family comes from. So, if you want to go ahead and call me anti-Egyptian, go ahead and do that. But the reality is that, on principle, I don’t think we should be sending unconditional foreign military aid to any government- MSNBC HOST: On principle, are you against ethno-religious states writ large? ABDUL EL-SAYED: On principle? I absolutely am.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here is the full interview on MS NOW’s “The Weekend.”