In a July 19 interview
with a leading Democratic Senate candidate in the swing state of Michigan, CNN host Jake Tapper homed in on the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran — but he didn’t ask the candidate’s thoughts on the hundreds of Iranian and Lebanese civilians killed, nor the possibility of U.S. war crimes, and not even 18 dead U.S. soldiers. Instead, Tapper
posed
: “Why were you worried about offending people who support the ayatollah?”
Tapper was pressing Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator, on a right-wing outlet’s
story
exposing that he had expressed a desire to tread carefully because of potential differences of opinion among his would-be constituents. On a leaked campaign call, El-Sayed had said after Ali Khamenei’s February assassination that “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” referring to the southeast Michigan city that is home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the country. Given the ayatollah’s brutality, Tapper’s question implied, how dare El-Sayed consider that possibility?
As Michigan’s August 4 Senate primary between El-Sayed and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens draws near, he has faced a barrage of Islamophobic attacks ranging from thinly veiled policy critiques to outright racist caricatures. The two Senate hopefuls seem to embody the
forked path facing the Democratic Party
ahead of the 2028 presidential cycle, with 43-year-old Stevens representing the old guard thanks to her backing by the party establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, and 41-year-old El-Sayed representing an insurgent movement skeptical of long-standing U.S. foreign policy interests and corporate capture of American politics. With the latter vision comes a form of fearmongering that’s been endemic to American politics for decades.
Nancy Khalil, an anthropologist who researches Muslims in America at the University of Michigan, called Tapper’s interview “sloppy and offensive” and pointed o
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