News/Commentary

America did it? Abdul El-Sayed’s past remarks blaming U.S. for terrorism come back to haunt him

August 24, 2026 | | Print Article

A video of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed talking about terrorism is resurfacing, and it’s creating a lot of buzz.

While he did say that terrorism is “wrong” and “never okay,” he also implied that terrorists may act out because they don’t feel “seen” and that the United States may have a hand in creating the conditions that allow terrorism to occur.

Watch:

“The approach that we’ve often taken with terrorism has been to figure out how to leverage the might of the US military to go in and root out certain terrorist organizations. And where that’s necessary, that’s necessary. But I also think we need to be curious about why those things happen in the first place, like what drives somebody to want to commit such a heinous act,” he says to a group of listeners. “I have to be a student of people’s pain; that’s what I did in medicine, that’s what I try to do in politics. What happens when people are in pain? And I think part of what we have to understand is that sometimes when we move, we create so much collateral damage because too often we have been on the wrong side of our own policies.”

“That’s not ever to say that terrorism is okay, because it’s wrong, it’s never okay and we have to address it when it happens,” he clarified. “But I think we have to make sure that when we say that there’s a rules-based international order, that we are a principal follower of the rules, not just a principal enforcer of the rules. And I think too often, you know, one of the things that I do bring to this is, my whole life I’ve been forced to explain who I am to people. My whole life, right? Oftentimes, even in my own family, because I have experiences that most people in my family don’t have. I want you to think about that: Most of the time, if you grow up in a family, your experiences are very similar to your family’s experiences. In my case, I was in a position where I would have to explain what’s happening in America to people who are flesh and blood of mine in Egypt. Or I’d have to explain what’s happening in Egypt to people who are flesh and blood of mine in America.”

“I’m not them, but I have a piece of their understanding because of what I have accessed in the world. And one of the things I’ve often come to realize is that, when people feel some kind of way about, you know what terrorism is, it’s political violence, doing heinous things in pursuit of a political end. There’s a level of pain and frustration and a level of lack of agency that they have to feel to do something so insane and absurd. And so, I’ve often tried to ask what moves somebody to that? And how is it that we’re behaving that may get somebody to think that we don’t see them, and that’s creating pain,” El-Sayed concluded.

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Sierra Marlee
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