Abdul El-Sayed, the current Democratic frontrunner for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat, once helped push a viral hate crime hoax that blamed America for a murder actually committed by the victim's own husband. A fresh investigation from Just The News traces the whole sordid saga — and El-Sayed's fingerprints are all over it.
But sure, let's trust this guy to represent Michigan in the Senate. What could go wrong?
Here's what happened. In March 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi-American mother of five, was attacked in her home near San Diego on March 21 and died from her injuries on March 24. The narrative exploded instantly: a hate crime against a Muslim woman. Notes telling her to "go back to your country" had supposedly been left at the home. The media-activist complex kicked into overdrive.
El-Sayed, then a social epidemiologist at Columbia University, published an opinion piece on Mic on March 28, 2012, linking Alawadi's death to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida the month before. He wrote that "being black, male, and wearing a hoodie — looking 'suspicious'" was enough to get you killed in America. He declared that "Trayvon and Shaima were both murdered in cold blood" and called the killings "only the tip of an iceberg" of American racism and xenophobia.
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The "Hoodies and Hijabs" movement was born. Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour — yes, that Linda Sarsour — published a CNN piece declaring "my hijab is my hoodie." Protests spread. The narrative was locked in: America is a hateful country that murders Muslims and Black teenagers for sport.
One problem. It was all garbage.
In April 2014, Kassim Alhimidi — Shaima Alawadi's own husband — was convicted of first-degree murder. It wasn't a hate crime. It was a domestic murder. Alhimidi killed his wife because she was planning to divorce him. Their own daughter, Fatima Alhimidi, wrote a letter to the court asking, "How could you kill someone who was always there for you?"
Not a word from El-Sayed. No correction. No apology. No "I was wrong about America being a seething cauldron of Islamophobic violence."
And now this man — the same man who amplified a hoax to trash the country he wants to serve in the Senate — is the slight frontrunner in the Michigan Democratic primary. He lost the 2018 gubernatorial race to Gretchen Whitmer but kept his activist credentials polished, thanks in large part to his ties to Sarsour and the endorsement network that included Bernie Sanders.
The demand for hate crimes in America always exceeds the supply. We've seen it with Jussie Smollett. We've seen it with the Covington kids. We've seen it a hundred times. And every single time, the same cast of characters rushes to the microphone, declares America guilty, and then vanishes when the truth comes out.
El-Sayed didn't just fall for a hoax. He weaponized it. He used a murdered woman's body as a political prop to lecture Americans about their own bigotry — and when the real killer turned out to be the woman's husband, El-Sayed just moved on to the next cause.
Michigan voters deserve to know exactly who's asking for their vote. This is a man who saw a tragedy, assumed America was guilty, and never looked back when the facts said otherwise. That's not leadership. That's activism with a Senate campaign stapled to it.