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Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed appeared before the Michigan Democratic Party's Jewish caucus on Saturday with a direct apology for remarks he made following a March attack on Temple Israel, a suburban Detroit synagogue, while declining again to repudiate left-wing streamer Hasan Piker.
The caucus appearance was framed as an early test of whether El-Sayed can broaden his coalition beyond the progressive base that won him the primary.
The March remarks arose after a Lebanese-born man attempted an attack on the synagogue. The attacker had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon the week before.
El-Sayed initially condemned the attack outright, then released a four-minute video calling it "an evil act of displaced rage" while also arguing that "hurt people hurt people." He asked people to imagine the perpetrator's circumstances had his family survived and said "violence is a cycle." At the time, he told his campaign the video was a "risk" but that leadership meant "being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say." On Saturday, El-Sayed told the caucus: "I made a mistake.
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