The Michigan Senate race just got a whole lot hotter.
Reports about Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s birth mother and a Treasury-designated terror group are now all over conservative media.
And Rudy Giuliani went on Newsmax and said something about Islam that is going to have a lot of people talking.
What Giuliani Actually Said on Saturday Report
Giuliani appeared on Newsmax with host Rita Crosby, who asked him whether recent reports about El-Sayed’s birth mother raised any “red flags.”
The reports in question, first published by The Midwesterner and separately verified by other outlets, allege that El-Sayed’s birth mother, Fatten Fathy Elkomy, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency — a group the US Treasury Department officially designated a “global terrorist” organization in 2004. According to the Treasury, the group’s international offices allegedly provided “direct financial support” to Osama bin Laden and, by extension, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The agency was also accused of serving as a conduit to Hamas.
Elkomy previously denied any terrorist connections, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2004, “I’ve been working there serving orphans and children with at least one deceased parent, and it breaks my heart they’re not going to get any help.” Neither she nor any family member was charged with terrorism-related crimes. The IARA-USA did plead guilty to conspiring to violate sanctions and agreed to dissolve in 2016.
When Crosby asked if the reports were troubling, Giuliani did not hesitate. “Of course it’s troubling!” he said. He added that while he would not say El-Sayed is the same as his mother, “it’s going to make us want to take a look at him.”
He went further, saying it does not sound like El-Sayed’s mother is one of the “good people” who follow Islam, and that El-Sayed “sympathizes with mom’s aims.”
Then came the remarks that lit up the internet.
Giuliani argued Islam is an “ideology that is 1,600 years of mass murder and infanticide.” He rejected the familiar political phrase outright. “When people like to say Islam is a religion of peace, please. I don’t want to attack all of Islam, but don’t tell me it’s a religion of peace,” Giuliani said. “I know history too well for you to say that to me. It has elements of mass homicide in it, and it has to be avoided by the good people. Most of them do.”
He closed by warning that the United States faces a threat from within. “We are at risk of having our Western civilization destroyed by them. And we’re not going to let it happen,” he said.
The Race El-Sayed Just Won — and What It Means
El-Sayed, the Democrat Michigan Senate candidate, narrowly defeated US Representative Haley Stevens in the Democrat primary by roughly one percent, overcoming an estimated $65 million in outside spending, much of it from groups aligned with AIPAC that backed Stevens. He will now face Republican Mike Rogers in the November general election, a race expected to be among the most competitive Senate contests in the country.
President Trump weighed in after the primary results came in, calling El-Sayed “a Communist loser” and describing his win as “great news” for the Republican Party. Trump has endorsed Mike Rogers in the general election.
The contrast between how the two parties handle their primary winners is worth noting. After El-Sayed defeated Representative Haley Stevens, Democrat leaders including Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Representative Stevens herself quickly moved to rally behind him. Compare that to how the Republican establishment has treated other MAGA-aligned primary winners — and the pattern becomes clear. Democrats close ranks. The establishment wing of the GOP sometimes prefers a Democrat to a candidate they cannot control.
El-Sayed, for his part, came out swinging at Rogers the night of the primary. “Mike, we are coming for you,” he told supporters.
The Larger Question Nobody in the Media Wants to Ask
Giuliani’s comments will be dismissed as inflammatory by media figures who never apply the same scrutiny to the candidates they prefer. But the underlying question he raised — whether the importation of political structures and loyalties fundamentally incompatible with constitutional self-governance poses a threat to American civic life — is one that deserves a serious answer rather than a reflexive accusation of bigotry.
Opposition to the Islamification of American civic institutions is not the same as hostility to individual Muslims. It is a defense of the constitutional order that makes genuine religious pluralism possible in the first place. Sharia law, for example, mandates the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy against Islam — doctrines that are flatly incompatible with the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and free exercise of religion. Those are not fringe concerns. They are foundational constitutional conflicts that no amount of careful language can paper over.
Giuliani, who was serving as mayor of New York City when Osama bin Laden’s network brought down the Twin Towers, has spent the better part of three decades arguing that radical Islam represents a civilizational threat, not merely a law enforcement problem. His language on Saturday Report was blunt, but the concern underneath it is shared by millions of Americans who watched September 11 happen and concluded that the phrase “religion of peace” functions more as political management than as honest description.
The question of whether El-Sayed himself bears any responsibility for his birth mother’s alleged associations is a separate matter entirely. He was raised by his father and stepmother, and the candidate has not been charged with anything. But voters in Michigan are entitled to ask what they are electing, what associations surround a candidate, and whether those associations reflect values compatible with American constitutional governance. Those are not illegitimate questions. They are the basic due diligence of a self-governing people.
And the media’s instinct to shut down that line of inquiry by labeling it Islamophobic is exactly the kind of censorship that has made Americans distrust the press in the first place.
The Michigan Senate race is shaping up to be one of the defining contests of the 2026 cycle. Republican Mike Rogers faces a candidate whose primary win was powered by the progressive left and who will carry into the general election a set of associations that his opponents are already amplifying. Whether those associations matter to Michigan voters is a question only November can answer.
But the conversation Giuliani started on Newsmax is not going away. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of conversation that a free people in a constitutional republic are supposed to have — loudly, openly, and without being told which questions are permitted.
Sources: Mediaite, “Rudy Giuliani Scoffs at Islam Being ‘Religion of Peace’ In Rant Against Abdul El-Sayed: ‘It Has Elements of Mass Homicide'”; The Midwesterner, reporting on Fatten Fathy Elkomy and the Islamic American Relief Agency; US Department of the Treasury, October 13, 2004 designation of IARA; Fox News, Michigan Senate primary results; NBC News, Michigan Senate primary results.