Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama declared that the party had “just voted to send a TERRORIST” to Washington.
El-Sayed – or “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed”, as Tuberville called him on X – was a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America”, he claimed.
It was the opening shot in what researchers who track anti-Muslim sentiment describe as the most concentrated wave of Islamophobic rhetoric in US electoral politics since the 9/11 attacks, arriving at the exact moment Muslim candidates are winning office in unprecedented numbers.
The reaction to El-Sayed’s victory showed how quickly the rhetoric escalates. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found Islamophobic posts naming El-Sayed rose by nearly 1,900% in the week after his win, from an average of 155 to more than 3,000 a day.
The attacks are also coming from the very top of the Republican party. Donald Trump infamously called in 2015 for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the US when he was running for president, and attempted to enact one via executive order in early 2017. After years of legal wrangling, the supreme court did allow Trump to implement a limited version of his travel restrictions for majority Muslim countries.
This year, Trump called El-Sayed a “jihadist” from the Oval Office, and separately claimed – without naming anyone – that “jihadists” were being elected to office “all over the place”. Vice-president JD Vance, meanwhile, called El-Sayed “very, very evil” at a Michigan rally and, separately, invoked his own late grandfather to attack comments El-Sayed made in 2022 defending a legal challenge to an Oklahoma anti-Sharia ballot measure.