El-Sayed apologizes for ‘hurt people hurt people’ comment after Michigan synagogue attack

Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed apologized Aug. 29 to anyone hurt by comments he made following a March attack on a Detroit-area synagogue, including his remark that “hurt people hurt people.”

Speaking to reporters at the Michigan Democratic Party convention in Lansing, El-Sayed said, “My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify. But to anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”

“We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright,” El-Sayed added. “What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context. And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”

In March, Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon, rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, about 27 miles northwest of Detroit, before exchanging gunfire with security personnel, who shot and killed him. The FBI said at the time it was investigating the incident as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” 

Several members of Ghazali’s family, including his young niece and nephew, had reportedly been killed days earlier by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon amid the Iran war. Israel’s military said on X that it had killed one of Ghazali’s brothers, whom it identified as a “Hezbollah terrorist.”

El-Sayed issued a video shortly after the attack in which he condemned both the violence and antisemitism. He said there “is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship.”

“Hurt people hurt people. Violence is a cycle,” El-Sayed added. “Ayman Ghazali lost two family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people, and then in an evil act of displaced rage, he tried to take it out on innocent children who had nothing to do with the loss of the innocent children he lost, except that they share a faith.”’

He added that “violence always begets violence. Only peace can extinguish that because hurt people hurt people.”

Critics, including some Jewish Democrats and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, accused El-Sayed of appearing to excuse the attack by linking it to Israeli military action. 

Vice President JD Vance also criticized El-Sayed’s remarks and apology during an Aug. 31 Michigan campaign rally for his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, if he’s willing to empathize not with the children who almost had their lives destroyed at the most innocent and what should be the safest place in the world — their school — what is he going to do when he goes to Washington, D.C., when the cameras aren’t on?” Vance asked.

Vance then pointed to El-Sayed’s association with Hasan Piker, a progressive streamer with millions of followers who said in 2019 that America “deserved 9/11.”

“There’s something about El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,” Vance said. “It’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a coalition fighting for every single person, whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white, black, or brown, but as fighting for one group at the expense of others. And that is how, ladies and gentlemen, you destroy the United States of America.”

He urged voters to “reject the people who try to divide us” and those who “would defend the killer rather than the school children” at the November midterm elections. 

Vance concluded, “Reject Abdul El-Sayed and send Mike Rogers to the U.S. Senate.”