For a lot of liberal Jews in the state, those who would normally vote Democrat, Rogers’ opponent Abdul El-Sayed is too much to overcome.
“They cannot get there with El-Sayed. These liberal Jews that I spoke to on camera are mobilizing. They're literally mobilizing for Mike Rogers in Michigan,” David Brody of CBN News said on American Family Radio Thursday.
These Jews, it appears, are prioritizing the future of the Jewish state over other political differences they might have with the GOP.
El-Sayed, just days ago when asked about Israel in an ABC interview, doubled down on his opposition stating clearly that the U.S.-Israel relationship is bad for the U.S.
El-Sayed asked ABC’s Linsey Davis if she has children.
“I do,” she replied.
“And if your kid has a friend who keeps bumming off their money, and then talks about them behind their back, and then gets them into fights with other friends, what would you tell your kid to do with that friend? You’d probably tell them, maybe it’s not actually a friend. I think it’s time for us to realize that Israel is not actually our friend,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed has declined to give a clear answer about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
At a May event with Jewish supporters, El-Sayed said he struggled with the question of whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. He questioned what the term “Jewish state” means and how it is consistent with liberal values. He also argued that the question overlooks Palestinians displaced by Israeli actions since 1948.
In a July CNN interview, he again declined to answer the question with a simple yes or no. Instead, he said Israel exists, challenged why the question was not also asked about Palestine, and emphasized equal rights, peace and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians.
His anti-Israel positions have been consistent.
After a man rammed a truck into Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit, in March, El-Sayed condemned the attack but qualified his remarks. “Hurt people hurt people,” he said while discussing the attacker's reported family losses in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.
In August he apologized to Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus saying, “I made a mistake.”
Approximately 140 children and staff inside the synagogue in West Bloomfield were moved to safety. The attacker killed himself.
Getting out the vote
As in any election, turnout will be a key.
Michigan has large communities of both Jewish and Muslim residents, but the numbers of Muslims are far greater. Recent estimates show 120,000 Jewish residents compared to 274,000 Muslim residents.
The largest concentration for both is in the metropolitan Detroit area.
“Jews and Muslims in Michigan will decide this election. Democrat Jews mobilizing for Mike Rogers could very well make the difference,” Brody told show host Jenna Ellis.
Rogers, an Army veteran and former FBI special agent, served 14 years in the U.S. House where he was chairman of the intelligence committee.
He lost a 2024 Senate bid to Democrat Elissa Slotkin, also a former U.S. House member, by approximately 19,000 votes.
Burqa after burqa
Brody said working on election coverage in a recent trip to Dearborn, Michigan confirmed the Muslim influence he’d heard about the city.
“It’s definitely homegrown, and it’s a lot about where our culture has gone, that socialism we call it with the Red-Green Alliance, the communist-socialist red and the green of Islam, it’s the entire city. Storefront after storefront it’s more Arabic and less English,” he said.
It’s not only Dearborn.
Ten miles away in Hamtramck, Michigan, 70% of the population is Muslim, and “there are full burqas, burqa after burqa. It’s like, ‘This is America?’ It’s wild,” Brody said.
