Super PAC Linked to Hamas-Friendly CAIR Takes Credit for Helping Elect Abdul El-Sayed and 'Building a Movement' in US Mosques

A super PAC brags about turning mosques into a political machine and helping put a guy over the top in a Michigan Senate primary, and the reaction from most of the press is basically a shrug. Imagine if a Christian nationalist group put out a statement bragging about "building a movement" in evangelical churches to install a specific candidate, and named the churches, and named the campaign it bankrolled. That would be A1 news for a week. Here it's a paragraph buried in a wire story.

CAIR has spent years managing its image as a mainstream civil rights outfit, but its own lobbying arm just told on itself. This isn't some anonymous group with a similar name doing outreach. It's the political money arm of an organization with a long paper trail tying it to Hamas fundraising fronts, openly celebrating that it moved votes for El-Sayed and plans to keep doing it. That's not a smear from a critic. That's their own press release.

The bigger issue is what this tells voters about where the money and organizing muscle behind a rising progressive candidate actually came from. El-Sayed doesn't have to answer for every group that likes him, but when the group taking a victory lap is one that keeps drawing scrutiny over its ties to a terrorist organization's support network, that's a fair question to put to him directly, not something reporters should let slide because the answer might be awkward.

We keep hearing that foreign influence in American elections is a five-alarm emergency, right up until the group involved fits an inconvenient narrative. Then suddenly it's just "community organizing." Pick a standard and apply it evenly.