Source: Jen Kuznicki, Conservative Writer, by | May 4, 2018
It is my intention to provide an extremely thorough examination of each major candidate for Governor in this, my home state of Michigan. Since the news cycle has rested on the controversy between conservative candidate Senator Patrick Colbeck, and Democrat candidate Dr. Abdulrahman Mohamed El Sayed, I began to look for the truth between the claims of the two individuals. The question I wished to answer was, “Who is Abdul El Sayed, and is there evidence that El Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?” I believed researching the man would either affirm or deny any link.
As I went through a three-day research process, I found out a lot about El Sayed, and I changed my mind on the second question several times.
This piece is a political piece, I am clearly a conservative, and I make no attempt to be understood otherwise. But the central charge by the El Sayed camp and the media is that Colbeck is a racist, a xenophobe, and an Islamophobe, and no reporter has addressed the charges, they have instead convicted Colbeck in the court of public opinion. That’s not fair, and it doesn’t serve the public at all when they write puff pieces about El Sayed instead of getting to know a newcomer to the political arena, seeking the highest political office in the state.
So, we begin.
Background
Abdulrahman Mohamed El Sayed was born in 1984 in Detroit to parents who immigrated from Egypt to America in the 1970’s. According to interviews, El Sayed stated that his father left Egypt because he felt he was unable to practice his religion properly in Egypt. The couple immigrated in what is known as the third wave of immigration to Detroit from the Middle East, and the father, an engineer, eventually worked for GM, and is a part-time Imam. The mother and father divorced sometime after Abdul’s birth and both married other people. According to Wikipedia, the mother is a nurse practitioner living in Missouri, and Abdul’s step-mother, Jacqueline El Sayed is an engineer as well. Abdul graduated in 2003 from Bloomfield Hills Andover High School where he was captain of three sports, football, wrestling and lacrosse. According to interviews, Abdul has said he spent his summers in Egypt. El Sayed comes from an extremely privileged background, in fact the 2000 census shows that the family median income in Bloomfield Hills was over $200,000.
According to interviews, Abdul knew from an early age that he wished to become a doctor. His college educationlasted from September of 2003 until May of 2014. He attended the University of Michigan and received a B.S. in political science and biology. He then attained a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University while simultaneously earning a medical degree from Columbia University. The funding for the latter was provided the Soros Fellowship for New Americans, which is run by the brother of the infamous George Soros, Paul, and is awarded to immigrant children for postgraduate study. He is a Rhodes Scholar. He joined the faculty at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health in 2014, was the director of Columbia’s Systems Science Program and Global Research Analytics for Population Health, and remained until August of 2015 when Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed him as Executive Director of Detroit’s Health Department, a position he kept for one and one half years until he left in February of 2017 when he announced a run for governor.
Abdul is a practicing Muslim, is now 33 years old, is married to Sarah, a doctor of psychiatry, and has a child.
Area of Medicine
Abdul has degrees in political science, biology, philosophy, and social epidemiology. My first question was, why does a man who always knew he wanted to become a doctor have a political degree, unless his intent was always to go into politics? Secondly, what is social epidemiology?
According to Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology where Abdul attended, social epidemiology, “seeks to understand the ways in which social, political, cultural, and economic circumstances influence our chances for a healthy life. We combine theory from the social sciences with rigorous epidemiological methods so that we can illuminate the connections between social factors and health and use what we find to improve health. Within this broad frame we have a special interest in the connections between social inequalities and health inequalities.”
First, we aim to produce knowledge about the influence of social circumstances on health with a special emphasis on social inequalities in health. Second, we aim to train and mentor a new generation of scholars and practitioners who have the capacity to conduct rigorous research on the role of social factors in health. Third, we aim to leverage what we learn to improve population health and reduce health inequalities locally, nationally, and across international borders. Fourth we seek to translate and disseminate our work to policy makers, thought leaders, media, and the public and reinforce the message that social determinants of health are primary drivers of population health.
Which means that it is a social justice field of research and abstract theory. Which means, he’s a hard core leftist.
In fact, the International Journal of Epidemiology scoffs at social epidemiology, on the basis that epidemiology cannot focus mainly on behavior. They have argued that the hard science of biology is foremost, in this piece, “Social epidemiology? No way.”
An epidemiologist confronted with a research problem from the field of sociology or psychology is merely a technician who knows how to handle statistics with only a layman’s ideas on the topics that are statistically described…
We therefore believe that epidemiologists, sociologists and psychologists should stick to their field of scientific inquiry. This does not imply that epidemiologists cannot use social or psychological determinants (income, stress) or outcomes (e.g. quality of life) in their studies. But even then, biomedical theory should link these items to the core parameters of a study (e.g. income as a determinant for nutritional status; stress as a determinant for hormonal imbalance; quality of life as a sequel of particular diseases). Similarly, sociologists and psychologists may enter medically defined variables (e.g. mortality, infertility) into their studies….
We firmly believe that shopping in neighbouring scientific fields, without thorough subject-matter knowledge, will lead to statistical results without relevant meaning. As a consequence, research is reduced to statistically correct procedures without proper inference. Stretching borders between epidemiology as a biomedical discipline and sociology only leads to trivial statements, useless for society.
Trivial statements useless for society.
This is important so that the potential voter can grasp that Abdul’s schooling, funded by a Soros group, quite probably was directed for a life in the pursuit of politically leftist social policy. In other words, if you think he has been groomed, it definitely looks like it, especially given the fact that one of his first degrees was in political science, and his last was in abstract social justice theory, in an area of science denied by its field of medicine.
But Abdul says that he lost interest in practicing medicine one-on-one, which was hard given that he is a people person, but he knew he’d be better suited to practicing medicine at a “30,000 foot level,” overseeing the systems and producing more equal outcomes for healthcare.
The study he repeatedly cites as his personal and professional motivation is a study by Diane Lauderdale, who conducted a study in California called, “Birth outcomes for Arabic-named women in California before and after September 11” of pregnant women with Arab-sounding names and the birth weight of their children between September 2000 to March 2001 and September 2001 to March 2002. According to Lauderdale, the birth weights among all other races were extremely similar, but the Arab-sounding name children was massively adverse due to the September 11th attacks in 2001. This study was published in PubMed, The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, a medical information database funded by the American people and cited all over the world.
So Abdul used that study as a basis to create his own. His study, “Birth outcomes among Arab Americans in Michigan before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001” focused on Arab Americans in the tight-knit communities in Michigan, and he found that, contrary to Lauderdale’s study, “ we observed no difference in adverse birth outcomes before and after the events of September 11, 2001, among Arab Americans in Michigan. Arab American ethnicity is associated with lower risk of adverse birth outcomes compared to other racial/ethnic groups.”
His findings provided the basis of his assumptions that Arab Americans need to stay in tight-knit groups for the maximum public health of their population.
But this conclusion isn’t scientific. One glaring problem is the fact that the study in California focused on names and the perception of Arab ancestry, and the study in Michigan used a name algorithm and focused on self-described Arab ancestry. Not only that, but if you recall the statements made by the International Journal of Epidemiology, a study such as this isn’t based in biology, for instance, could the Arab-sounding women’s name be something like Sarah which is quite a common name across the board? And since when do parents name their children strictly within ethnic standards? Ever met a white woman named Eva or Lana or Tanya or Tina or Jenna? And is it just Arabs who benefit from segregation as Abdul is essentially saying? I thought we were against segregation in this nation?
Could it be that the study on which Abdul based his philosophy about public health was so rife with unscientific data that his conclusions mean absolutely nothing?
His opinion on healthcare policy in America
El Sayed concludes that the free market is the wrong approach to healthcare since only a few can afford insurance, that people can’t trust their doctors, and that people are too stupid to make their own healthcare choices.
His writings often come off with thinly veiled snobbery as in this piece which basically says that you can’t do math and you are too stupid to understand what’s good for you. Its title is, “Failing the Test: Did Our Discomfort With Numbers Doom Health Reform?” Here’s an excerpt:
A central conundrum many on the left have struggled with, is that the demographic most likely to oppose healthcare reform seems to be the same demographic most likely to benefit from it. If numeracy is a key predictor of the ability to value health among a small sample of Americans, did poor American numeracy doom healthcare reform?…
After all, the reform package was built around two empiric arguments that would address crucial policy imperatives, the economic imperative to lower healthcare costs, and the moral imperative to improve health coverage. Reform would reel in healthcare costs as a proportion of GDP from the current 16% (estimated to be 37% by 2050 at current rates), and it would expand coverage to between 31 and 36 million Americans, decreasing the proportion of America’s uninsured by up to 78%. Clearly, both of these arguments are quantitatively complex, and therefore, implicitly dependent on the American public’s ability to understand and evaluate percentages, proportions, ratios, and returns. Both ultimately failed.
As American math and science skills continue to stagnate, the outlook for appropriate, yet empirically complicated social policy looks bleak. While healthcare reform may be the first on Obama’s ambitious list of policy targets that has suffered as a consequence of poor numeracy among the American populous, it won’t likely be the last. Climate change poses another scientifically and mathematically challenging series of trade-offs that are poorly understood and perceived skeptically by many Americans. Forthcoming climate change legislation may suffer the same troubled and tragically short life as its older brother….
Frankly, if a group of subjects with poor quantitative skills don’t have the ability to value better health over worse health in a simulation, we can’t expect an increasingly less numerate population to make sound decisions about our national health, our economy, or our shared Earth. In a democracy “for the people, and by the people”, it is crucial that “the people” can understand the theoretical underpinnings, complex trade-offs, and difficult decisions that frame our social policy.
See what I mean? Here are more examples of his writing:
- This piece is embarrassing, a 25 year old medical student admonishing a world-renowned surgeon who decided to retire because of the experiential knowledge of the outcome of Obamacare.
- Again El Sayed decries market-driven healthcare, when we have anything but.
- It is concerning that as an American physician-in-training, El Sayed had no idea whatsoever about the consequences of government taking control of healthcare, and he continues to push for an even more strangling and impossible Single Payer plan for Michigan, as well as Medicare for all.
- In an open letter, Abdul blamed LeBron James for obese kids because of his commercials for McDonald’s and Coca Cola.
- Obama didn’t produce the change he wanted, Abdul wanted more.
- He advocates against outlawing the super-gulp, opting instead for per-ounce soda tax across the board.
- As a matter of normal incidence of media presence in one’s life, how do you go about being followed around by news organizations, documenting your whole life? This piece by Michigan Daily follows El Sayed and his wife Sarah to New York where they are students in 2006. Things like this certainly lead to the perception that El Sayed has had political ambitions for a very long time and probably has had quite a few operatives behind him for much of the way.
El Sayed’s fixation
I spent hours watching videos of El Sayed’s interviews, public speaking engagements, and so on. His focus on his Arab name and his Arab ancestry is constant. Several times during one presentation, he says the words, “Hi my name is Abdulrahman El Sayed and I’m an Arab American,” to the same audience twenty to thirty minutes apart which seemed strange. Why reintroduce yourself so many times to a captive audience? He has authored numerous essays and blog posts and articles and medical articles. Here is an overview of all of his work. He has produced reams of material, to be sure. Among his medical work he has considered the affect of xenophobia on the political parties of the far right in Great Britain, and a slew of works related to his study of Arab Americans. It is clear from his work as a student to his writings for the Huffington Post and other publications that Abdul probably sees himself as a sole representative of and defender of Arab Americans.
Written when he was 26 years old, El Sayed claims in this piece that American Muslims and politicians must follow the example of the British government.
In this piece, he attacks an evolutionary psychologist and professor at the London School of Economics for being an Islamophobe, instead of Thomas Friedman who came up with the statistic he doesn’t like. I encourage you to read the piece and the two other pieces he mentions in order to understand how he attacks the professor instead of a fellow leftist. It was after reading this piece that I wondered – if Abdul wanted to prove that Muslims don’t have a Muslim first, American second attitude as pressed by the professor in his piece, why would he spend nearly his entire time in academia trying to find solutions for Arabs?
Here is an extremely angry El Sayed who feels that Muslims are picked on about terrorism, which seems ridiculous since it was published in 2010, and knowing what we know now, ISIS and all. It’s a two-way street. If a truth is pointed out, that most terrorism is caused by radical Islamists, then peaceable Muslims have to confront that. I can’t tell you why, but Abdul hasn’t done that yet.
The Muslim Brotherhood
This piece in the The Guardian shows a 26 year-old El Sayed, asking President Barack Obama to mean one of the phrases young Abdul believed in and which pushed Abdul to help get him elected – that democracy is a human right – and Abdul believed it applied to the uprising in Cairo, “The Arab Spring.” While the leadership of Mubarak was not democratic, the secular administration maintained peace with Israel. When Morsi was elected and backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, it was clear the people weren’t ready for democracy since the regime of Morsi was extremely fundamentalist in nature, and showed much of the Western world that Sharia Law is incompatible with democracy.
Here Abdul writes for the American people to support the Arab Spring, in which a false so-called “Democracy project” overthrew Mubarak in favor of Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood are often described as Islamists, militants and fascists in suits, while projecting an outward appearance of moderation, and held the highest number of governmental seats in Egypt when the so-called Arab Spring materialized. This would mean that El Sayed, if not linked to the Muslim Brotherhood through other reports that he was Vice President of the Muslim Students Association, and his wife was President of the MSA, (a legacy organization of the Muslim Brotherhood in America,) along with the fact that he holds dual citizenship in America and Egypt, we can deduce that he is at least influenced by Muslim Brotherhood propaganda in Egypt.
He also blames the problems of democratizing Middle East nations on Israel, the lone democracy in the Middle East. This is typically the argument from Islamists in the region, in fact the Muslim Brotherhood preaches that democracy is possible and when it doesn’t materialize, they blame Israelis, because they are democratic, and are at fault.
Political positions
From numerous interviews and articles, I have detected the following political positions of Abdul El Sayed:
He wishes to make Michigan a sanctuary state for all “undocumented” immigrants.
He wants government to provide free college tuition for all.
He wants single-payer healthcare in Michigan, which means completely provided by government.
He supports the movement for a “living wage” and is a full-throated supporter of a $15 minimum wage.
He wants to direct federal money to specific cities in Michigan to replace water pipes even though this responsibility lies with the cities themselves.
He claims he is a man of the people who has to fight government for basic human rights.
He is pro-abortion, a strange position for a practicing, devout, Muslim.
Admitting that his political positions if instituted would be extremely costly, Abdul wishes to reexamine Michigan’s tax code and change it from a flat tax to a graduated tax system, which means, the more you make, the more government takes.
$$PayPal TIP JAR$$
Conclusion
After examining El Sayed’s life, there are, in fact, ties between El Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood. These ties are perhaps indirect, but the controversy between El Sayed and Senator Colbeck is based on an expressed concern by Colbeck that El Sayed may have ties. The press and the Democrat Party as well as some politicians in the Republican Party refuse to look into El Sayed to find out if the charge holds water. It’s my conclusion that it does indeed. I have not found ties between his parents and the Muslim Brotherhood as Colbeck suggested, and am willing to look over those alleged ties if presented to me, and I will update with more information if warranted.
I have passed by the charge given in some journals that Sarah Jukaku is the daughter of a board member and former chair of CAIR in Michigan, Dr. Jukaku Tayeb, only because I cannot confirm it through use of the internet so far, though the two do bear a striking resemblance. But given that both El Sayed and his wife were in the leadership of a Muslim Brotherhood Students Association in college is a tie.
Also, given his writings and his dual citizenship as well as his summers spent in Egypt, it’s clear that if Abdul has no tie with the Muslim Brotherhood directly, which we will never be able to uncover given the nature of the organization, he certainly repeats their ideas and mindset and this raises flags that he may be emulating the outwardly moderate, inwardly militant persona that characterizes the Muslim Brotherhood. Understand that the question of whether he is emulating the Muslim Brotherhood is not a certainty, but for voters, the political calculations of the candidate are certainly fair game.
Now, Muslim Brotherhood aside, El Sayed is definitely the most liberty-crushing candidate running for governor. His understanding of the Constitution is abysmal and reflective of the leftist work of Barack Obama and all radical leftists, to undermine it. So, in essence, there is little difference between the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood on American society, and the aims of the radical left on American society – using the freedoms of America in order to undermine them – is a shared goal of both.
That said, Abdul is a charming kid.
His presence online is massive, I have skimmed most of his stuff in order to gather information about how he thinks, and what his goals are, and have come away with the notion that he indeed has 
been groomed for political office by the radical left in the Democrat party, and is determined to gain political office. It is telling that his first swipe is at the governorship, instead of say, mayor. His arrogance is palpable when writing while his outward appearance is that of a jovial “every guy.” He spoke of his disdain for the everyday slog of medicine, and yearned for a “30,000 foot view” of medicine, indicating that he is authoritarian in nature, a philosopher king who represents those “smarter and therefore better” than the common man, and willing to implement government solutions to problems best left out of the hands of government. Gone are the ideas of limited government in America, for Abdul, everything would be controlled by government, and taxes would rise astronomically to pay for it all.
Given that he is consistently compared to Barack Obama, and that he says he helped Obama gain office, it seems odd there are no pictures of him and the former president. There are however, pictures of him and Linda Sarsour, who has endorsed him, Bill Clinton, and Maxine Waters, but none of Obama. It is noteworthy that he penned an article for the Huffington Post claiming progressive disappointment with the lack of change Obama was able to produce. Abdulrahman Mohamed El Sayed is far more radical than Barack Obama, and would use his knowledge and probably use his charges of racism against anyone who gets in his way.
He bases a lot of his political experience on his stint as Executive Director of Health in Detroit, and the Flint water crisis, which ironically, was caused by Detroit shutting off water to Flint.
As of this writing, his candidacy is a little in doubt due to questions on his eligibility, but I believe he will be deemed eligible, and has the organization and youth to railroad Gretchen Whitmer to become the Democratic candidate in the general. It’s my belief that another candidate, Shri Thenadar, the man challenging his eligibility, does not have the persona nor charm needed to gain the nomination. (El Sayed was cleared of any eligibility questions on May 9, five days after this article was published.)
For all those who believe all Muslims in America are here to take it down, I profoundly disagree. I do not have anything against the peaceful exercise of religion. But I will say that El Sayed projects an image of a devout Muslim while he adheres to social policy of the left that is completely against his religion, which means that though charged with being Muslim first, American second, as many Muslims are, it is more correct in Abdul’s case that he is Leftist first, Muslim second, and has little knowledge of the ideas of liberty that America was founded upon, for sure.
In other words, this particular Muslim comes in peace to shackle the free market, take away freedoms, and destroy our liberty.
Here is his launch video, you’ll notice right away why he’s compared to Obama.
