00:00So there's another interesting allegation surrounding the Democratic candidate for Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.
00:06This one involving a charity that his father, Muhammad El-Sayed, has served on the board of for several years.
00:13Muhammad El-Sayed has been a board member of Life for Relief and Development since 2020, at least.
00:19Life for Relief and Development has a long history of drawing from Muslim donors.
00:22And in 2004, at the height of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Life for Relief and Development's Baghdad office
00:28was raided.
00:29And soldiers found boxes of evidence and reams of documents suggesting that the charity, which was supposed to help the
00:36needy and the disadvantaged,
00:38had actually been funneling donors' money via the nation of Jordan to the regime of the since-deposed Iraqi dictator
00:44Saddam Hussein.
00:46That evidence kicked off a long-running criminal and civil case against the group that only concluded in 2014,
00:52when Life for Relief and Development paid a settlement of around $780,000.
00:57Now, during that investigation, federal investigators also found ties between Life for Relief and Development and the Islamic African Relief
01:04Agency,
01:05another charity suspected of funneling support for bad actors in the Middle East, specifically Hamas,
01:11and a charity for which Abdul El-Sayed's mother happened to be employed for a short time.
01:17Now, this is just the latest example of El-Sayed or members of his family being accused of being linked
01:23to unscrupulous actors with ties to the Middle East,
01:26ties to Islamic extremists, and ties to out-and-out terror groups.
01:31He's spent most of the past few weeks trying to deflect and answer charges that he is at least a
01:38supporter of,
01:39if not an out-and-out member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
01:41Now, the Muslim Brotherhood has been active in the Middle East for around a century.
01:44It's a very powerful political Islam group that has been linked to the rise of Hamas,
01:51which emerged from several Brotherhood-linked charities in the Gaza Strip in the late 1980s.
01:55Most recently, in 2012, El-Sayed drew unwanted attention when he turned out to have signed a letter
02:01supporting the Muslim Brotherhood during a crackdown by the Egyptian government
02:05during unrest in that country that was part of the Arab Spring.
02:08Now, there's no evidence that Mohammed El-Sayed was involved in the actions of Life for Relief and Development
02:14in giving money to Saddam Hussein.
02:16But the latest claims show that there are real questions that El-Sayed has to answer
02:21about who he will actually represent in the U.S. Senate should he win next week.
02:26Will he represent the people of the state of Michigan,
02:28which does have one of the largest Arab populations in the U.S.,
02:31but also has a bunch of other concerns related to the economy and energy?
02:36Or will he use his power for the next six years to focus purely on issues of the Middle East,
02:42thousands of miles away from his nominal constituents?
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