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Leave it to a Michigan Democrat running for the U.S. Senate to discover that noticing a legal system with a documented track record of amputations, stonings, and second-class status for women and non-believers is the actual hate crime.
Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s nominee, took to Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime in late August 2026 to explain that “preemptively” banning Sharia is discriminatory because it singles out a tiny, totally unremarkable community that just happens to be different.
The Visegrad24 graphic [above] making the rounds is a compressed, partisan summary of those comments. The underlying statements are real; the framing and visuals are designed to maximize alarm.
Sharia itself ranges from personal religious rules (prayer, diet, finance, marriage, property, and punishment) to, in some interpretations and countries, criminal and family law that conflicts with U.S. constitutional rights. U.S. courts already cannot enforce foreign or religious rules that violate the Constitution.
El-Sayed would like you to stop talking about the second part.
His exact phrasing from the interview: “When people preemptively go out there and start preemptively passing laws to ban something that’s not happening, what you’re trying to do is target a very small community because they’re different.” Efforts like Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s “seem to me to be deliberately targeting the Muslim community because they’re different.”
He compared personal/religious observance of Sharia to Catholic canon law and said no one is trying to impose Sharia on others, just as no one should impose canon law.
The Washington Examiner summarized it as El-Sayed saying “‘preemptively’ banning sharia is discriminatory.” This is the same fellow who, in a 2022 speech to CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter, treated a 2010 ballot measure that simply told state courts they could not consider Sharia or foreign law as the moral equivalent of the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing. He blamed “white supremacy” and “the same exact forces.”
Fact-checkers (Reuters, PolitiFact) noted he did not call for implementing Sharia as U.S. civil law. They did not note that comparing an anti-Sharia amendment to ethnic cleansing and a fertilizer bomb is the kind of rhetorical flourish that usually gets a man invited back to CAIR events.In 2009, as a young medical student, he told the New York Times he felt a religious “obligation” to live in a Sharia-compliant way (he used a Sharia-compliant mortgage to avoid interest).
His campaign now insists he supports separation of church and state and opposes writing any religion’s rules into civil law. The rest of us are expected to believe that bull crap and treat the 2009 version and the 2026 version as the same man who has never once noticed that some versions of Sharia do not stay in the prayer rug lane.
The 1 percent figure gets deployed like a magic shield: How dare you even discuss a legal tradition followed by a sliver of the population? Never mind that slivers have a habit of becoming neighborhoods, then demands for parallel courts, then “sensitivity” training for judges. Catholics have canon law. They have not spent the last twenty years producing headlines about honor violence, polygamy prosecutions, or no-go zones in Western cities. The comparison is doing a lot of work.
El-Sayed’s position is internally consistent if you accept the premise that any preemptive defense of the Constitution against a specific religious legal code is bigotry by definition. The rest of the country is still allowed to notice that “it’s not happening” is the traditional opening line before it starts happening.
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