First-ever Muslim candidate for Governor comes unhinged over question about Sharia
Abdul al-Sayed to GOP opponent: ‘You may not hate Muslims but Muslims definitely hate you!’
By LEO HOHMANN
Michigan’s first-ever Muslim candidate for governor, Dr. Abdul al-Sayed, took a shot at fellow gubernatorial candidate Patrick Colbeck on Thursday that some Republicans are saying was below the belt.
Colbeck, speaking at a candidate’s forum in East Lansing, expressed his concerns about Sharia law and the extremist Muslim Brotherhood’s tactic of civilization jihad. Colbeck took exception with an article he says was planted by Sayed supporters in the left-of-center website Buzzfeed, which painted Colbeck as a fringe extremist using “unfounded conspiracy theories” against Sayed.
Rather than address Colbeck’s concerns, Sayed called Colbeck a racist Islamophobe whom Muslims “definitely hate.”
Sayed, 33, the former public-health director for the city of Detroit, was on stage Thursday at the Michigan Press Association with several other Democrat and Republican candidates for governor running in the Aug. 7 primary.
Sayed refused to answer a question from the moderator about the Islamic legal system known as Sharia, other than to say that, if elected, he would uphold the constitutions of the U.S. and State of Michigan.
“I take [the Constitution] particularly seriously because it guarantees me two things. A, the right to pray as I choose to pray, and for me that means I put my face on the ground 34 times a day,” Sayed said. “Some people choose not to pray at all. Then in Article Six it also tells us that no religious test should be held over someone wishing to serve under this Constitution. It’s an incredible document.”
Sayed leveled charges of racism and “white supremacy” at Republicans in general but saved his most severe critique for Colbeck, the one GOP candidate who has dared to talk about the issue of creeping Sharia in a state that has the country’s highest concentration of Muslims and has the nation’s first case of female genital mutilation working its way through the federal courts. Michigan also recently had a case involving a possible honor killing in which a 15-year-old Muslim boy in Farmington Hills allegedly pushed his mother to her death at a time when she was going through a divorce from his father.
Colbeck, an aerospace engineer and two-term state senator, said his concerns are not about individual Muslims. Rather, he worries about the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been declared a terrorist organization by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and whose influence in the U.S. was spelled out in the Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, a document seized by the FBI in 2004 and presented as evidence in a terror-financing trial that sent five members of an Islamic charity called the Holy Land Foundation to prison in 2008 for funneling money to Hamas.
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https://leohohmann.com/2018/05/11/first-ever-muslim-candidate-for-governor-comes-unhinged-over-question-about-sharia/