Abdul el-Sayed entered, gained energy within, and won his Democratic Party primary on the basis of his positions on the Middle East. He attacked his opponents for being aligned with Israel, a country he openly opposes, and many of his campaign surrogates were animated primarily by that issue. I don't even disagree, on the substance of that one issue, that the US should not provide military aid to Israel while the country actively builds settlements and turns a blind eye to settler violence in the West Bank, though I think AES goes too far in treating them as something more akin to an adversary than a flawed ally. But Middle East issues are very obviously and openly something that animates him and his supporters. Consider the median American's opinion on Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist powers in the Middle East with Abdul el-Sayed's. Take the median Democrat, even. Is anyone willing to go on the record and say they honestly think he is no more sympathetic to them than the median American? He is not an Islamist - he is an American social democrat who, like many American leftists, finds many reasons to sympathize with Islamist groups and sees them often as victims of American foreign policy in the Middle East. I keep seeing people want to have it both ways: on the one hand, he will gain power because he is a fervent opponent of Israel. On the other hand, to even think about asking him for more elaboration than a cursory denial on how he feels about the Islamist powers in the region is an undue concern motivated by his race and faith. No. Absolutely not. If we are to enter a period of renegotiating the country's approach to Middle East foreign policy - and make absolutely no mistake, that is one of the core reasons AES's supporters and campaign surrogates want him in office - then we absolutely cannot treat it as undue religious/racial motivation to want a clear picture about where people stand in relation to Middle East powers and why. Republicans did not make the Middle East central to Abdul el-Sayed's campaign. Abdul el-Sayed did. Now he wants to have it both ways, and a lot of people are nodding along for motivated reasons.