Abdul El-Sayed Defends Temple Israel Comments to Sara Haines

Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed defended his comments on the March 12 attack at Temple Israel during a November 5 appearance on 'The View.' Co-host Sara Haines asked El-Sayed why he took roughly five months to apologize for his initial statement about the gunman.

Haines noted that El-Sayed described the attacker's relatives, who were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, with the phrase 'hurt people hurt people.' She asked if leaders have a responsibility to challenge extremist views within their own faith, noting El-Sayed is the first Muslim senator in the United States.

El-Sayed agreed with the premise that faith should uplift people rather than justify human actions. He recalled visiting the temple after the attack and attending a bar mitzvah there in his youth. He stated that he condemned the attack immediately but tried to offer context about the attacker's loss.

'When people are hurting, context is secondary, and I just should have stood with their pain,' El-Sayed said. He added that he is not above apologizing when he makes a mistake. He said he wanted to encourage an adult conversation about how actions around the world create worse conditions for everyone.

Haines responded that she would be furious if politicians used her life's words to hurt people, especially when the victims were young children. She expressed surprise that it took El-Sayed time to understand how the comment landed with voters. El-Sayed acknowledged her point, and co-host Joy Behar added that it was better late than never.

Jesse Arm, a vice president at the Manhattan Institute and a pollster from Michigan, criticized El-Sayed's remarks to Fox News Digital. Arm compared the comments to a politician responding to the 2015 Charleston church shooting with a similar phrase while asking the public to consider the killer's grievances.

Arm argued that El-Sayed's comments were grotesque and that the interview compounded the problem by presenting the mistake as a matter of timing. He said the core issue was suggesting that overseas events mitigate responsibility for a domestic attack. Arm wrote that there is no justification for attacking a synagogue full of children.

Arm stated that Americans deserve leaders who can state this moral clarity without pivoting to the terrorist's pain. He warned that politics is in a dangerous place when that clarity becomes negotiable based on the identities of the attacker and the intended victims.