The New York Post has discovered that Abdul El-Sayed’s birth mother once worked for a charity that the Treasury Department later designated as a terrorist-supporting organization. The headline writes itself, apparently, because that is exactly what happened: a headline engineered to make you stop reading before you reach the third paragraph.
Here is what the third paragraph tells you. Fatten Fathy Elkomy worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency from 1999 to at least 2004, running programs for orphans and displaced children. She was hired years before the Treasury Department designated IARA’s international network. When federal authorities moved against the organization in October 2004, Elkomy told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she had no knowledge of terrorism connections. She was never charged with anything. Not a single count.
USDAgov (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsEl-Sayed’s parents divorced when he was young. His mother remarried and returned to the Middle East. He was raised in Michigan by his father, Mohamed, and stepmother, Jacqueline. The campaign has made little mention of Elkomy because, by all available evidence, she was not a presence in his life. None of that makes it into the Post’s headline, or into Ed Morrissey’s HotAir column, which concludes that El-Sayed has been “set up as a front man for radical Islamist terrorism to penetrate the US Senate.”
Let me be clear about what this is. This is the oldest play in the book: take a Muslim candidate, find a family member with a tangential connection to something frightening, and smear the candidate with it. The facts are carefully arranged