08/22/2026
Give Hate the Boot
Published in Huron Daily Tribune
August 22, 2026
Last week the Democrats in Michigan nominated a man for the US Senate whose family background is Middle Eastern. His name is Abdul El-Sayed. He grew up in Rochester Hills, was captain of his high school football team, and graduated from the University of Michigan. He is a Michigan man.
Already the forces of intolerance are painting him as someone who is not like us. Mike Rogers has called him by his formal name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, thus invoking fear and hatred of Muslims.
This kind of intolerance finds a home in ignorance and we have seen it before. Our black brothers and sisters know this hate. Our Latino neighbors recognize it. Our Catholic friends still remember those days. Many among us — the autistic, the person who uses a walker or a cane, or comes from another heritage or speaks another language, or is gay, or even those who didn’t grow up in Michigan — they know the looks, the conversations, the attitudes that paint them as “other.”
Electing good people to serve in our government is not about skin color, or what country or state your people are from, or even what language is a part of your heritage or where you worship. No, the choice of Michigan’s next senator this year is not and should not be about otherness.
Whether you are a supporter of Mike Rogers or of Abdul El-Sayed, do not let the ugly specter of hatred of the Muslim people and their way of life and faith be the factor that decides your vote.
Here in Huron County our guide for this election is found in the example of Frank Murphy who grew up in Harbor Beach and became a beloved figure of US History. In January of 1940 — before Pearl Harbor and with the second Great War raging in Europe — Murphy was serving as US Attorney General. He gave a speech about intolerance and anti-semitism.
Frank Murphy said that “the purveyors of hatred, the provokers of division and strife, the swaggering apostles of force and violence, are methodically and with premeditation laboring to bring to the United States the same conditions of group hatred and civil war that have destroyed the peace of Europe. Treacherously, they camouflage their true nature by representing themselves to the unwary as defenders of God, America, and the Constitution. Unscrupulously, they stir up riots in the city streets, they intimidate peaceful citizens, they invade meetings, and they peddle as truth the malicious lies which people of their ilk have invented to blacken those whom they hate.”
Whether your political persuasion is red or blue, do not be led down that path of hatred in this election in 2026. Give intolerance the boot. Listen to both candidates, to both sides. Read up on their backgrounds and accomplishments. Recognize that there will be vitriol that emerges. Know that the advertising cleverly seeks to sway us one way or the other.
Who is this guy? Well, he’s Abdul. He lives in Ann Arbor. He’s smart. He talks about government that helps everyday people. He could be the first Muslim US Senator.
Above all, he could be your son-in-law, your fishing buddy, your golf partner, the guy you sit next to at a football game or who is line behind you at the grocery checkout this weekend. Let’s face it: he probably looks an awful lot like one of your trusted doctors!
Let’s keep hatred out of this fall’s campaign. Our Huron County brother, Mr. Justice Murphy who grew up on Huron Avenue in Harbor Beach, said it like this:
“America was not built by anti-Semitism, or anti-Protestantism, or hatred for the Catholics, or by the fantastic doctrines of racial superiority that are practiced elsewhere. America was built to greatness by a partnership of men and women who represent every race and nationality that inhabits the globe. The good things of life that you and I enjoy we owe not to Catholics alone, or Jews alone, or Englishmen or Irish alone -- we do not owe them to Aryans or non-Aryans alone, or to white or black alone -- we owe them to all God's children of every color and nation and creed.”
This fall, give hate and intolerance the boot. Be bigger. Be an American.
Wanda Eichler
Huron County Democratic Party
