'I Speak for the Whole African & Arab Diaspora': Abdul El-Sayed Called France a 'Colonizer' During World Cup, Cheered for Morocco and Not US in Deleted Posts

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed denounced France as "the colonizer" and said he spoke "for the whole African & Arab diaspora" during the 2022 World Cup, according to deleted social media posts. El-Sayed, who has a history of anti-Western and anti-American remarks, was rooting for upstart Morocco in its matches against former Western imperial powers.

El-Sayed, who has claimed multiple times to have "dual citizenship" in the United States and Egypt (which he now denies), issued a broadside against France ahead of its semifinal match against Morocco.

"We are all #Morocco," El-Sayed wrote on Dec. 10, 2022, after Morocco defeated Portugal 1-0. "Can't wait to watch them take it to the colonizer in the #WorldCup semifinal."

Morocco lost to France 2-0 in the match and fell to Croatia in a third-place match days later. While El-Sayed backed Morocco, a semi-constitutional monarchy whose king holds "full dominance" over the state and society, offered no such support for the United States during the 2022 tournament, even after its Nov. 29, 2022, victory over Iran.

France had multiple players of North African and Arab descent on its 2022 World Cup team—which lost the final match to Argentina—including the widely celebrated Kylian Mbappe, who is of Cameroonian and Algerian descent. France once controlled Algeria and Morocco.

El-Sayed's "colonizer" and "diaspora" comments offer a window into his broader hostility to the West. El-Sayed is a staunch critic of Israel and has criticized U.S. foreign policy, including in posts on the anniversaries of 9/11. This week, he suggested that Israel is a greater threat to the United States than Iran is.

Anti-Western sentiment toward France is back in the headlines this month as hundreds of thousands of high school and university students—many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants from Muslim North Africa—have protested cuts to France's welfare and school system. President Donald Trump asserted the crisis consuming France is the result of "out of control mass migration" and "about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!" Trump invoked the French protests in a social media onslaught against El-Sayed on Thursday.

"How's France doing?" Trump wrote, lambasting El-Sayed as a "RADICAL Extremist" and "Terrorist Sympathizer."

Trump reiterated his endorsement for Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan's U.S. Senate race. The Wolverine State is home to more than 300,000 people of French descent, one of the largest concentrations in the country. Detroit was founded by French colonists more than 300 years ago as an outpost to control the fur trade.

El-Sayed doubled down on his views about Western colonialism in more now-deleted 2022 social media posts and dismissed another user who pointed out that Morocco colonized Western Sahara, its neighbor to the south, in 1975.

"Colonization is terrible," El-Sayed wrote. "Most of the border disputes that exist in the modern Middle East emanate from arbitrarily drawn *European* border lines."

Morocco—which still controls Western Sahara and in recent years has been accused of human rights abuses there—was under French and Spanish protectorates between 1912 and 1956. French control brought many reforms to Morocco, including the end of the slave trade.

El-Sayed, whose parents emigrated to the United States in 1978, has twice claimed to be a citizen of both Egypt and the United States. He said in 2016 he had "dual citizenship" in both countries and listed citizenship in "Egypt" and the "United States" on his résumé in 2014, the Washington Free Beacon reported. El-Sayed's campaign now says his claim was an "error" based on inaccurate information from a relative. The campaign has declined to provide additional information about the error.

El-Sayed's father is an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University. His mother works in the health care field in Missouri and, before that, worked at the Islamic Relief Agency of America, a group that was designated a terrorist organization in 2004 for funding al Qaeda.

He has campaigned repeatedly with anti-American and anti-Israel activists and clerics. He has attended several events with Hasan Piker, the socialist streamer who said that "America deserved 9/11." He has campaigned three times with a Michigan-based cleric, Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, who was an official in the Iranian Navy's Islamic propaganda unit in the 1980s and served in a high-level post in the Martyrs Foundation, an Iranian NGO sanctioned for funding Hezbollah.

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