Vance hosts members from Michigan synagogue attack at rally after el Sayed apology

Vice President JD Vance on Monday denounced Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed as “very evil” for qualifying an initial statement condemning an attack on a synagogue, revealing a rabbi at the place of worship as a guest at his Detroit rally. 

Vance spoke to a crowd of attendees at the MAGA Inc.-hosted event in Sterling Heights, as he sought to boost multiple candidates down the ballot also present at the rally, including Republican Mike Rogers, who is running against el Sayed, and GOP gubernatorial nominee John James.

During the event, the vice president said an unnamed rabbi from the West Bloomfield synagogue that was attacked in March, along with several members of its internal security team who were credited with stopping a deadly shooting, were also present. The vice president denounced el Sayed for comments he made following the antisemitic incident at Temple Israel, where dozens of children were present at school during the attack. At the time, el Sayed said the attack was without justification but drew uproar for also saying “hurt people hurt people” and “violence is a cycle” and linking the attack to Israel’s airstrikes on Lebanon, where the accused gunman is from. 

“There’s something about Abdul el Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today, and it’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a nation, fighting for every single person, whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or black or brown, but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others,” Vance told attendees at the rally. “That is how, ladies and gentlemen, you destroy the United States of America.” 

“When you have people who start to say my ethnic group deserves something and yours doesn’t, or that ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad, that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality and common citizenship that we need to continue to have the United States be the most powerful and prosperous nation anywhere in the world,” the vice president added. “What I’d ask all of you to do is to reject it in November. Reject the people that try to divide us, one race against the other, one religion against the other. Reject the people who would defend the killer rather than the schoolchildren.”

On March 12, a gunman drove through the halls of Temple Israel with several explosives and a rifle in his vehicle before being killed in an exchange of gunfire with law enforcement on March 12. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a Lebanese immigrant, is accused of carrying out what the FBI described as a Hezbollah-inspired attack. Hezbollah is the terrorist group that controls much of Lebanon, which borders Israel. In response to Hezbollah attacks on Israel, Israel has gone to war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Ghazali had lost several family members in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon before he carried out his attack, according to officials. Jennifer Runyan, head of the FBI’s Detroit field office, said Ghazali had frequently consumed Hezbollah-related content online before the attack.

“This is the largest gathering place for Israelis in the state of Michigan in the United States,” Ghazali said in a video sent to his sister, who is still living in Lebanon, minutes before the synagogue attack. “I have booby-trapped the car. I will forcefully enter and start shooting at them. God willing, I will kill as many of them as I possibly can.”

El Sayed denounced the terrorist attack, perpetrated by a Lebanese immigrant who lost family in an Israeli airstrike, but qualified it at the time, offering support for those affected by Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

“In the coming weeks, a narrative is going to take hold. It’ll be shaped in part by the very people who launched that war that led to those airstrikes that killed those children, that drove this crazed attacker to violence against innocent people at a synagogue in Michigan,” el Sayed wrote. “We ought to grieve for the children who are dying at the hands of airstrikes.” 

Upon intense backlash, el Sayed later apologized to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus for those remarks on Saturday, calling his initial statement “a mistake.”

“I should have issued a statement, of course, condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop,” he said. “For folks who felt like my comments were justifying of an act of domestic terrorism, I did not intend it that way.”

“If I had the opportunity to take it back, I would take it all the way back,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.

Vance said Monday that the apology wasn’t enough, and condemned el Sayed for campaigning with Hasan Piker. El Sayed has distanced himself from the Twitch streamer in recent days after appearing with him several times before the primary despite concerns Piker is antisemitic due to his repeated denials or downplaying of sweeping sexual violence against Jews in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, saying he “would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time” and calling Hamas “a thousand times better” than Israel. Piker has also drawn scrutiny for saying in 2019 that the United States “deserved” the 9/11 attacks.

Vice President JD Vance speaks at Universal Contracting and Urban Tree Trimming, Monday, Aug. 31, 2026, in Sterling Heights, Michigan. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

DEMOCRATS FROM OPPOSITE SIDES OF PARTY ALL RALLY BEHIND ‘BIG TENT’

“Abdul el Sayed made an apology for the very people who would perpetrate violence against hundreds of innocent American schoolchildren. You’ve got to ask yourself if he’s willing to empathize not with the children who almost had their lives destroyed at the most innocent and what should be the safest place in the world, their school, what is he going to do when he goes to Washington, D.C., when the cameras aren’t on?” Vance questioned, referencing el Sayed’s words after the Temple Israel attack.

“That guy showed up at that synagogue at that school with a desire to kill a lot of children, and he killed precisely zero children because of the brave security guards who did their job and did it very well,” he added. 

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