El-Sayed Campaign Disowns PAC Ad on Israel Aid

Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign said it had no connection to a political ad showing a couple putting groceries back because money for bananas had to go instead to “killing Palestinians.” The ad, produced by Rebellion PAC, ended by contrasting Mike Rogers with El-Sayed: “Mike Rogers is for they/them” — alongside pictures of Israeli politicians — “Abdul El-Sayed is for you.” The fight over who speaks for a Senate candidate quickly became a fight over who gets blamed for families’ hardship.

Who Gets Blamed

Many Democrats said the ad blamed Jews for families’ inability to afford food and called on El-Sayed to condemn it. His campaign responded that the ad was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy, adding that “no one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.” Critics said that statement stopped short of condemning the message and amounted to refusing to denounce what they described as scapegoating Jews for Michigan’s problems.

El-Sayed later said he “disagreed” with the ad’s contents. He wasn’t pressed to explain how. That left the campaign’s rejection of formal ties doing more work than any detailed account of what it objected to.

El-Sayed’s primary challenger, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), said he had repeatedly made the same argument dramatized in the ad: that taxpayer aid to Israel was responsible for problems including Michigan’s failing schools and failing health care. Those are Stevens’s claims about El-Sayed’s rhetoric; the account doesn’t provide a response from him to that specific charge.

Campaign Lines and Political Leverage

El-Sayed had campaigned five times with Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer identified as Uygur’s nephew. The article said Piker had compared Jews to the Ku Klux Klan the previous week and said Americans deserved 9/11. El-Sayed repeatedly refused to denounce Piker.

Stevens was invited to appear with El-Sayed at a campaign event on Sunday. She made her appearance conditional on El-Sayed denouncing both the ad and his own rhetoric, which she said engaged in similar scapegoating of Jews. El-Sayed told Stevens to take a hike. She then went to the campaign of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers.

The contest is unfolding through campaign statements, advertisements and appearances alongside candidates. The account describes no legislative proposal or other reform aimed at the problems named in the dispute. It also reports no grassroots organizing, mutual-aid effort or community response to the ad. The conflict presented here is electoral: candidates and campaign organizations contest the message and the blame, while the grocery-store image supplies the ad’s picture of people forced to choose what they can afford.

The Machinery Behind the Message

Rebellion PAC is described as a left-wing political action committee run by YouTuber Cenk Uygur. The article gives no information about who funds the PAC or what it delivers beyond producing the ad. It also says the advertisement was one of two political ads that defined the election season; the other came from Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and targeted his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

The column was written by Batya Ungar Sargon, host of “Batya!,” which airs Saturday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on NewsNation. NewsNation was described as the nation’s fastest-growing cable news network and a sister company of The Hill. The page carried a 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. copyright notice and said the material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Even the account of a campaign dispute arrives inside its own machinery of ownership and control.