Cinema

America Just Elected the Muslims Hollywood Taught It to Fear

Michigan elected the first Muslim senator despite AIPAC's millions and the antisemitism smear. Hollywood, which cast Muslims as terrorists for a century, must now choose.

Husam Sam Asi 7 November 2026, 12:11

Abdul El-Sayed and his wife, Dr Sarah Jukaku, celebrate his election victory in Detroit, Michigan, on 4 November 2026. Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP.

On election night Hollywood threw a party. Pedro Pascal was “sobbing” over a blue Texas. Viola Davis cheered Keisha Lance Bottoms, America’s first Black woman governor, and Mandy Moore toasted Chris Pappas, New Hampshire’s first openly gay senator. One historic first was missing from the confetti. Abdul El-Sayed beat Mike Rogers in Michigan to become the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate, and not one of the stars quoted in the election-night roundups mentioned his name.

He did not win alone. At least seven Muslims were elected to Congress, among them the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations counted a record 97 Muslims elected across the country.

Millions Against One Doctor

El-Sayed won after a campaign that played like a 1990s action film with a Muslim villain. Donald Trump told a Michigan rally that the Egyptian-American doctor would “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores” and, on the eve of the vote, posted that “Abdul El-Sayed Hates Jews”. When the Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy called him a “terrorist”, Rogers said Portnoy was “exactly right”. CBS News, owned by David Ellison, ran a headline on his deleted tweets about 9/11 that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, reportedly pushed. Critics called it anti-Muslim; a person familiar with the story rejected the charge.

The pro-Israel lobby paid for the rest. AIPAC’s election arm spent more than $30m to stop him in the primary, then made a rare entry into a general election to back Rogers. The charge that followed him everywhere was antisemitism. El-Sayed pledged to stand up to it and thanked the voters who had welcomed him into “your synagogues”.

Michigan’s Jews delivered their own verdict. A survey of Jewish early voters, commissioned by a group led by an AIPAC veteran, found most of them voted for him. Across America, Jewish voters ranked antisemitism third and Israel fifth among their concerns, far behind democracy and the cost of living.

The Charge That Ends Careers

Israel’s defenders did not stop on election night. Within hours, the Anti-Defamation League’s Midwest office announced “serious concerns” about the approach to antisemitism of Daniel Biss, Illinois’s new congressman, who is Jewish, and its Philadelphia office denounced another progressive winner, Chris Rabb. Biss answered that the ADL now “traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism.”

I know that weapon well. In 2009, when I arrived in Hollywood, I was called a terrorist and an antisemite because of my name and because I worked for an Arabic newspaper. A Lebanese colleague told me that he was blamed for the September 11 attacks. In 2022 I wrote that Israel’s supporters dominated Hollywood, in an article that credited my survival there to my Jewish and Israeli friends. The Golden Globes’ investigators applied the ADL’s definition of antisemitism, declared my sentence an antisemitic trope, and I was expelled, over the objections of my Jewish colleagues. A year earlier, when the Golden Globes stood accused of racism, I had asked the association’s board to support Arab and Muslim cinema. Its president told me: “No one cares about your people.”

On 3 November American voters, Jewish voters among them, gave their answer.

Made in Hollywood

The smears El-Sayed faced were familiar because Hollywood wrote them and showered them with awards. When cinemagoers chanted “death to Arabs and Muslims” after watching American Sniper, Hollywood gave the film six Oscar nominations. Trump simply borrowed the cast list. Hollywood’s Muslim and Mexican villains paved his road to the White House, and this autumn he aimed them at a doctor from Michigan.

Some of Hollywood’s talent pushed back. Mark Ruffalo and Bruce Springsteen endorsed El-Sayed, and Ruffalo said his opponents had “played racist anti-Muslim games, and they got nothing.” The power brokers backed the other side. Casey Wasserman and Teddy Schwarzman crossed party lines to give to Rogers, and Paramount and Warner Bros. now belong to the Ellisons, whose patriarch, Larry, once gave $16.6m to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

Obama Changed Hollywood. Can El-Sayed?

Hollywood has rewritten its script for a politician before. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 told the studios that America was ready for Black leads, and a reckoning followed. 12 Years a Slave became the first Black film to earn seven Golden Globe nominations and went on to win the Oscar for best picture. Moonlight followed, and Black Panther took more than $1.3bn. When #OscarsSoWhite exposed the Academy, it nearly doubled the share of its members from under-represented groups. A decade of Black cinema changed the face of Hollywood.

Muslims are still waiting for their turn. The voters who elected El-Sayed buy the cinema tickets and the streaming subscriptions, and they have just rejected the old labels at the ballot box. The studios can keep casting a man named Abdul as the terrorist, or they can follow the audience, as they did after Obama.

El-Sayed ended his victory speech with a message for Trump: “You could just go on and call me Senator.” Hollywood taught America to see a bomb in a name like his. America has just called him Senator. Now Hollywood has to decide whether it can say the word.