CHANTILLY, Va. — Three days after Abdul El-Sayed won a historic election as America’s first Muslim senator, a driver navigating a black luxury GMC Yukon Denali SUV pulled into a parking space beside a side security entrance of an upscale Marriott conference center here in this suburb of Washington, D.C., at 7:39 p.m. on Friday.
A man jumped out of the front passenger seat and opened the rear door, from which El-Sayed emerged for an appearance at the Arab America Foundation’s “CONNECT Empowerment Summit,” hosted by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose leaders had supported his election.
As the man extended an arm to shield El-Sayed, the senator-elect dipped out of the SUV, slipping on a jacket as he climbed the steps toward the entrance. The Democratic Party’s newly minted rock star had arrived, in more ways than one.
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The ensuing 45 minutes offered a window into some of the activists, organizations, political rhetoric and cultural forces surrounding the El-Sayed’s dramatic rise, buoyed by an increasingly powerful coalition that includes many disaffected Democrats, but also outright Islamists and communists in an unlikely alliance.
Inside, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, a far-left nonprofit, paced in the hallway in a fuchsia tunic over leggings and white boots.
CodePink is a pro-communist, pro-China nonprofit funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American-born, Shanghai-based tycoon whose financing of left-wing nonprofits has drawn congressional and prosecutorial scrutiny. CodePink’s other co-founder, Jodie Evans, is married to Singham.
Nearby, Benjamin’s husband and fellow CodePink activist, Tighe Barry, wore a traditional Chinese jacket under a khaki Mao-style cap emblazoned with a five-point star associated with communist iconography. He carried a backpack patterned with a keffiyeh pattern and watermelons, symbols adopted by pro-Palestinian activists.
Benjamin and Barry weren’t political outliers in El-Sayed’s orbit.
His political rise has been supported by prominent anti-Israel activists including Linda Sarsour and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who has called Hamas “1,000 times better” than Israel, a remark he later described as intentionally provocative.
Friday night provided a firsthand view of another part of that coalition.
They were among activists and representatives of organizations from different ideological traditions that have converged around El-Sayed — part of what Fox News Digital has examined as a “red-green” network linking elements of the socialist and communist hard-left with Muslim and Arab advocacy organizations.
The gathering itself didn’t fit neatly into a fundamentalist religious mold, amid questions about Islamism, or political Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood that have followed El-Sayed. He has denied being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, although his family reportedly has ties to the organization and he himself has written favorably about the organization’s leaders.
Women danced and sang with bare shoulders and flowing hair, underscoring the secular and openly cultural character of much of the celebration. A table for Jinba Village and School outside Hebron in the West Bank displayed a flyer reading, “End Settler Outposts: Make Palestinian Villages Safe. Email Congress.”
Another table offered keffiyehs with designs replacing the traditional fishbone pattern with the outlines of Palestinian territory.
Along the far corner of the ballroom, a collection of gifts for a fundraiser included a handcrafted wooden “silhouette of Palestine, painted in the iconic colors of the Palestinian flag” by artist Hasan Munem.
Opening bid: $100.
Benjamin eventually took a seat beside Hazami Barmada, a prominent Syrian American anti-Israel activist who has deployed political theater and demonstrations across Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., storming the offices of Palantir Technologies, Lockheed-Martin and PETA, the animal rights advocates, and confronting Biden and Trump administration officials to cut ties with Israel.
Barmada wore a keffiyeh over her hair like a turban.
Benjamin, Barry and Barmada declined to answer questions from Fox News Digital.
Their presence put figures from different wings of the political coalition around El-Sayed in the same room: activists from the socialist, pro-communist Left alongside Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian activists and organizations that supported his candidacy.
Fox News Digital has tracked the intersection of those movements as a “red-green” network — the “red” referring to socialist and communist organizations and “green” to Muslim and Arab political organizations. The groups don’t share a single ideology or formal organizational structure but have converged around causes including opposition to Israel and U.S. foreign policy.
Friday night, those relationships weren’t nodes on an organizational chart.
They were in the room.
Co-founders Warren David and Dr. Amal David started the Arab America Foundation as an educational and cultural organization dedicated to promoting Arab heritage and connecting and empowering Arab Americans nationwide.
Now they were waiting to greet the country’s first Muslim senator.
The foundation describes itself as nonpartisan, but political participation features prominently in its programming.
The next morning, the summit’s “Leading from the Front,” included Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed, co-chairs of the Uncommitted National Movement, which organized Democratic voters in 2024 to cast “uncommitted” ballots in protest of the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel and the war in Gaza. El-Sayed supported the Uncommitted effort.
Also on the roster was Anas Shallal, CEO of the Washington, D.C., restaurant and bookstore, Bus Boys and Poets, which has hosted events involving left-wing organizations, including groups in the Singham network such as CodePink, on issues ranging from Israel and the Trump administration and Israel to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The summit also included Arab American Institute founder James Zogby among dozens of artists, musicians and business, government and community leaders.
But Friday night, El-Sayed was the celebrity guest.
Benjamin, Barry and Barmada rushed into one hallway before being directed back toward another as organizers and supporters tried to determine where El-Sayed would enter.
Supporters eventually gathered near a doorway beside displays depicting Israel and the Palestinian territories as a single state of Palestine.
At 7:51 p.m., El-Sayed finally appeared through a side door, beaming.
The ballroom erupted in zaghrouta, high-pitched celebratory ululations traditionally heard at Arab weddings.
In his khaki Mao-style cap, Barry filmed the arriving senator-elect on his phone, as El-Sayed passed Benjamin and Barmada, then then swung his camera toward Benjamin, who pumped her hands near her shoulders in celebration.
Supporters cheered as El-Sayed made his way onto the stage.
Before the senator-elect even began his remarks, another office entered the conversation: the presidency.
Emcee Ameera David, a journalist and daughter of the co-founders, told the audience that her seven-year-old Egyptian American son had awakened Wednesday morning after El-Sayed’s victory and asked her, “Mom, can he run for president?”
“Yeah!” someone shouted as the room exploded in cheers and applause.
“To which I happily replied, ‘Yes he can,'” David continued. “And you can, too.”
El-Sayed smiled.
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The presidential talk came just hours after El-Sayed had registered Habibi PAC with the Federal Election Commission, according to records, defining it as a leadership PAC separate from his principal campaign committee.
The committee gives the incoming senator a vehicle to raise money and make contributions to other candidates and political committees. The timing put the new committee into the backdrop of a celebration where some supporters were already discussing El-Sayed’s political future beyond the Senate.
The PAC’s name borrowed the Arabic term of endearment that El-Sayed had propelled into national political conversation during his election-night victory speech.
With a wry smile, El-Sayed addressed Vice President JD Vance as “JD, habibi,” noting that Vance would be called upon to swear him into the Senate in January.
In just three days, “Habibi” had gone from an election-night line to the name of a federal political committee.
Then came a more explicit description of the political “movement” surrounding El-Sayed from the chairman of the organization hosting him.
At 7:53 p.m., Arab America Foundation Chair Issam Andoni, a local tech entrepreneur whom the emcee had introduced as a “long time supporter of El-Sayed, stepped forward with a scarf over his shoulders designed with the keffiyeh fishbone pattern and the word “PALESTINE.”
Andoni denounced Trump and Republicans and lauded El-Sayed’s success over what he called the “Democrat Zionist.”
“But Habibi Abdul,” he said, to laughter and applause, “you destroyed them all.”
El-Sayed smiled quietly.
“You destroyed AIPAC twice,” Andoni continued, referring to the primary and the general election.
“He showed them a steel backbone,” he told the audience. “That steel backbone they never saw before. And that steel backbone is what created a movement behind him.”
Andoni predicted, “And I’m sure that movement, it’s going to grow and grow and grow. And it’s going to connect with other movements.”
“And with the sumud,” the Arabic word for “steadfastness,” “of our people in Gaza, West Bank and Lebanon, I’m sure we’ll see a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
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“Palestine will be free,” a woman shouted.
Al-Sayed listened quietly, his hands clasped in front of him.
As the crowd erupted in applause and cheers, Andoni continued, “A free Palestine, free Palestine from the river to the sea. Free from occupation. Free from Zionists. And free from corruption. And free from apartheid.”
The phrase “from the river to the sea” is fiercely contested. Supporters describe it as a call for Palestinian “freedom,” while critics, including many Jewish organizations, interpret it as an anti-Semitic call for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state from the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.
The implications became less theoretical when Fox News Digital later asked people at the gathering what Palestinian freedom meant to them.
Abdullah Abualrub, Virginia state organizer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, was manning the organization’s table at the summit.
Speaking explicitly in his personal capacity, Abualrub told Fox News Digital he supported a Palestinian right of return.
“I believe that all Palestinians should have a right to return to their country,” he said, describing his own family as part of the Palestinian diaspora.
Asked about Palestinians returning to territory within modern-day Israel and receiving equal political rights, Abualrub said the “dream is that everyone lives in peace” and that Jewish people “who are following the law” should be “free to live wherever they want.”
Experts told Fox News Digital that, under the rubric of a core set of principles, called “thawabet,” adopted by the Palestinian national movement decades ago, a broader political program includes a one-state solution “free from Zionists,” and the right of return to modern-day Israel for Palestinians displaced during the creation of the state of Israel and their descendants.
El-Sayed’s spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment on his position on a one-state solution with a “right of return” for Palestinians to Israel.
A short embrace followed Andoni’s introduction, and then El-Sayed stepped to the microphone.
“My name is Abdul-Rehman Mohammed El-Sayed,” he said to applause and laughter. “And I’m honored to be the next United States senator from the great state of Michigan,” the “capital of Arab America.”
He walked through stories that have become part of his public narrative: how his name contains sounds Americans struggle to pronounce, how his grandmother once told him each of his cousins possessed some quality superior to his and how he shortened Abdul-Rahman to Abdul at a time when singer Paula Abdul and basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar made the name familiar to Americans.
Six minutes later, at 7:59 p.m., a woman, Rima Ayyash, rose from the front row and let out the high-pitched celebratory ululations called zaghrouta.
El-Sayed paused as the room reacted.
“I don’t know how one follows that up,” he said.
El-Sayed then moved from identity and domestic policy into foreign policy and Israel.
As he spoke about creating a society supportive of all, some of his backers began corralling a Fox News Digital reporter, blocking footage and repeatedly demanding that the credentialed reporter move away from the stage, where the other media was freely gathered.
One of them, Omar Kurdi, a featured speaker at the summit, had just whispered in the ear of Barmada, the anti-Israel activist wearing the kefiyyeh turban.
Kurdi, a singer and rehabilitation nonprofit executive from Cincinnati, Kurdi published a song, “I am Palestinian,” last October, accompanied by a music video incorporating anti-Israel protest footage and repeatedly using the refrain, “From the river to the sea, liberation is all I see.”
Andoni arrived and questioned why Fox News Digital was reporting on a “cultural” event that wasn’t “political.”
Finally, the foundation’s co-founders intervened and told them to stop harassing the Fox News Digital reporter.
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At the microphone, El-Sayed invoked “self-determination” and developed an argument about America’s role in the international system created after World War II.
“The beauty of this country is our ideals,” El-Sayed said.
“We led the effort in this country to build a rules-based international order,” he continued. “We built the United Nations and the World Health Organization and the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court so that we could uphold the ideals of democracy. We did that. And then we proceeded to be the chief violator of exactly those same ideals. To call our country to those ideals became an open question, how could you?”
El-Sayed’s attack on the “rules-based international order” echoed language used late last year by Singham, whose financial network has supported CodePink and other left-wing organizations.
Singham argued that the existing order was built on a false narrative of World War II and called for a “new world order” based on multilateralism advanced by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China.
“The international rules-based order was created by another lie,” Singham said.
“If we want to therefore have a new world order that is based on the multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II,” Singham had said.
El-Sayed turned specifically to Palestinians.
“I don’t know why we cannot call for equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination,” he said. “I don’t know why can’t we call for the idea that a Palestinian child should be able to grow up in the land of their forefathers without having to worry about a bomb paid for by our tax dollars dropping on them.”
“We don’t want our tax dollars spent abroad to do genocide, apartheid, and war,” El-Sayed said, repeating a talking point of protesters from the red-green alliance, like Benjamin, Barry and Barbada. “We believe in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination.”
Andoni made his own priorities explicit in an interview with Fox News Digital after the speech.
Asked what he wanted El-Sayed to tackle first in the Senate, the foundation chairman didn’t hesitate.
“Cutting aid to Israel,” Andoni said. “Military aid especially.”
“That is from our perspective as a community probably number one,” he said.
Andoni acknowledged that El-Sayed himself had emphasized issues including “Medicare for all.”
“If it’s up to me,” Andoni said, cutting military aid to Israel “is what I will advise him.”
No mention was made of the fact that Prtesident Trump last week announced an end to the $4 billion in aid the U.S. currently provides to Israel.
Andoni also embraced the presidential speculation.
“I would love for that,” he told Fox News Digital, before questioning whether America was ready for an El-Sayed presidency.
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The CAIR presence offered another window into the political infrastructure around El-Sayed.
Abualrub’s table was filled with pocket-sized trifold guides explaining what to do if “Law Enforcement Approaches You.”
The first tip: “You have the right to remain silent.”
CAIR itself is a 501(c)(3) and does not endorse political candidates, a distinction Abualrub emphasized to Fox News Digital. But CAIR’s separate political advocacy arm, CAIR Action, endorsed El-Sayed, while its affiliated Unity and Justice Fund super PAC independently spent more than $445,000 supporting his Senate candidacy, according to federal campaign-finance records.
A Fox News Digital review separately found more than $100,000 in contributions to El-Sayed from current or former CAIR employees or leaders.
Asked what aligned CAIR with El-Sayed’s message, Abualrub said the organization wanted “more aid for the Palestinians.”
Speaking personally, he added that he wanted “an end to the genocide and our tax dollars going to funding the genocide.”
But not everyone at the summit viewed El-Sayed primarily through foreign policy.
Will Langhorne, a Washington resident and former professional race car driver, said there was “a lot of excitement” around El-Sayed but called presidential speculation premature.
Langhorne said El-Sayed’s message was about “inclusiveness and his care for Michigan and Michiganders” and issues such as health care and affordability.
“A lot of people want to point to foreign policy issues,” Langhorne said, “but that’s not really what was important to him and his message in connecting with the state of Michigan.”
Mohammed Al-Bidawi, an Egyptian American attendee, saw something different in the presidential speculation: representation.
“It’s interesting to see someone, his name is Abd al-Rahman, and people ask him to run for president in United States,” Al-Bidawi told Fox News Digital.
Even if El-Sayed never succeeded in such a campaign, he said, a Muslim and Arab American running for president would demonstrate that “we are equal.”
Another attendee, Hisham, who said he was from Palestine, urged patience.
“I think he should focus on being a senator for now,” he said. “Let him prove himself as a senator. And then he can go for a bigger” office.
The political rhetoric was repeatedly interspersed with cultural celebration.
In the front row, a few seat away from Benjamin and Barmada, popular Jordanian singer Hussam Allabad stood up with a wide smile and interrupted El-Sayed, recording himself in a selfie video as he led the crowd in a traditional Jordanian ahāzīj, rhythmic Arab folk chants built around call-and-response singing and synchronized clapping, a tradition commonly performed at weddings and other celebrations.
El-Sayed eventually brought his remarks back to the significance of his election and the conflict with Israel.
“Michigan proved that Arab America is America, too,” he said.
“We want an America where we stand with democracy against genocide,” El-Sayed continued. “We want an America where we uphold international law.”
“We want an America where our tax dollars are spent to invest in our fellow Americans rather than to buy bombs and tanks for other people’s countries.”
The Arab America Foundation then honored El-Sayed with its first “Pathbreaker Award.”
Then, about 40 minutes after his SUV first pulled up to the Marriott, the night’s themes converged in one final exchange.
At 8:20 p.m., as foundation board members took their final photographs with him, a supporter handed El-Sayed a baseball cap.
El-Sayed studied the words across its front and smiled widely.
“JD HABIBI.”
The phrase from his election-night victory speech had become political merchandise.
With the “JD HABIBI” cap on, El-Sayed walked off the stage and back through the side door, passing through a security chute created by volunteers to hold back the crowd.
Outside at the security entrance, Fox News Digital asked asked El-Sayed why he had created Habibi PAC and whether he was seeking higher office.
This time, he paused.
El-Sayed stared toward the camera and pointed to the “JD HABIBI” hat.
And that’s, when asked if he’s seeking higher office as president, he responded, “Nope, I want to serve my state as U.S. senator.”
Then he ducked into the waiting GMC Yukon Denali SUV.
His security detail paused long enough for him to complete the thought before shutting the door.
At 8:24 p.m., 45 minutes after arriving, the Yukon pulled away with El-Sayed inside.
Back in the ballroom, CodePink’s Benjamin danced to a live performance by Franco-Algerian singer Nadir Benmansour, weaving between dancers with her arms overhead.
Former Al Jazeera bureau chief Abderrahim Foukara posted a video of Benjamin dancing.
His headline captured the dual character of the evening: “Of protest and celebration.”
The political activism continued after the celebration ended.
Saturday night, the anti-Israel activist Barmada caused a disturbance with other activists at a Washington Capitals ice hockey game, unfurling an Israeli flag smeared with red paint resembling blood and the words: “ISRAEL KILLS.” She later posted a celebratory video of their antics.
“Get out of here!” hockey fans yelled.
And Sunday evening, Benjamin posted a carefully curated video on Instagram, headlined “A NEW DAWN IN CONGRESS” and featuring highlights from Friday night, including Barry’s footage of her hands raised in triumph as El-Sayed took the stage.
“There is hope,” she exclaimed, over the live music from the summit’s ballroom.