Abdelhamid Algizawi of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor called Ismail Haniyeh a ‘heroic martyr’ and ‘symbol of jihad’
Left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s imam scrubbed videos of his sermons from YouTube, including one in which he gave an “absentee funeral prayer” hailing the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as a “heroic martyr” and another in which he urged his congregants to vote for El-Sayed.
The Muslim Community Association (MCA) of Ann Arbor’s YouTube channel featured dozens of recordings of Imam Abdelhamid Algizawi’s sermons as recently as Tuesday but now shows only the message, “This channel doesn’t have any content.” A video of Algizawi’s Aug. 2, 2024, sermon eulogizing Haniyeh, which was also accessible on Tuesday, is now “unavailable” and set to “private.” So is a sermon Algizawi delivered in the wake of El-Sayed’s primary victory, which the imam described as a “very big victory for Muslims” and “for the Islamic nation.”
The removal comes in the wake of a series of Washington Free Beacon reports on Algizawi and the MCA of Ann Arbor, where El-Sayed typically prays, according to a source familiar with the situation. There, Algizawi spoke about El-Sayed personally, telling his congregants that the Muslim community had an “obligation” to vote for El-Sayed in November to “change the society.” He also eulogized Haniyeh in a sermon delivered two days after the late terrorist leader died from an explosive device smuggled into his guesthouse in Tehran.
“He is a symbol of jihad, a symbol of struggle, a symbol of patriotism, and a symbol of devotion,” Algizawi said of Haniyeh. “No one loves him except someone who loves God and his Messenger, and no one hates him except an enemy of Islam. He is a righteous man, one of the righteous. … He wanted to liberate Palestine, his land and his homeland. He sought nothing more than that. Yet despite this, the unjust and wicked killed him. … We ask Almighty God to grant him a place in Paradise. O God, place him among the martyrs and the righteous.”
In other sermons, Algizawi railed against homosexuality, calling it a “fashion” and saying Muslims must reject it because it “cannot bring stability to life” and is “against human nature.”
“Also, Muslims cannot compromise their religion,” Algizawi said in 2022. “We cannot say, ‘Hey, because I am a Muslim, I’m American, we are living in America, we have…’ No, we cannot compromise our religion.”
Despite the MCA of Ann Arbor’s move to scrub its YouTube page, the sermons can still be viewed. The Middle East Media Research Institute captured a video of Algizawi’s sermon on El-Sayed’s primary victory, and the Free Beacon did the same in the case of Algizawi’s eulogy of Haniyeh. The imam’s criticisms of gays came in a 2022 address to a Sacramento-area Islamic center, which has not deleted the video as of Wednesday evening.
The MCA of Ann Arbor, Algizawi, and El-Sayed did not respond to requests for comment.
On the campaign trail, El-Sayed has contradicted Algizawi’s sermons on homosexuality, saying during Pride Month in 2025, “This month and every month, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community in their struggle for equal rights and dignity. I’ll always fight for an America where all of us can live and thrive as we are.”
El-Sayed’s views on Islamic terrorists, however, are more in line with Algizawi’s. After a Lebanese-American man whose brother was a Hezbollah commander attacked the Temple Israel synagogue in Michigan, El-Sayed said, “It’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people,” a remark he later said was aimed at providing “context for why it happened.” During a July 2025 campaign event, meanwhile, El-Sayed blamed America for “creating” terrorism, video footage first reported by the Free Beacon shows.
“There is a level of pain and frustration and a level of lack of agency that they have to feel to do something so insane and absurd, right?” he said. “And so I’ve often tried to ask, like, so what moves somebody into that, and how is it that we’re behaving that may get somebody to think that we don’t see them, and that’s creating pain?”
“And I think too often, the way we’ve engaged in the world has been that we set up this rules-based international order, and then we break the rules of the rules-based international order, and that creates a situation where there are a lot of people who look at us and say that’s hypocritical and that’s wrong,” he went on. “And I think the best thing we can do is be honest about that.”
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