If words of wisdom could cure the Republicans’ addiction to Islamophobia, these might suffice:

“Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect.”

Those remarks were voiced six days after 9/11 by President George W. Bush. Which means that in today’s depraved GOP, he’d be a bleeding-heart leftist.

What we’re witnessing across our benighted land, from the White House construction site to the MAGA grassroots, is a demagogic crusade to reduce Michigan-born Oxford and Columbia-educated medical doctor Abdul El-Sayed to a “terrorist” cartoon.

It’s a cinch to explain their motive. Control of the U.S. Senate may hinge on the outcome of the Michigan Senate race, and with Trump’s poll numbers in the toilet, indulging the cult’s racist id and scaring the hell out of voters is arguably the most promising strategy.

Granted, hard-core Michigan MAGAts wouldn’t vote for a Democrat even if that candidate was a white Christian male who’d partied with Jeffrey Epstein. But in that likely tight swing-state election, every vote may be crucial. If even a tiny share can be conned into recoiling at the prospect of a Muslim in the Senate, Islamophobics will spike the ball in the end zone.

I’m not implying El-Sayed, a former Rhodes scholar and author of three books on public health, is a perfect candidate. Some of his progressive stances, like “Medicare for All,” may alienate moderate voters, and his denunciation of Israel’s war in Gaza is anathema to some Jewish voters. His narrow win last Tuesday in the Senate Democratic primary showed he’s weak (thus far) with working-class voters and Black voters.

Healthy skepticism on those fronts is obviously warranted. But MAGA’s personal smears are already far beyond the pale.

Will they work? Possibly. Fox News has long been a cultural blight – it does for journalism what toxic dumps do for the environment – and for three decades it has pumped Islamophobia into millions of weak minds. And we have Trump, the propaganda outlet’s demon spawn, who as early as 2011 was playing the pejorative Muslim card on Obama. Yeah, he conceded on camera, maybe the president does have a U.S. birth certificate, “but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim.” (It didn’t.)

But El-Sayed is indeed a Muslim, and Trump’s toadies are in low dudgeon. Tommy Tuberville, the meathead Alabama senator, posted the other day without a shred of evidence that El-Sayed is a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” and a “TERRORIST.” The Senate Republicans’ super PAC says El-Sayed will “unleash terror.” Ted Cruz told Fox News that El-Sayed wants “Sharia?law,” despite the dearth of evidence and El-Sayed’s repeatedly voiced respect for the U.S. Constitution and religious freedom. And according to Mike Rogers, the Senate Republican candidate, El-Sayed supposedly believes that America “deserved” 9/11. That’s a viral lie; in truth, a lefty commentator who supports El-Sayed said it in a podcast seven years ago and later retracted it. For what it’s worth, El-Sayed wrote in 2020 that the “craven” 9/11 attacks had “devastated” him.

For the record, El-Sayed at age 31 held public office – executive director of the Detroit Health department and city Health Officer – drawing on his specialty as an epidemiologist. That doesn’t seem to track with the Islamophobic stereotype of a violent terrorist, and what makes the haters’ hypocrisy even more detestable is the fact that they have no qualms about routinely selling weaponry to white Christians who shoot up public places and secure America’s standing among high-income nations as the leader in gun homicides.

All told, El-Sayed is situated at ground zero in an election year when America is truly at the crossroads. Are low-information voters still receptive to the mendacious messaging peddled so successfully by the Trumpists and pre-MAGA Republicans? Perhaps not – according to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 25 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim presidential candidate, down from 38 percent in 2015 – but implanted fears of El-Sayed may bloom in the privacy of the voting booth. That would be unfortunate. To indulge those fears, and elect a Republican senator, is to aid and abet the teetering fascist cult.

If only those who hesitate could at least entertain what George W. Bush said: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is about. Islam is peace. Muslims most not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.”

And for the umpteenth time since 2016, we will determine whether that America still exists.

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