Abdul El-Sayed told a reporter yesterday that scrutiny of him is “the same thing that they did to JFK when he ran for president… the notion that because he was Catholic, that somehow he had dual loyalty.” I have written about JFK. That claim is a grotesque perversion of history. In 1960, no Catholic had ever been elected president. Al Smith’s 1928 landslide loss was driven in large part by Protestant fears—rooted in centuries of Reformation conflict and reinforced by nativist suspicion—that a Catholic president would answer to the Vatican rather than the Constitution. JFK met it head-on in Houston in 1960, pledging absolute separation of church and state, and the charge collapsed because there was nothing under it. That is not what is happening with El-Sayed. Being Muslim is not the disqualifier. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, serves as Minnesota’s attorney general. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib serve in the House. Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York City. CAIR’s own 2026 directory counts roughly 255 Muslim elected officials nationwide, including four in the House and dozens in state legislatures. Voters have repeatedly elected Muslims to state and federal office without treating their faith as disqualifying. The issue is not prayer; it is politics, associations, and family ties to an ideology that rejects the secular liberal order El-Sayed claims to defend. El-Sayed flatly denied on Meet the Press any family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the U.S. listed this year as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity for material support to Hamas. His half-sister, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, has posted otherwise. In 2012 she wrote: “My family has long been MB,” though she added that it “navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively.” In 2013 she wrote that she had “family jailed for being a part of it.” She also wrote of her mother’s early-1970s Brotherhood activism in college. Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, later worked for the U.S. arm of a charity network Treasury designated in 2004 for supporting al-Qaeda; she was never charged. El-Sayed calls the posts “hearsay” and distances himself from his mother by saying he wasn’t raised by her. But his flat denial and his sister’s own words can’t both be right. There is more. El-Sayed confirmed on camera that his sister-in-law was on the federal terror watchlist. She sued, a district court ruled in her favor, and an appeals court reversed. The FBI won’t say where she stands now. No one accuses him of any role. His father-in-law is a longtime board member of the Islamic Society of North America. None of these questions are about how he prays; they are questions about reported links to an organization whose Egyptian branch the United States has now formally labeled for supporting terrorism. After a man rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel synagogue near Detroit in an attack authorities treated as targeted at Jews, El-Sayed’s response included the line “hurt people hurt people.” He later apologized under pressure from Jewish Democrats, saying he should not have offered “context” that trampled on the victims’ pain. That is not the language of someone simply defending religious freedom. He has also campaigned repeatedly with Hasan Piker, who in 2019 said “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed later called the remark “dumb” and said America did not deserve the attacks, but the association remains. Voters are entitled to notice who a candidate chooses to platform. JFK faced prejudice against his faith. El-Sayed faces reporting on his family’s documented embrace of a group now designated by the U.S. government for supporting Hamas, his own comments after an attack on a synagogue, and his political alliances. Equating the two is not a defense of religious liberty. It is an attempt to weaponize a real historical injustice in order to shut down legitimate questions about radicalism and national security. The Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. It does not require voters or journalists to pretend that family ties to a designated terrorist organization, or responses to domestic terrorism, are off-limits simply because the candidate is Muslim. History is not a prop for that evasion.