Hank Kennedy FAIR
Political cartoons commenting on Michigan’s 2026 US Senate race have been dominated by a torrent of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism directed at Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, an Arab-American Muslim. These caricatures do not come out of nowhere, of course, but reflect the poisonous atmosphere of the campaign against El-Sayed—with slurs coming not only from fringe hate groups, but also from prominent Republican senators and even the White House.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) accused El-Sayed, sans evidence, of being a “jihadist sympathizer” who is “infiltrating from within” (Mother Jones, 8/16/26). Britt’s fellow Alabama Republican, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, posted on social media that El-Sayed is a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST” (X, 8/5/26).
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Fox News (8/8/26; Time, 8/13/26) that El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are “Islamists”: “They want Sharia law, they hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate capitalism, they hate America.” President Trump got in on the act by calling El-Sayed a “jihadist” (Religion News Service, 8/18/26).
El-Sayed’s Republican opponent Mike Rogers has followed with smears of his own, falsely accusing El-Sayed of having “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood” (Fox 2 Detroit, 8/5/26) and believing “America deserved 9/11” (New York Times, 8/8/26). A study by the Washington Post (8/23/26) found that El-Sayed’s primary victory led to a “wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric.” Nearly 1 in 3 posts from right-wing social media accounts mentioned “Islam,” “Muslims” or “Shariah.”
‘Death to America, Vote El-Sayed!’
Cartoon by Henry Payne (8/5/26). The real Abdul El-Sayed (Instagram, 8/4/26) says, “I love America enough to understand that America ought to be America for all of her children” —but where’s the fun in that?Stereotypes and slanders like these have a long history of showing up in the cartoons on the nation’s editorial pages. In 1982, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) published the report Cruel and Unusual: Negative Images of Arabs in American Popular Culture. A section on political cartoons concluded:
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, the anti-Arab political cartoon has unfortunately become standard fare on the editorial pages of American newspapers. The portrayal of Arabs in these cartoons has been unrelievedly negative. Sometimes…it can only be described as racist.
Some of the political cartoons dealing with the Senate race in Michigan have trafficked in similar tropes. The most prolific contributor to this smear campaign has been Henry Payne, a freelance political cartoonist who also serves as an automobile critic for the Detroit News. Payne’s work has previously cracked jokes about assassinating Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (FAIR.org, 3/27/26), so his hostility towards El-Sayed comes as no real shock.
Payne (Andrews McMeel, 8/5/26) illustrated El-Sayed on stage shouting in front of a sign reading “Death to America, Vote El-Sayed in ’26!” In real life, of course, El-Sayed (Instagram, 8/4/26) speaks eloquently about his love for America, noting, “I know exactly what America did for me.”
A Henry Payne cartoon (8/15/26) has the New York Times giving five stars to “Woke 2″—associated with “socialism forever,” trans rights (“WNBA for Dudes”) and anti-Zionism (smeared as “no Jews”). Has Payne ever read the New York Times?
A similar inversion was the point of another Payne cartoon (Andrews McMeel, 8/15/26) showing a smirking El-Sayed wearing a T-shirt with the “no” sign above the word “Jews.” The non-cartoon El-Sayed (Meet the Press, 8/9/26; C-SPAN, 8/25/26) speaks warmly of growing up in a largely Jewish community, saying, “Judaism and the Jewish people are a light unto the world.”
Perhaps wisely, given the Detroit metro area’s large Arab-American population, Payne’s scurrilous cartoons did not run in either of Detroit’s major newspapers, the Detroit Free Press or the Detroit News. When Payne’s “Death to America” cartoon ran in the Chattanooga Times Free Press (8/10/26), it prompted a reader (8/14/26) to write in:
Cartoons are effective when they identify irony based on truth. This cartoon was a lie. Truth is a foundational human value and a critical element of democracy. We need truth now more than ever from our newspapers and elected officials.
Payne’s employer, the Detroit News (8/18/26), described anti-Muslim extremist and January 6 rioter Jake Lang as an “activist” when he brought his “Christian Crusader March” to Dearborn in order to “stop the Islamification of America.” It is unlikely that a marcher looking to stop the “Judaization of America” would get a similarly value-neutral description from the paper.
‘Look for the Soviet Union label’
Apparently David Hitch (7/22/26) couldn’t think of any good Ottoman Empire gags.
When not delving into anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes, some cartoonists call up the ghost of Joseph McCarthy to tie El-Sayed, a self-described capitalist, to socialism, Marxism and Communism. This invocation of McCarthy was literal for cartoonist Steve Kelly (Creators, 7/16/26), who described the Wisconsin demagogue approvingly as “decades ahead of his time.”
A.F. Branco lumped El-Sayed with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as people who say (falsely, we are to presume) that they are not Communists (Creators, 8/19/26). Kelley’s caricature of El-Sayed points to his strong support from “socialist organizations like the DSA” (Creators, 8/6/26), although the Democratic Socialists of America has not, in fact, endorsed his campaign. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren has endorsed El-Sayed, though Kelley wrongly identifies her as a socialist.)
Jon Russo has repeatedly returned to the theme of El-Sayed as closet socialist. One cartoon entitled “True Lies” has El-Sayed stating he is “not a socialist” whilst being puppeted by Senator Bernie Sanders (Creators, 7/29/26). Russo then showed El-Sayed hooking Michigan with a hammer-and-sickle-shaped fishing pole (Creators, 8/4/26). In yet another Russo piece, the “Pied [Hasan] Piker” leads El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar off the edge of the Soviet hammer and sickle (Creators, 8/13/26).
After the United Auto Workers endorsed El-Sayed, cartoonist David Hitch captioned a piece “Look for the Soviet Union label” (Springfield, Ore., Chronicle, 7/22/26). Hitch’s work recalls, perhaps unconsciously, a far-right pamphlet from the 1940s attacking the Congress of Industrial Organizations, today part of the AFL-CIO: “Vote CIO and Get a Soviet America.”
The opiate of the people, inshallah
This (Margolis & Cox, 8/6/26) is not what “inshallah” means—and definitely not how Muslims use it.
Some cartoonists attempt to depict El-Sayed as both an Muslim fanatic and a Communist—despite the latter ideology’s famous association with atheism. An offering by Margolis & Cox (Cagle Cartoons, 8/6/26) had El-Sayed sporting a hammer-and-sickle button while squashing a Democratic donkey that Bernie Sanders vainly attempts to pull along. El-Sayed is yelling “Inshallah”—“God willing” in Arabic—which makes no sense contextually, but reminds readers that El-Sayed is not one of our kind.
Cartoons like these echo far-right claims about “Islamic socialism” (Washington Examiner, 8/6/26)—or sometimes “Islamo-Marxists,” “Islamo-Communists,” “Islamo-leftists,” etc.—who are ostensibly moving to place the United States under a government equal parts Stalinist and shariah. In 2021, professor Philippe Marlière (New Arab, 2/19/21) stated the term “Islamo-leftism” was “reminiscent of the antisemitic ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ slur of the 1930s, which blamed the spread of Communism on Jews.”
The Nazis were among the prime spreaders of the “Judeo-Bolshevism” canard. In Europe, some of the loudest voices raised against the threat of “Islamo-leftism” have been France’s National Rally, a neo-fascist political party (Middle East Eye, 3/5/21).
Not all political cartoons about El-Sayed have been of such a hysterical tenor. John Autcher tweaked voters with surnames like Przestrzelski, Mellendorfer and Lipschitz who find the candidate’s surname “weird” (Michigan Public Radio, 8/7/26). Nevertheless, as a growing number of Arab- and Muslim-Americans run for office, it is sadly the case that too many cartoonists caricature candidates as inherently violent, un-American and disloyal solely because of their religion and ethnic background.
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