Tyler May

Congratulations, Abdul El-Sayed. You won. You outsmarted millions. If voters in other states had been allowed to vote for you, many more would have fallen for your charm. Keep going and maybe one day it's the presidency. Like it or not, they will call you Senator. You beat them at their own game. Western democracy gave you representation, and you're using that power to shape your country (yes, your country) closer to your worldview. Who knows, maybe you'll even work to undo the Muslim Brotherhood designation. As an observant Muslim, why wouldn't you pursue what you believe in? And let's be honest: you read your voters far better than they read you. Your critics put the questions about your associations in front of them. Your voters, many of them Jewish, shrugged and backed you anyway. As we say in Arabic: القانون لا يحمي المغفلين. The law doesn't protect the gullible. The political current that cheered your victory has spent decades working patiently toward this, for the good of humanity as it sees it, and for the good of its children. I disagree. I grew up where Islam has ruled since the 7th century. Since the eighties, the Muslim Brotherhood has promised us الإسلام هو الحل, "Islam is the solution." We lived the result, and nothing could be further from the truth. That was our experience in the Muslim world, the same world your parents chose to leave. Maybe America will be different. Maybe here it will finally work, because the people who mistake your smug smile for a sweet one are so much easier to win over. They have no resilience. They take every smile at face value. And they have so little sense of who they are that some would trade it for anything that offers certainty. Congratulations. The hard work paid off. While your side spent decades organizing, the people who should have been paying attention were busy inventing new identities, new grievances, new reasons to be offended, new things to smoke, new gods. Then the Palestinian cause led them straight into bed with Islamism. And for Palestine, they'll march hypnotized to the end of the earth. @AbdulElSayed