A Michigan Senate Candidate’s Ties to an Iran-Linked Imam

The most memorable detail in this episode isn’t a quote from the interview—it’s a historical parallel. Glenn Beck asks listeners to imagine a Senate candidate in Michigan in 1942 whose friend and donor was a man personally appointed by Hitler to keep the German Navy ideologically pure. That candidate hugs him publicly, takes his money, and keeps him out of campaign materials. Then Beck says the standard that would disqualify that candidate in 1942 should apply the same way today.

The candidate in question is Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for U.S. Senate in Michigan. The man at the center of the controversy is Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, who runs the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights. According to Beck, Elahi was personally appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini to run the political-ideological office of the Iranian Navy, a job he described in 2017 as taking officers who had gone “western” and bringing them back into the Shia Twelver philosophy. Elahi has also blamed Israel and Mossad for 9/11, defended Hezbollah as “resistance,” held a vigil after an American airstrike killed an Iranian commander, and called the Ayatollah’s death “an honor” at “the most wretched hands on earth”—meaning American hands.