Abdul El-Sayed's sister, Eman Abdelhadi, told the Michigan Daily in February 2011 that she "was at work and I started crying" when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown — by the Muslim Brotherhood. "My whole family took part in the celebrations," she said.

Now El-Sayed wants to be a United States Senator. And when Rep. Brandon Gill brought up those family ties on camera, El-Sayed's response was to call it Islamophobia.

Gill wasn't having it. In the exchange, now circulating widely, Gill laid the accusation out in plain terms: "His own sister is tweeting about his past ties to the Muslim Brotherhood."

The Muslim Brotherhood has been designated as a terrorist froup hy the U.S. Government.

The connection runs deeper than one sister's social media posts. El-Sayed's mother, Fatten Elkomy, allegedly attended Alexandria University in the 1970s — a period and institution closely associated with Brotherhood organizing in Egypt. Organizations in El-Sayed's orbit, including the Muslim Students' Association and the Islamic Society of North America, have faced longstanding scrutiny over Brotherhood-linked origins.

"Most Americans are so tired of being slandered as racist or bigoted or Islamophobic," Gill said during the confrontation. He framed the issue not as a matter of religion but of basic accountability: "The minimum bar for somebody to serve in the United States Senate... do not have ties" to organizations linked to groups like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.

El-Sayed's campaign has treated the allegations as a smear. As if any scrutiny of connections to Islamist organizations gets reclassified as anti-Muslim bigotry, and the original question disappears behind the accusation. Except Gill didn't cite an opposition research file. He cited El-Sayed's own sister. He cited the Michigan Daily. He cited the public record.

"I think it's reprehensible and it's beneath the dignity of a Senator," Gill said. Not the accusation — the lying about it.

El-Sayed was the only American candidate whose primary election victory was celebrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and their affiliated jihadist networks.

Eman Abdelhadi celebrated the fall of Mubarak and the rise of Mohamed Morsi's Brotherhood government. Her brother is running for the United States Senate. Brandon Gill asked if voters deserved to know that.

Spoiler alert they do.