The Unity & Justice Fund — a super PAC with direct ties to CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations — pumped $175,000 into Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan Senate primary campaign. Then it sent out a fundraising blast bragging about what that money bought.

"We're doing more than just securing electoral wins; we're building a movement in Masjids and communities," the PAC wrote. Masjids is the Arabic word for mosques.

So a PAC linked to an organization designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in both Florida and Texas is openly boasting about turning houses of worship into political organizing hubs. Imagine a Christian PAC sending that email — "We're building a movement in churches" — and picture how fast the IRS would revoke every tax exemption within a three-county radius.

The money trail gets cozier. El-Sayed's father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, serves as a Board Director of the Michigan CAIR chapter. Jukaku personally donated $100,000 to the campaign in July. A separate entity called Fighting for Michigan PAC paid more than $40,000 to a consulting firm owned by Zaineb Hussein — who also happens to be the Chief of Staff to Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.

That's a father-in-law on CAIR's board writing six-figure checks, a PAC funneling tens of thousands to the Dearborn mayor's chief of staff, and a fundraising apparatus that openly credits mosque networks for delivering votes. All for one Senate candidate.

The organizational ambition doesn't stop in Michigan. The Unity & Justice Fund has set a $1.5 million fundraising goal for the midterms and claims to be preparing more than 200 Muslim candidates to run for office nationwide. They're backing Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic mayor of New York City, and Adam Hamawy, a congressional candidate in New Jersey. This isn't a one-state operation. It's a pipeline.

And the financial engineering goes deeper than standard political fundraising. The Fiqh Council of North America — a body of Islamic scholars — issued a fatwa allowing political donations to count toward zakat, the Islamic obligation of tithing. That means contributions to groups like the Unity & Justice Fund can be treated as a religious duty. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas has pushed the Designating Hamas Affiliates in America Act of 2026 in response to CAIR's expanding political footprint.

The connection between CAIR and designated terror entities isn't speculation. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in USA v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the landmark 2007 federal case involving the funneling of money to Hamas. That designation has never been rescinded. Reporter Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations noted that the group initially used the word "Masjids" in its fundraising materials — then quietly scrubbed it from later versions.

So they said the quiet part out loud, realized it was loud, and edited it. But the screenshot survived.

The question isn't whether a CAIR-linked PAC is organizing in mosques. They told us they are. The question is why mosque-based political organizing gets celebrated as "grassroots democracy" while church-based organizing gets investigated as a tax violation.

The answer, of course, is that the rules were never about the rules. They're about who's following them.