Michigan US Senate candidate signaled support for Egypt’s pro-democracy movement in 2012, not Islamist group

The Republican campaign to defeat Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race by casting him as an Islamic extremist is based on a false claim first made by the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer eight years ago, a Guardian review of the evidence reveals.

Loomer, an influential outside adviser to Donald Trump who calls herself “a proud Islamophobe”, has claimed since El-Sayed entered politics in 2018 that an open letter he signed in support of democracy in Egypt in 2012 was a public endorsement of the Muslim Brotherhood. The text of the letter, however, does not even mention the Muslim Brotherhood, and is not, as Loomer maintains, “a pledge” of support for the Egyptian Islamist group.

Warnings of escalating clampdown on press freedom come after Cairo court convicts Attalah of managing an unlicensed website

Lina Attalah, a prominent Egyptian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr, has been released from detention by Egypt’s authorities and had her website ordered to be shut down by a court amid an intensifying crackdown on independent media in the country.

Attalah was taken briefly into custody after a Cairo court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website, prompting fresh international concerns over press freedom in Egypt.