What Republicans mean when they ask Abdul El-Sayed to ‘disavow’ the Muslim Brotherhood

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At a town hall event in Caro, Michigan, over the weekend, a man in the audience asked Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”

It was “a simple question,” the man insisted.

El-Sayed immediately recognized it as something more. “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” he replied, then turned it back on the man: “Why are you asking the question?”

Why was a Michigan-born Democratic nominee being asked about the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Middle Eastern Islamist organization? Throughout the Senate campaign, Republicans, including President Donald Trump and the GOP candidate, Mike Rogers, have sought to associate El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, with Islamic extremism.

Most recently, they have pointed to old, resurfaced social media posts from his half-sister, describing how their mother — who left El-Sayed in his early childhood — had been active in the organization in the ’70s.

The implication was familiar, if tired. Muslims in the West, especially after 9/11, have been asked repeatedly to take responsibility for acts of violence carried out by other Muslims around the world.

But the word choice was distinctive. When Muslims are asked about terrorism, they are typically asked to “condemn” it. This presumes a certain collective guilt by association, said Todd Green, a religion scholar and author of “Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn’t Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism.”

“You just have to make the insinuation, and it puts Muslims on the defensive,” Green said.

The word “disavow” makes a subtle, but important, shift, said Grace Paterson, a philosopher of language. A person may condemn something without necessarily having any specific ties to it. A disavowal suggests something stronger.

“There’s a lot more implicit in the disavowal question,” she said. “You can condemn things you just learned about. Disavowal, I think, brings in this implicit content that there’s a significant connection between the person and the thing.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.

Illustration by Alberto Mier/CNN

“Disavow” comes from the Old French “désavouer,” a negation or reversal of the word “avouer” meaning “avow.” “Avow,” from the Latin root “advocāre,” means to acknowledge a person as one’s own.

To ask someone to “disavow” something, then, is to ask them to reject a previous affiliation. This affiliation is generally understood to be serious — for instance, it would sound odd for someone to “disavow” their fandom for a book series they no longer enjoy.

In politics, “condemn” and “disavow” are parts of an almost, but not quite, interchangeable lexicon for discussing something that has been deemed a problem, along with such words as “repudiate,” “denounce” and “disown.”

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During the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, his association with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who had made derogatory comments about Jews, became a point of contention. Facing mounting pressure to respond, the Jackson campaign released a statement: “I find such statements or comments to be reprehensible and morally indefensible,” it read. “I disavow such comments and thoughts.”

The statement was characterized in the press alternately as a denouncement, a repudiation and a disavowal.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama used or was prompted to use a number of those words in response to the outcry over remarks made by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

“I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies,” he said in an initial statement .

As the news cycle failed to die down, Obama tried to distinguish between the man and his remarks. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the Black community,” he said in a speech . “I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.”

Though Obama left the church a few months later, he rejected calls that he denounce it: “I’m not denouncing the church, and I’m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church,” he said in response to a question from a reporter.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was repeatedly asked during last year’s mayoral race to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” over concerns from some Jewish constituents who considered its use by protesters threatening or offensive. Though he said he did not use the language himself and would discourage the phrase, he repeatedly declined to say he condemned it.

Eventually, journalist Kristen Welker asked, “Why not just condemn it?”

Mamdani replied that he didn’t believe it was a mayor’s role to police speech. “My concern is to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the president, who is looking to do those very kinds of things, putting people in jail for writing an op-ed, putting people in jail for protesting,” he said.

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Last month, after Hasan Piker suggested that American Jews’ support of Israel would worsen antisemitism, El-Sayed, who spent months campaigning alongside the streamer, was asked in a debate if he would “disavow” Piker’s remarks. “Absolutely,” El-Sayed responded, though he challenged the premise of the question. “I resist the idea that we should play this cancel culture gotcha game that tells us who we can’t talk to, when democracy is about trying to build a coalition because you went out and talked to as many people as possible.”

But that question was premised on the fact that El-Sayed had shared a stage with Piker. A question like “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” is insidious, Paterson said, because it can’t be answered only by a yes or no. For El-Sayed to merely answer in the affirmative would be to accept the implicit charge: that he had, at some point in time, been tied to the Muslim Brotherhood in a way that he must now separate himself from.

During the town hall exchange, when El-Sayed pushed his heckler to state clearly the basis for his question, the questioner merely said that the Muslim Brotherhood was “a terrorist group.” Absent of a clear claim of a link between himself and the topic, El-Sayed connected the dots himself.

“You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties,” he said.

Minorities in the US have long faced questions about whether they could truly place their duty to the country above their supposed ethnic or religious sympathies. As El-Sayed noted over the weekend, John F. Kennedy dealt with similar accusations related to his Catholic faith during his presidential run. Jewish Americans contended with similar charges, as did Japanese Americans during World War II.

Despite the bigotry inherent in the asking, many Muslims over the years have tried to respond in good faith, declaring through op-eds , public statements and “ not in my name ” campaigns that they do not condone the killing of innocents.

There can be clearer grounds for asking a candidate to speak against someone or something, Paterson said. When the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke endorsed Donald Trump during his first presidential campaign, a Bloomberg reporter asked Trump if he would repudiate Duke. “Sure, I would do that, if it made you feel better,” he replied in August 2015.

Asked about Duke’s support again at a news conference in February 2016, Trump said: “I didn’t even know he endorsed me. David Duke endorsed me? Okay, all right. I disavow, okay?”

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, then rival candidates for the Republican nomination, were among those who considered Trump’s disavowal insufficient . “you’re better than this,” Cruz wrote at the time in a tweet directed at Trump. “We should all agree, racism is wrong, KKK is abhorrent.”

Rubio tweeted, “We cannot be a party that nominates someone who refuses to condemn white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan.”

As journalists and his rivals continued to press him on the issue, Trump issued a more forceful disavowal.

“David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years,” he said on MSNBC in March 2016. He added, “I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK. Do you want me to do it again for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him now.”

When El-Sayed is asked to “disavow” the Muslim Brotherhood, those asking the question don’t seem particularly interested in his answer. Among them is Cruz, who has kept insisting that El-Sayed is connected to the group.

Saher Selod, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, said she saw it as a campaign strategy by Republicans to associate El-Sayed with Islamic extremism in the minds of voters.

“The whole purpose of this is to have him associated with groups that are deemed as terrorist organizations in the United States,” she said. “This is the unfortunate part of what it’s like to be Muslim in the United States.”

Journalists and the general public seem to now recognize the purpose of such questions as well, Green added. If asking someone like El-Sayed to “disavow” something carries a stronger charge than asking them to “condemn” it, he said it also makes the implications of the question more clear.

“He very adeptly, quickly turned the question back on the questioner,” Green said. “And all of a sudden, the dialogue and the conversation became about basically prejudice, Islamophobia, and whether the threat to democracy is coming from another source other than Muslims.”

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上周末在密歇根州卡罗市举行的一次市政厅活动中，一名观众问民主党参议员候选人阿卜杜勒·埃尔-赛义德：“你会与穆斯林兄弟会划清界限吗？”

“这只是个简单的问题，”那人坚持说。

埃尔-赛义德立刻意识到事情不止如此。“当然。没错，绝对是这样，”他回答道，然后反问那人：“你为什么问这个问题？”

为什么一位出生于密歇根州的民主党候选人会被问及穆斯林兄弟会——一个跨国的中东伊斯兰组织？在整个参议院竞选期间，包括唐纳德·特朗普总统和共和党候选人迈克·罗杰斯在内的共和党人一直试图将这位埃及移民之子埃尔-赛义德与伊斯兰极端主义联系起来。

最近，他们指出他同父异母的妹妹在社交媒体上发布的一些旧帖子，这些帖子重新浮出水面，描述了他们的母亲（在埃尔-赛义德幼年时期就离开了他）在 70 年代是如何积极参与该组织的。

这种暗示虽然老套，但却似曾相识。尤其是在9·11事件之后，西方穆斯林被反复要求为世界各地其他穆斯林实施的暴力行为承担责任。

但措辞却很特别。宗教学者、著有《推定有罪：为什么我们不应该要求穆斯林谴责恐怖主义》一书的托德·格林表示，当被问及对恐怖主义的看法时，通常会被要求“谴责”恐怖主义。

格林说：“你只需要暗示一下，就能让穆斯林处于守势。”

语言哲学家格蕾丝·帕特森指出，“否认”一词带来了一种微妙但重要的转变。一个人可以谴责某事，而未必与它有任何具体的关联。“否认”则暗示着更强烈的情感。

“否认这个问题蕴含着更多含义，”她说。“你可以谴责你刚刚了解到的事情。但我认为，否认本身就包含着这样一种隐含信息：人和事之间存在着某种重要的联系。”

编者按：CNN的“每周一词”栏目为您解读新闻中出现的词语背后的含义。

插图：Alberto Mier/CNN

“Disavow”（否认）一词源于古法语“désavouer”，是“avouer”（承认）一词的否定或反转。“avow”一词源于拉丁语词根“advocāre”，意为承认某人是自己的。

因此，要求某人“否认”某事，就是要求他们放弃之前与该事物的联系。这种联系通常被认为是严肃的——例如，如果有人“否认”自己曾经喜欢的某个系列书籍，而自己现在又不再喜欢它，这听起来就很奇怪。

在政治中，“谴责”和“否认”几乎可以互换使用，但又不完全可以互换，用来讨论被认为是问题的事情，其他常用的词语还有“驳斥”、“谴责”和“抛弃”。

米奇·阿代尔/盖蒂图片社

在杰西·杰克逊牧师1984年竞选总统期间，他与伊斯兰民族领袖路易斯·法拉罕的关系引发争议。法拉罕曾发表过贬低犹太人的言论。面对越来越大的回应压力，杰克逊竞选团队发表声明：“我认为此类言论应受谴责，在道德上站不住脚。我否认此类言论和想法。”

媒体对该声明的描述褒贬不一，时而谴责，时而否认，时而推翻。

在 2008 年总统竞选期间，巴拉克·奥巴马曾使用或被促使使用过其中一些词语，以回应人们对他的牧师杰里迈亚·赖特牧师的言论的强烈抗议。

“我断然谴责任何贬低我们伟大国家或分裂我们与盟友的言论，”他在最初的声明中说道。

随着新闻热度持续不减，奥巴马试图将这个人与他的言论区分开来。他在一次演讲中说：“我不能与他断绝关系，就像我不能与黑人社区断绝关系一样。我不能与他断绝关系，就像我不能与我的白人祖母断绝关系一样。”

尽管奥巴马几个月后就离开了教会，但他拒绝谴责教会的呼吁：“我没有谴责教会，我对那些想让我谴责教会的人也不感兴趣，”他在回答记者提问时说道。

去年纽约市长竞选期间，佐兰·马姆达尼多次被要求谴责“全球化起义”这一口号，因为一些犹太选民认为抗议者使用该口号具有威胁性或冒犯性。尽管他表示自己不使用这种说法，并且会劝阻他人使用，但他始终拒绝公开谴责该口号。

最后，记者克里斯汀·韦尔克问道：“为什么不直接谴责它呢？”

马姆达尼回应说，他不认为市长的职责是监管言论。“我担心的是，如果我开始管控语言，明确哪些语言可以接受，哪些语言不可接受，那就跟总统的做法如出一辙了。总统现在就想做这种事，把写专栏文章的人关进监狱，把参加抗议活动的人关进监狱。”他说。

安娜·康纳斯/Pool/路透社

上个月，哈桑·皮克尔（Hasan Piker）声称美国犹太人对以色列的支持会加剧反犹主义后，曾与皮克尔并肩作战数月的埃尔-赛义德（El-Sayed）在一次辩论中被问及是否会“否认”皮克尔的言论。埃尔-赛义德回答说：“当然会。”但他同时质疑了这个问题的前提。“我不认同这种‘取消文化’式的攻击，它告诉我们不能和谁对话。民主的真谛在于努力建立联盟，而这正是因为我们走出去，与尽可能多的人交流。”

但这个问题的前提是埃尔-赛义德曾与皮克同台演讲。帕特森说，像“你会与穆斯林兄弟会划清界限吗？”这样的问题很阴险，因为它不能简单地用“是”或“否”来回答。如果埃尔-赛义德只是简单地回答“是”，那就等于接受了这种隐含的指控：他曾经与穆斯林兄弟会有过某种联系，而现在他必须与之划清界限。

在市政厅的交流环节，当埃尔-赛义德追问提问者其提问的依据时，提问者只是简单地说穆斯林兄弟会是“一个恐怖组织”。由于提问者并未明确说明自己与此话题有何关联，埃尔-赛义德便自行推断出了这一点。

“你之所以问这个问题，是因为你暗中认为我会效忠于双重国家，”他说。

长期以来，美国的少数族裔一直面临着这样的质疑：他们是否真的能将对国家的责任置于所谓的种族或宗教倾向之上。正如埃尔-赛义德周末指出的那样，约翰·F·肯尼迪在竞选总统期间也曾因其天主教信仰而受到类似的指责。犹太裔美国人也曾面临类似的指控，二战期间的日裔美国人也同样如此。

尽管这种要求本身带有偏见，但多年来，许多穆斯林都试图以诚挚的态度回应，通过专栏文章、公开声明和“非我之名”运动表明，他们不容忍杀害无辜者。

帕特森表示，要求候选人公开反对某人或某事，有时会有更明确的理由。例如，前三K党头目大卫·杜克在唐纳德·特朗普首次竞选总统期间为其背书时，彭博社记者曾问特朗普是否会公开谴责杜克。特朗普在2015年8月回答说：“当然，如果这能让你感觉好些，我会这么做。”

2016年2月的一次新闻发布会上，当再次被问及杜克的支持时，特朗普说：“我甚至不知道他支持我。大卫·杜克支持我？好吧，好吧。我否认，好吗？”

当时共和党总统候选人提名的竞争对手特德·克鲁兹和马可·卢比奥等人认为特朗普的否认远远不够。“你应该做得更好，”克鲁兹当时在推特上对特朗普写道。“我们都应该同意，种族主义是错误的，三K党令人憎恶。”

鲁比奥在推特上写道：“我们不能成为一个提名拒绝谴责白人至上主义者和三K党的人的政党。”

随着记者和他的竞争对手继续就此问题向他施压，特朗普发表了更为强硬的否认声明。

“大卫·杜克是个坏人，这些年来我多次与他划清界限，”他在2016年3月接受MSNBC采访时说道。他补充道，“我与他划清界限。我与三K党划清界限。你们想让我再说一遍吗？这都第12遍了。我过去与他划清界限，现在也一样。”

当被要求“否认”与穆斯林兄弟会有关联时，提问者似乎对他的回答并不感兴趣。其中就包括克鲁兹，他一直坚称埃尔-赛义德与该组织有联系。

社会政策与理解研究所的研究主任萨赫尔·塞洛德表示，她认为这是共和党人的一种竞选策略，目的是在选民心中将埃尔-赛义德与伊斯兰极端主义联系起来。

她说：“这样做的目的就是为了让他与美国认定的恐怖组织联系起来。这就是在美国做穆斯林的不幸处境。”

格林补充说，记者和公众现在似乎也认识到了这类问题的目的。他说，如果要求像埃尔-赛义德这样的人“否认”某件事比要求他们“谴责”某件事更具攻击性，那么这也更能清楚地表明问题的含义。

格林说：“他非常巧妙地迅速将问题反问了提问者。突然之间，对话和谈话的内容就变成了偏见、伊斯兰恐惧症，以及对民主的威胁是否来自穆斯林以外的其他来源。”

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