Deep in midterms mourning, GB News hired little-known US political commentator Lee Cohen (no, us neither) to write a piece about the real scandal behind Donald Trump’s humiliation.
“I just witnessed an American victory speech delivered in Arabic – what’s coming for Britain sent a chill down my spine” was the headline on Cohen’s rambling article, in which he professed his shock at Abdul El-Sayed’s remarks after winning Michigan’s Senate seat. “This outcome might cause Britons to reflect whether they too will soon hear Arabic from the podium on a British election night,” he moaned.
Meanwhile, right wing American website The Free Press – run by Bari Weiss, the woman currently ruining CBS News, tweeted: “Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed gave his victory speech in Arabic last night”.
In the accompanying video, the site’s tedious culture warrior Maya Sulkin bemoaned that both El-Sayed and Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar “in their first speeches to the American public, on the night they win power” had dared to “address Americans in foreign languages” (Omar made a short speech in Somali to Somalian volunteers in her campaign before making a longer official one in English). Sulkin marvelled that: “No-one in the Democratic Party seems to think this is strange”.
What is truly strange is that El-Sayed did not – as claimed by both GB News and The Free Press – give his victory speech in Arabic. He used three Arabic words in remarks that contained nearly 1500 words.
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The charismatic (if slightly rude to Sky News) Democratic Socialist said “inshallah” (“God willing”) twice, “alhamdulillah” (“praise be to God”) once and “habibi” (“my beloved”) also once. That came in a section where El-Sayed, referring to how vice-president JD Vance had called him “a psychopath” and “a radical extremist”, joked: “JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January.”
Transcripts show that only 0.27% of the 1,460 words spoken by El-Sayed were Arabic. Hardly a spine-chilling “American victory speech delivered in Arabic” then.
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