“We’re paying $5 gas. We’re paying more for groceries because of a war we should not be fighting, at the behest of whom?

“The government of Israel.”

That’s a quote from Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in a tight Michigan race against Republican Mike Rogers.

Compare that quote to the ad made in support of El-Sayed that everyone agrees is overtly antisemitic.

El-Sayed won’t denounce the ad, but his defenders insist he can’t be blamed for it.

I provide the quote above to make absolutely clear that the spot everyone agrees is antisemitic is drawn from Abdul El-Sayed’s explicit statements.

The candidate and the commercial, then, are equally antisemitic.

The ad depicts a couple in a grocery store doing their food shopping.

The wife tells her partner he has to put the eggs back because they can’t afford them.

“We have to set that seven dollars aside for killing Palestinians,” she says.

The husband whines about the money they already give Israel; the wife complains that each individual American must now fork over another $161 to the Jewish state to “drop bombs on Gaza.”

The couple then moan that Americans are also paying for Israeli universal health care.

“Might as well put the bananas back,” the woman grumbles.

None of this is true, obviously.

But the lies are almost beside the point of an ad that would make the Nazis blush.

The real point is to plant the idea that Americans are going hungry because of the Jews.

The video isn’t new — what’s new is the addition of the names of the Michigan Senate contenders.

The ad is put out by a group run by left-wing propagandist Cenk Uyghur (who happens to be the uncle of Hasan Piker, another antisemitic El-Sayed proxy).

But the idea undergirding the ad is El-Sayed’s.

So let’s just be clear: If the ad is indefensible, so is he.

Here’s another example.

In August, the writer Anand Giridharadas interviewed El-Sayed and asked the Michigan Democrat about his obsession with connecting Israel to local issues.

Here’s how El-Sayed responded:

“Israel is an affordability issue. Every time you want to put glasses on kids’ faces or give people health care or fix a school, somebody pops up and is like, Well, how are you going to pay for that?

“I don’t know. Maybe we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals.

“That’s our money. You just saw $3.3 billion voted to send abroad to a foreign government that, by the way, has guaranteed health care and can guarantee college education without debt. We can’t.

“And you want to send my money over there? That’s insane.”

Notice the common formula?

El-Sayed says Michiganders can’t afford basic services because that money is being spent by Israel “to drop bombs.”

Israel, he complains — just like the complaining couple in the Jew-baiting ad — “has guaranteed health care.”

It’s therefore “insane,” El-Sayed says, that “you want to send my money over there.”

El-Sayed has been saying some form of this all through the campaign. It’s basically his only idea.

Every bumper-sticker line you hear from El-Sayed is a version of this grocery ad.

He’s not the only Democrat angrily spitting this propaganda, of course.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, a New York Democratic House nominee, blamed the Jewish state for gentrification.

New York Assembly candidate Lydia Green said, “The more we’re spending on genocide and displacement of Palestinians, the less we’re spending on housing, feeding and caring for New Yorkers.”

Does it require an astonishing level of innumeracy and economic ignorance to believe that when the US gives Israel vouchers to buy weapons from American manufacturers — thus expanding American jobs and American manufacturing — it’s somehow taking eggs and bananas out of the mouths of theoretical Abdul El-Sayed voters?

Yes, it does.

That’s why no one believes it.

But some people want to believe it, and others pretend to believe it.

One person in the latter category is Abdul El-Sayed — the inspiration for some of the ugliest political antisemitism in America.

X: @SethAMandel. Adapted from Commentary.