Michigan Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi runs the Islamic House of Wisdom out of Dearborn Heights. Federal officials have tied his mosque to Iranian propaganda.
Fox News saved screenshots showing Elahi standing alongside former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State John Kerry, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Sen. Gary Peters, Sen. Raphael Warnock, and a collection of current Michigan Democratic candidates. Whitmer’s 2023 inauguration featured a prayer tribute from the imam. One cached post was a flyer for an Islamic House of Wisdom event headlined by Anthony Fauci.
This is the same imam who, after an Israeli airstrike killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei last month, called it the work of “the most wretched hands on Earth.” Khamenei spent decades threatening America. In 2022 he said: “Yes, it will happen. Death to America will happen.”
Elahi put money behind some of the same Democrats he photographed with. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed got more than $800 from him in 2017. Gilchrist got over $1,000. Detroit’s former mayor Mike Duggan, now running for governor, got $500. Duggan first told local outlet The Michigan Enjoyer he had “no recollection” of photos with Elahi. Fox turned up multiple shots of the two, including one where they’re embracing.
Last September, Elahi sat in on a meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Also in the room: the co-founder of CODEPINK, a group with reported ties to China, and Scott Ritter, the former U.S. intelligence official whose house the FBI raided over a suspected Foreign Agents Registration Act violation.
GOP strategist Colin Reed didn’t buy it. “The unwillingness of public officials to distance themselves from someone so controversial would be troubling enough under normal circumstances, but doubly so during a time of conflict when Americans’ lives hang in the balance,” Reed told Fox News Digital. “It shouldn’t be a close call to want to put daylight between someone so sympathetic to their cause.”
Republican strategist Mark Bednar noted the asymmetry. “The press corps often sprints after Republicans to ask them about why someone took a picture with them,” he said. “That same level of scrutiny is not remotely applied to Democrats.”
