Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s primary election Tuesday as a Senate candidate, warned not to conflate Jews and Judaism with AIPAC and the Israeli government. He said that you can love the Jewish people and Judaism, as he claims to do, and not love AIPAC and the Israeli government.

Critics point out that AIPAC is run by Americans, not Israelis, and that focusing only on the American-run AIPAC to the exclusion of all other lobbying group, such as Chinese and Qatari lobbying groups, is at least suspect, if not downright nefarious. The same is true, they say, of hating the Israeli government and only the Israeli government out of all the governments in the world, when it’s the only Jewish one.

Jordan Domingue, a Marine combat veteran and former State Department security professional who served as the leader of El-Sayed’s security team, resigned in January, saying that El-Sayed holds extremist Islamist views and is unfit for office.

“AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people. I love Judaism and I love the Jewish people. I venerate Judaism and I venerate the Jewish people. I stand with Judaism and I stand with the Jewish people,” he declared to cheers and applause.

El-Sayed then presented a strawman argument that it’s dangerous to extend the definition of antisemitism to include AIPAC and the Israeli government, since no one has argued that the definition of antisemitism includes criticism of those two entities. What some critics have argued is that deriding opponents from taking money from AIPAC is a dog whistle.

“The single most dangerous thing that they’ve tried to tell us is that somehow they can extend the definition of antisemitism to include a foreign government and its leaders. I call bulls—. No, no. If you believe that antisemitism extends to include a foreign government and AIPAC, you are creating a dangerous circumstance,” he said.

The candidate went on to say that “we” love Judaism and the Jewish people as well as Palestinians because “we love people.” But he also added that “we love our tax dollars” and object to their being used to kill children, invoking’I LOVE THE JEWISH PEOPLE’ the genocide libel against Israel.

“And we love that our tax dollars get spent here on schools here and healthcare here because we love people. You cannot claim that human rights end at a border. You cannot claim that you want to invest in our kids when you send our money abroad to kill other people’s kids.”