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Feature: How the Arab-American Community Abandoned Kamala Harris
The Biden-Harris administration's enabling of internationally-labeled genocide helped Republicans in battleground states across the country...
Congress certified the 2024 election today, and the winner is clear: Trump won, and Harris lost. But how did we get here?
Leading up to the 2024 general election, everyone’s anxiety was heightened. Americans were being fed the narrative by both candidates and the mainstream media that if you didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, it would be the end of democracy, but also that if you didn’t vote for Donald Trump, you wouldn’t have a country anymore. There was a binary choice to be made.
There was also a world war barreling along. Brutal fighting continued in Ukraine and Israel was at total war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and in turn, the Palestinian and Lebanese people were caught in the crossfire.
Those were the stakes, according to the narrative. But there was a third option few knew about: Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party.
It is in this latter conflict that the Biden-Harris administration would meet its political end, choosing to financially and materially support what the international community calls an active genocide against Arabs in the Middle East, ultimately bleeding critical votes away from Democrats in key ethnic strongholds across the country.
This would prove to be detrimental to the Harris campaign in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona, all with notable Arab-American populations.
If there were any doubts about this claim of genocide, the International Criminal Court (The Hague) just issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity. (Hamas commander-in-chief Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri was also held to account for his role in the conflict despite his reported death in August.)
Arab-Americans had an ally in this struggle. The Green Party, led by Dr. Jill Stein chose to advocate for these marginalized people. She recognized that Israeli violence against Palestinians was indiscriminately being applied in retaliation for Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7th, in an effort to root out Hamas and rescue hostages. Arab civilian lives were being treated as an expendable means to an end.
It was in the middle of this timeline that Zakir Siddiqi, the 26-year-old campaign manager for the ‘Abandon Harris’ movement in Arizona, and now co-chair of the Arizona Green Party, arrived to Arizona’s political landscape.
The Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was slated to arrive in Phoenix on a brief campaign stop. The ‘Abandon Harris’ movement coordinated the visit at his family’s coffee shop.
Local mainstream media failed to show up, not paying the situation much attention. A lone Associated Press reporter stood in their place reporting on the visit along with yours truly.
Waiting for Dr. Stein’s arrival, I struck up conversations with attendees. I spoke with the 2012 Miss Arab USA, Suz Yatim, a Palestinian-American who explained to me the lasting struggle of her people and her life experience.
She being a Palestinian-American, I asked her about Oct. 7th, and specifically about how the violence Palestinians now face was different from the actions of Hamas. I curiously sought her perspective.
“Oct. 7th, what Israelis experienced then is sort of a day in the life of Palestinians. We’ve had 76 years of Oct. 7th’s,” said Yatim. She explained to me her own first-hand account of Israeli violence towards her people, and shared how her mother had been taken from their home and beaten by the Israelis when she was a kid.
She humanized the conflict from an Arab perspective and explained that there was a long-term pattern of violence and retaliation in the region. To people like Yatim and Siddiqi, the situation demanded peace through the resistance to what they view as an apartheid state. The destruction of entire families in the name of reciprocity from what they view as an illegal occupation is unacceptable.
“I wish for peace, but I know peace has been met with bloodshed time and time again,” says Siddiqi.
All across the United States, people like Yatim and Siddiqi were advocating for an end to the genocide. They seek to stop the violence. They wince at the idea that our nation is directly providing the finances and weapons to perpetuate what much of the world largely deems a genocide against other human beings.
In their view, seeking an end to the conflict was not anti-American or anti-Semitic. It was about embracing humanity and valuing human life.
According to X’s Grok AI, there are some 137K civilian casualties (both killed and wounded), many of them women and children. That’s the equivalent population of Yuma, Ariz. And the Arab-American population saw the Biden-Harris administration directly complicit in this outcome.
So you see, this campaign stop at a coffee shop, one week away from the 2024 general election was a lot more than showing that the Green Party had showed up to compete at the ballot box for a mere 2% of the vote. It was a statement that there were like minded people unwilling to consent to violence against a people that could not defend themselves, and ‘Abandon Harris’ was behind the scenes, coordinating these types of visits in cafe’s, community centers, and parks all across the battleground states and in fact the country.
It is in this struggle that the ‘Abandon Harris’ campaign had found an ally in the Arizona Green Party and a base of support in Arizona’s Arab-American community.
Supporters came from all over the state to see Dr. Stein, and show their support for the candidate who saw them for their humanity, while openly rejecting Harris who was in a position to stop the violence immediately, not later if they just gave her their vote, as she was in fact part of the current administration.
The visit was brief, but Dr. Stein’s reception among the people was what stood out to me. People admired her. They respected her. And those feelings were clearly mutual. She wasn’t a spoiler candidate, she was an advocate.
“We do not end this violence by crushing Hamas. We end this violence by ending apartheid occupation…” said Dr. Stein to her supporters. She went so far as to call the genocide a holocaust of the Palestinian and Lebanese people, a carefully crafted message.
Her campaign manager even stated: “Genocide deserves losing”.
(Privately, I asked her how a Green Party presidency helped Arizonans. She explained how elements out of the Green New Deal like universal healthcare would benefit the people. Her platform was more than anti-genocide. I digress.)
The venue for Dr. Stein’s visit to Arizona shifted to a community center in Mesa where she met with thousands of Arab-Americans.
Muslim leaders from across Arizona’s Arab-American community came out in force to endorse Dr. Stein. Her reception was electric. She was the guest of honor. She spoke with love for a marginalized people. She advocated for a shift in both domestic and foreign policy and most notably, she spoke out against the Biden-Harris administration’s overt support to Israeli-handed genocide. She understood their pain and publicly recognized it.
These people felt abandoned by Biden when the war started and Palestinians were under fire, and now it was their turn to ‘Abandon Harris’ now that she was the Democratic Party’s leading candidate.
The Green Party had now firmly secured the Arab-American vote not just in Arizona, but across the nation, and with 11 electoral votes on the line in Arizona, it would surely impact the end result, and in all fairness to Harris, they had given her every opportunity to change course.
I broke that down by the numbers.
There are roughly 37K Arab-Americans in Arizona (according to the U.S. Census), and when factoring out children, that leaves approximately 28K potential registered voters out of this demographic (or 0.6% of all registered voters across the state).
If these 28K voters were to cast their ballot for either Stein or Trump, it would surely bleed key votes away from Harris in an already tight race, favoring Trump. Over 18K people cast their vote for Stein in Arizona.
Trump won 11 electoral votes here in Arizona, and went on to secure the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, again, all with notable Arab-American populations, and it was in part because of the collectivity on this issue of for Arab-Americans across this nation through the ‘Abandon Harris’ movement, and their deep determination to not consent to genocide, or worse apathy.
The ‘Abandon Harris’ movement and its ties to the Arab-American community was thus a key factor in this election.
Harris’ supporters would even go so far as to blame the Arab-American community for her loss, as if consenting to sanctioned genocide was acceptable in order to “save democracy”. Zakir himself received hateful text and social media messages. Democrats acted as if the Green vote somehow audaciously belonged to Harris to begin with, which it didn’t.
Votes are earned. To the Arab-American population, Harris had earned her outcome.
Speaking towards Kamala Harris upon her political loss, the ‘Abandon Harris’ campaign said: “Did we not make it clear that we’d fight to make sure you lost every single swing state? Did we not warn you that you cannot commit genocide and walk away unscathed? Did we not tell you, without a hint of doubt, that a reckoning was on its way and that we’d be the ones to rip the ground out from under you? Look closely. These are the consequences of your genocidal actions.”
This ‘Abandon Harris’ movement encapsulated the idea that we cannot allow ourselves to normalize the killing of civilians. Humanity deserves that much. Genocide was on the ballot, and the nation and in fact the world was watching.
And what’s worse than genocide? Ignoring it.
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