Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate blocks away from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on 22 August 2024 (John Moore/AFP)
Community leaders sign statement backing candidates supporting Gaza ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel.
Originally published in Middle East Eye.
A group of approximately 50 Black Muslim leaders have signed a statement urging Black and Muslim American voters to shun Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid for the White House and instead back candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel.
The new statement, first reported by Middle East Eye, is the latest effort from Muslim community leaders - from imams to scholars, to activists to politicians - telling voters not to choose Vice President Harris in the upcoming November election over her unwillingness to commit to policy changes that would hold Israel accountable for its ongoing war on Gaza and now Lebanon, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese people.
"Although some Muslim Americans have nevertheless argued that our community must support Vice President Harris because of her positions on domestic issues or their belief that Donald Trump might be even worse on issues like Gaza, we respectfully disagree with their conclusion," the statement said.
"As Muslims obliged to uphold justice and as Black Americans whose ancestors experienced the worst of crimes, genocide must be our red line."
It adds that "we simply cannot support a candidate who participated in a genocide and now refuses to lay out any plan to end that genocide".
The statement comes after a series of different statements and letters from leading figures and organisations in the wider Muslim-American community were published in recent weeks endorsing or shunning candidates for the US 2024 election.
On 20 September, a coalition of leading Muslim organisations in the US released a statement calling on voters to vote for candidates that both support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel.
Then, on 30 September, dozens of imams from across the country signed a letter endorsing a call for Muslims to vote third-party in the election, with the goal of sending the Democratic Party a message about their outrage over the Biden-Harris administration's steadfast support for Israel's war on Gaza. That letter has more than 130 signatories.
A week later, the Muslim-led Abandon Harris movement endorsed the Green Party's Jill Stein for president.
"We call on Muslim voters to support only a pro-ceasefire and pro-arms embargo presidential candidate, as well as candidates down the ballot who support other just policies, including economic justice, religious freedom, healthcare for all, humane immigration policy, reforming the criminal justice system, and racial equality," the statement from Black Muslim leaders said.
Ismahan Abdullahi, a Muslim community leader in San Diego and a signatory of the statement, told Middle East Eye that the effort is an opportunity for Americans to "reflect on our role in regards to sustaining injustices globally".
"When we look back at the movements that have been successful in asking this country to change course, Black communities have been at the core of that change and were the drivers of that change," Abdullahi said.
A copy of the statement was shared with MEE and organisers say they plan to share it on the same website hosting the previous letter from leading imams.
So far, 47 people from 17 states and Washington DC have signed the letter, and organisers of the effort say they are working to gather additional signatures.
False narratives
The statement from Black Muslim leaders comes several weeks after NBC News reported earlier this month that around 25 Black Muslims had endorsed Harris for president.
NBC's reporting, which made no mention of the significantly larger group of imams endorsing third-party candidates, claimed that the 25 Black Muslims supporting Harris was a sign she was winning back Muslims disaffected by her administration's Gaza policy.
The endorsement reported by NBC was also organised by a current Biden administration appointee, which was not mentioned in the report.
Abdullahi said she and other organisers in the Black Muslim community "might not have access to the mainstream media as others might", but added that she hopes this new statement will highlight the "interconnectedness between the Black and Palestinian struggle and how undeniable that interconnection is".
While some Black Muslim leaders have expressed support for Harris, recent polling by the Yaqeen Institute has shown that only 32 percent of Black Muslims plan on voting for her in this upcoming election.
“There’s a false narrative that is being pushed that the majority of Muslims who are Black are Kamala Harris supporters,” Imam Dawud Walid, a community and faith leader in the state of Michigan, told MEE.
Walid is also a signatory to the initial letter where imams endorsed the third-party vote but felt the need to also join this effort to show many Black Muslim leaders are against a Harris presidency.
"There's this narrative that is trying to divide the community to say that the majority of Muslims who aren't Black are supporting third party, but the majority of Muslims who are Black are somehow divided from the rest of the community, and that's not true," Walid said.
"It's sowing racial division amongst American Muslims during a genocide of our brothers and sisters in Gaza."
Organisers of the letter of this group of Black Muslims say it is the latest effort in what is a long and deep-rooted history of Black-Palestinian solidarity.
"Black communities have fought tirelessly against slavery, against segregation, against racial violence, so it recognises the Palestinian struggle is the same fight for freedom, for dignity and the right to self-determination," Abdullahi said.
"Just as Jim Crow saw a South try to keep the Black community subjugated, we're seeing Palestinians undergoing that, Israel using their apartheid system to strip them of their land, of their rights. It goes beyond solidarity."
Many leading Black American activists and intellectuals throughout the past several decades have supported Palestinian rights and spoken against Zionism and US support for Israel, including Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis.
In 2015, when residents of Ferguson, Missouri, came out to protest on the streets after the police killing of Michael Brown, a young unarmed Black teenager, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and those in the diaspora signed a statement of solidarity, and some Palestinians also sent tips via social media on the best ways to deal with the militarised tactics used by Israeli and American police forces.
"We are rooted in our shared experience of resilience and resistance and hope for a better world," said Abdullahi.
A major shift
Current polls show that Harris and Trump are neck and neck, with both candidates making efforts to draw support from Muslim and Arab Americans who say that they could decide the presidency in swing states like Michigan.
The November election is shaping up to be a major shift in the voting patterns of Muslim Americans.
Over the past few months, there has been a large departure in the Muslim-American community away from the Democratic Party as a result of US support for the war on Gaza.
So far, Israeli forces have killed over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the official death toll released by the health ministry in Gaza.
However, Israel's military has destroyed much of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, including Gaza's hospitals where deaths are officially registered. Other estimates by experts have the death toll near 200,000 Palestinians, which is about one percent of the total population in Gaza.
Israeli forces have targeted schools, mosques, UN shelters, and in addition to killing civilians, Israeli soldiers have killed medical workers, foreign aid workers, and journalists throughout this conflict.
Throughout the war, the Biden-Harris administration has supported Israel with diplomatic cover and military aid.
While media reports have said Harris has shown greater sympathy to Palestinians than President Biden, Harris advisors recently told The New York Times that any sympathy shouldn't be confused with a break from US foreign policy towards Israel.
For two decades, a majority of the faith community voted Democrat in presidential elections.
In 2020, 69 percent of Muslims voted for Biden over Trump. However, polling from the Council on American Islamic Relations showed that this past summer, Stein, the Green Party's presidential candidate, was tied with Harris among Muslim voters.
Yaqeen Institute's polling conducted between 27 August to 8 September found that more than 50 percent of Muslims were voting for someone other than Harris or Trump. In that poll, Harris only received 14 percent of Muslim voters, while Trump got four percent.
Earlier this month, the Abandon Harris movement, a Muslim-led organisation aimed at electorally punishing the Democrats for their Gaza policies, announced they were endorsing Stein and her running-mate, Butch Ware, for the presidential ticket.
"I believe that this is going to be a generational shift in the American Muslim community toward not giving blind allegiance to the Democratic Party," Walid said.
Walid noted that the majority of Muslim Americans voted for George W Bush prior to the 9/11 attacks, but "after the bloodshed in Iraq and the draconian policies that were signed into law by President Bush", Muslims in large part shifted towards the Democrats, "even though the majority of Democrats supported those same domestic policies".
"I believe that besides some failed domestic policies, the Biden-Harris administration's active support of genocide will cause a significant percentage of American Muslims to abandon the Democratic Party for a generation," Walid said.
Umar Farooq is a journalist based in Washington DC. He writes about social and political issues facing Muslim communities in the US, as well as foreign policy related to the Middle East.
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