Umar A. Farooq
Middle East Eye / August 19, 2024
Organizers look to turn US voters away from Harris after receiving no commitments to unconditional ceasefire or Israel arms embargo.
The Abandon Biden campaign that for months worked in key swing states to turn voters away from US President Joe Biden over his unwavering support for Israel’s war on Gaza has officially relaunched its movement with a new aim: Abandon Kamala Harris.
Organizers within the campaign had been deliberating over their next steps after Biden dropped out of the presidential race last month, and told Middle East Eye they would be making the official announcement during a press conference on Monday in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention is taking place.
“On Monday, we’re beginning Abandon Harris,” Hassan Abdel Salam, a human rights professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and a founder of Abandon Biden, told Middle East Eye.
The campaign held an all-day conference in Chicago on Sunday, where they worked with Abandon Biden leaders to recalibrate their mission and strategy to inform voters about why they shouldn’t vote for Harris.
“In terms of electoral strategy, at the very minimum, we ask the American people to make sure that they never vote for the genocide or Kamala Harris,” Abdel Salam said.
At this point, we want people to “receive the information, the message that she is a genocider and that morally, we can never support her, and that strategically, we need to punish her in order for us to buy power, because we’ve been thoroughly ignored”.
Abdel Salam said they are also considering whether to endorse a single candidate or even a range of third-party presidential candidates, because “almost all Abandon Biden leaders find Mr Trump to be despicable”.
The announcement comes as the Democratic Party begins to kick off its national convention this week, where Harris will officially receive the presidential nomination from the party.
Tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters have descended upon Chicago to protest the convention over the Democratic Party’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children.
The Uncommitted Campaign, which mobilized voters to choose “uncommitted” during the presidential primaries rather than Biden over his support for Israel’s war, announced that the DNC would host a panel on Palestinian human rights — a move that was celebrated as an organizing win.
But with Harris’ aides having explicitly said the presidential candidate would not support an arms embargo on Israel, the newly minted Abandon Harris campaign said they haven’t seen the Democratic Party offer any substantive support for Palestinians.
“There really is no focus on what has been happening in Gaza beyond meaningless platitudes. Just alone [Harris] saying Israel has the right to defend itself after 10, 11 months of what we can see is by default an endorsement of the genocide in Gaza,” Hudhayfah Ahmad, the campaign’s communications director, told MEE.
“When you put it in that context, you start to see exactly what kind of candidate Kamala Harris is. I genuinely believe that she has not spoken in any meaningful way about Gaza because she believes she can win without addressing it.”
‘We’ll see whose red line is genocide’
The Abandon Biden campaign was launched in December by several Muslim American leaders and community organizers, after their deadline for Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza came and went with no response.
The decision to rebrand the Abandon Biden campaign to Abandon Harris came after weeks of deliberating over the best electoral strategy that would show all politicians in the country that Muslim American voters would not stand behind any candidate who supports the devastating war on Gaza and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.
On 22 July, they announced during a press conference in Washington DC that they would made a open call to Harris, demanding she accept an unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza in addition to a full US arms embargo on Israel.
The campaign told MEE that they were open to meeting with her and give her an opportunity to communicate what her policy position was.
However, as the days went by and Abandon Biden organizers saw how Harris continued to commit to defending Israel and how she responded to pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally in Detroit, they had made up their minds.
“We feel that there’s no other path for us but to do what we did after issuing this policy ultimatum. We now need to leverage our power, our votes, and make clear who Kamala Harris is,” Abdel Salam said.
“Kamala Harris is a frightful, a despicable option for our country. [She is] someone who can’t even, who can’t say that genocide is unacceptable to American policy.”
Throughout the war on Gaza, voter support for Biden had dwindled and many pundits predicted that Trump would easily defeat the incumbent. However, since Harris has become the frontrunner for the Democratic Party, her support has surged.
Harris was also described as a candidate who had shown more sympathy for Palestinians and was more open to changing the decades-long, bipartisan US policy of steadfast military and diplomatic support for Israel.
That description has stuck despite Harris not committing or commenting on any such policy change, in addition to her silencing a group of pro-Palestinian protesters and accusing them of wanting Trump to win and her repeated statements reiterating Israel’s right to self-defence.
“The closer we get to November, the clearer we will see for who genocide is actually a red line and who is going to prioritize short-term interests over morals and values and ethos,” Ahmad said.
“I would advise people to revisit how they felt in October, November, December, January, back when we were seeing these atrocities and being gaslit about them. And how we were being ignored and demonized.”
Ahmad said that for the Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab communities, the consequences of falling in line and voting for Harris without any actual policy change are huge.
“There is no reason for them to take us seriously if we ignored a genocide. If we’ve conceded that genocide is not a red line, it is going to affect us domestically.”
Umar A. Farooq is a journalist based in Washington DC
