Inside Arab And Muslim Democrats’ Last-Minute Push To Get Harris Over The Finish Line

Arab and Muslim leaders in Michigan and around the country are mounting a last-minute push to convince their compatriots to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day next week, despite Harris and President Joe Biden’s continued funding of the Israeli military’s invasions of Gaza and Lebanon.

The push, consisting of endorsements and public appearances, comes as polling continues to show a tight race in Michigan, where 300,000 residents of Middle Eastern descent could play a make-or-break role if the election is close enough.

Republicans, meanwhile, have wooed their own Muslim and Arab leaders and are seizing on Harris’ use of former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as a surrogate to muddy the waters on former President Donald Trump’s approach to the Middle East.

The highest-profile moment of the Democratic effort came on Monday night, when Assad Turfe, the deputy executive of Wayne County, Michigan, took the stage at Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had a difficult assignment: Create a permission structure for his fellow Arab and Muslim American Michiganders to get behind Harris.

“The past year has been unimaginable for so many people in my community. We are mourning loved ones who have died in Gaza and Lebanon,” Turfe said. “We are wondering when the suffering will finally stop. We are desperate for a president who sees us, who understands us and who will give voice to our pain and work to end this war once and for all.”

“And Ann Arbor, I’m here tonight because I know without a doubt that Kamala Harris is that leader!” he concluded.

Turfe, the highest-ranking Arab American elected official in the county that is home to the predominantly Arab American city of Dearborn, contrasted Harris’ stated commitment to pushing for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars with Trump’s words of support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “Do what you have to do.”

Turfe’s remarks, a press conference in support of Harris featuring Arab-American leaders at the American Arab Chamber of Commerce on Sunday, and a string of other public endorsements all aim to take some of the air out of the high-profile Arab American and Muslim endorsements that Trump touted at a Saturday rally in the Detroit suburb of Novi.

It’s all part of the way that the war in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 43,000 Palestinians, displaced nearly all of Gaza’s population, and sparked a malnutrition and public health crisis in the coastal enclave, has fractured the Democratic Party coalition that elected Biden in 2020 and is now threatening Harris’ prospects for victory in the key battleground state of Michigan.

It is difficult to recall a presidential election in which an overseas conflict in which the United States is not directly engaged in hostilities has played such an influential role in a presidential election.

The Israel-Hamas war, which began in response to the Palestinian group Hamas’ terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, has prompted major human rights groups to accuse Israel of war crimes for, among other things, not permitting adequate humanitarian aid to enter the besieged territory. Earlier this month, France and Italy each imposed embargoes on arms sales to Israel, citing the need for a political solution to the escalating regional conflict.

But with the exception of a pause on one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, Biden has refused to impose stricter conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel, let alone an arms embargo.

Some Muslim and Arab Americans initially were hopeful that Harris would come out in favor of a tougher approach. But while she has expressed impassioned support for a cease-fire and sympathy for Palestinian deaths, she has not broken with Biden on the critical matter of unconditional military aid and weapons sales to Israel.

That stance cost Harris the endorsement of the Michigan-based Uncommitted movement, which had hoped to leverage its protest vote in the Democratic primaries for a policy concession.

The Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, which began in September, and a subsequent ground invasion to root out the Shia militia Hezbollah, has caused additional rancor in Arab American hubs like Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, where many residents hail from the southern Lebanon communities most affected by Israeli operations. Kamal Ahmed Jawad, a Dearborn resident and U.S. citizen, was killed in an Israeli airstrike while visiting Lebanon in early October; many other Michiganders have recounted losing family members to the Israeli bombardment.

Even as Trump has promised to impose even less restraint on Israel than Biden or Harris, the Arab American leaders rallying to his side have pointed to his promises to scale back the United States’ interventions in foreign conflicts.

Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi, the first Arab American mayor of a city where one-third of the population is of Arab descent, suggested in a GOP press call last week that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which resulted in the destruction of a home his grandparents had built, was the reason for his endorsement of Trump.

Bazzi, who is officially nonpartisan, made his endorsement official onstage at Trump’s rally in Novi, Michigan, on Saturday. “When President Trump was president, there was peace. We didn’t have any issues. There was no wars,” Bazzi said. “He didn’t create wars. He was actually trying to withdraw our troops from overseas.”

But opposition to LGBTQ+ rights may be driving the Arab and Muslim shift toward Trump as much as anything related to foreign policy. “We support Donald J. Trump for his commitment to promoting family values and protect[ing] our children’s well-being, especially when it comes to curriculums and schools,” said Imam Bilal Alzuhiry, who spoke onstage alongside other clerics at Trump’s rally.

Given what he calls Trump’s “contentless” promises of Middle East peace, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, dismissed the Trump endorsers’ focus on foreign policy as window dressing. “His people told them that he would oppose LGBTQ stuff in the schools,” said Zogby, who participated in the pro-Harris press conference at the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn on Sunday. “That’s all it was, really.”

Those Muslim and Arab American endorsers of Harris’ bid, who are more explicit in their criticism of her policy toward Israel, have made a nuanced argument about the dangers of a second Trump term and the opportunity to get a fair hearing from Harris.

Yasmine Taeb, a human rights attorney who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Iran, emphasized Trump’s implementation of a travel ban on people from majority-Muslim countries during his presidency. As a newly elected senator in January 2017, Harris joined a demonstration Taeb helped organize against the ban in front of the White House.

“As someone who fled war and grew up undocumented, I care about fighting for immigrant rights, workers rights, a human rights-centered foreign policy, and making sure that we’re fighting for the most marginalized in our communities,” Taeb, a former member of the Democratic National Committee from Virginia, told HuffPost. “I believe that we can continue to fight for those issues under a Harris administration.”

Taeb and other pro-Palestinian Harris supporters described their disgust at the spectacle of Trump using Arab American endorsements to boost his bid, even as he and his allies continue to heap vitriol on Palestinians.

At Trump’s rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani warned, without evidence, that Harris wanted to let in more Palestinian refugees. “I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at 2,” he said.

“Trump’s closing message is that Palestinians want to kill us at 2 years old,” Taeb said. “The fact that he’s now exploiting our pain around Gaza for his own benefit … is ridiculous.”

Harris has made her boosters’ job somewhat more difficult by campaigning with former Rep. Liz Cheney and accepting the endorsement of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. The elder Cheney was an architect of the post-Sept. 11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and relentless surveillance and detention at home that drove Muslim Americans into the arms of Democrats; Liz Cheney is an interventionist foreign policy hawk in a similar mold.

The Wyoming Republican’s role as a Harris campaign surrogate aims to help Harris pick up Trump-skeptical Republicans and independents in the affluent suburbs. But Trump and his allies have cited the Cheneys’ endorsement in their pitch to Arab and Muslim American voters, claiming that Trump, not Harris, is the true antiwar candidate.

“Kamala is campaigning with Muslim-hating warmonger Liz Cheney, who wants to invade practically every Muslim country on the planet,” Trump said at the Novi, Michigan, rally on Saturday. “And let me tell you, the Muslims of our country, they see it, and they know it.”

Harris herself has not explicitly created daylight between her foreign policy views and those of Liz Cheney. In an interview on “The Daily Show” last week, however, Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, explicitly promised host Jon Stewart that Harris would not implement the Cheneys’ “foreign policy decisions and discussions.”

Still, Trump’s effort to hit Harris for her association with Cheney might be more plausible to an ordinary voter, because there isn’t a “great degree of detail about what [Harris’] foreign policy would look like,” according to Eli Clifton, a senior adviser at the anti-interventionist Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Trump’s record and approach are clearer, though they should not be especially comforting to voters who want the U.S. to be more even-handed in its approach to Israel or otherwise take a less bellicose approach to the Middle East, Clifton noted.

Among other decisions, Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and tore up the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement. And Miriam Adelson, the Israeli American widow of casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson and staunch advocate for right-wing Israeli policies, remains one of the biggest financial backers of Trump’s bid for a second term.

The Middle East was “the exception to the foreign policy he ran on and that he regularly touts of trying to engage with adversaries and trying to find maybe unexpected or unusual ways to resolve long-term conflicts,” Clifton said. “That really is the blind spot for him.”