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    • My Arab-American Family’s Debate About Voting for Kamala Harris
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    My Arab-American Family’s Debate About Voting for Kamala Harris

    Pabio Posted on

    The expansion of access to mail-in voting in Michigan has given rise to a new tradition for my family: Before each election, we meet after Sunday dinner, collect various endorsements and voter guides, debate the races and everyone votes.

    With knots of anxiety in their stomachs, my family members from three different households sat down with their ballots last weekend to deliberate over the best choices, saving the presidential race for last.

    Even with similar political leanings and bellies full of salmon and tabbouleh, we knew this one was going to be a contentious debate.

    Why so undecided

    Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be that difficult to choose a presidential candidate.

    These are far from normal circumstances.

    For many Arab Americans, the presidential race represents a tortuous decision, made increasingly impossible by an expanding, U.S.-funded war in Gaza and Lebanon that continues to escalate. bloodier, to gain momentum and cause carnage and which continues to take place live on social networks. traumatic detail – and it keeps getting closer to the Syrian villages from which my family emigrated in the 1970s.

    Our options:

    • A Republican campaign that continues to become bolder in its rhetoric of blatant and exposed intolerance and xenophobia.
    • A Democratic campaign that constantly thumbs its nose at Arab and Muslim voters who beg for a sign of their anti-war intentions.
    • Two third-party candidates who have fully embraced Arab American voters, often literally, showing up at community functions and telling them everything they want to hear — except that they can actually win.

    There is a bitterness, a resentment that has continued to burn and build for over a year in Arab-American communities. With every glance at the screens in the palms of their hands are vivid reminders of the horrors of an absurdly lopsided war, financed by their own taxes.

    Hospitals, universities And residential buildings reduced to dust, frenzied search for survivors in the rubblechildren scavenging through landfills for food, refugees burned alive, decapitated infantsentire villages and ancient monuments of historical and religious importance wiped off the map.

    Cold and contradictory Reactions from the Biden administration persisted throughout the year as the number of civilian deaths soaredand finally reached a plateau only because counting the dead has become impossible.

    There have been many moments of hope – thousands of Americans students return to their campuses in protest. Resignation of senior federal officials on American support for the war. The president himself sidelined him in favor of a younger, more compassionate candidate – with two immigrant parents.

    But the students finally be silenced. Dissenting voices in powerful places would be quietly replaced. And replacing the president on the ballot has so far failed to chart a course that seems different from the devastating status quo.

    The resulting exhaustion, discouragement and fury leave many Arab Americans, as well as their friends and neighbors, unable to confidently fill a circle in the presidential vote.

    The case of Trump

    No one at the Sunday dinner table took up the cause of former President Donald Trump.

    But some prominent Arab Americans have taken this extraordinary step, including the mayors of Hamtramck and Dearborn Heights.

    Both said Trump would bring peace.

    They must have forgotten that nine days into his presidency, Trump authorized a botched counterterrorism raid in Yemen. who killed 25 civilians. At least 86 Yemeni civilians reportedly killed in airstrikes and raids during Trump’s presidency, according to independent monitoring groups.

    It’s hard to imagine that the mayors forgot that in 2017 Trump banned immigrants from Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq and Iran.

    Or that he used the term “Palestinian” as an insult on the debate stage. Or that he called Biden to let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “finish the job” in Gaza. Or that he promised to do it somehow expel these student demonstrators who demand a free Palestine.

    Surely they cannot have forgotten Trump’s policy of separate children from their parents at the southern borderor the ultimate shame – his assertion at the debate stage that Immigrants ate their neighbors’ animals in Ohio.

    When the mayor of Dearborn Heights joined Trump on stage in Novi last monthAn image released by the campaign appeared on large screens, showing a group of Pakistani men in traditional dress burning an American flag with the following text: “Meet your new neighbors if Kamala wins.»

    I know many Arab Americans will vote for Trump, but not without angering their friends and loved ones who value logic and self-respect.

    Yet Trump seems to view these supporters as a value, rather than a liability, as is sometimes felt. for Arab American Democrats looking to support Harris.

    Harris’ case

    “So many innocent lives lost, desperate and hungry people fleeing again and again to safety. The scale of the suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war so that Israel is safe, the hostages are freed, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.

    It’s Harris on Gaza at this summer’s Democratic National Convention.

    The specific recognition of Palestinian suffering and the promise of self-determination could have been a watershed moment, a sign of recognition that the Arabs under attack in the Middle East, the relatives, friends and others in whom we recognize ourselves, are worthy of the rights of man. and equal treatment.

    Then news spread that party leaders had refused to allow a Palestinian American speaker to attend the convention, despite the government’s tireless efforts. Michigan delegates promise non-controversial speech.

    And for many Arab Americans, it seemed like the end of any meaningful effort to bridge the gap between the campaign and Palestine’s advocates.

    The campaign appeared to spread to other potential voting blocs, including longtime conservatives who oppose Trump and could be swayed by Dick and Liz Cheney.

    In the meantime, the war in Gaza has spread to Lebanonwhere thousands of Michiganders have close family ties, vacation homes and business interests.

    More and more Michiganders were losing family members. Others turned to Trump out of pure anger and a desire to punish the Democratic Party, rational or not.

    Yet, as my sister argued at this table, Harris, unlike Trump, has never been accused of rape; never fought for revoke the right to abortion; never has called other countries “assholes”;” never claimed the arrest of journalists Or the expulsion of demonstrators; she is not known for habitual deception And she came to the defense of Detroit after Trump clearly insulted the city during a visit last month.

    The arguments in favor of the protest vote

    Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West each made hot, repeated and well informed openings to Arab Americans in Michigan.

    They worked to win the votes of Arab Americans, in person and in great detail, rather than insisting on their support for national security reasons.

    Yet they simply cannot win, and are even unlikely to achieve the independent candidate’s true goal: winning 5% of the vote, nationally, which would make federal election funds available to that party in the next election cycle.

    Even Ralph Nader, an Arab-American icon, never got more than 3 percent in Michigan as a third-party presidential candidate in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008.

    Come around

    For most of this year, my parents had no intention of voting in this election. They were too angry. Too jaded and exhausted by the pain and fear caused by a year of uncontrolled violence in the Middle East and the relentless onslaught of news, ads and robocalls on the presidential campaign.

    They only requested ballots at my insistence.

    Arab-American organizers have worked too hard and for too long to increase voter turnout in Michigan for our family to stay away.

    This is what I expected of them: to abstain from the presidential race as a sign of discreet protest.

    Instead, with his 11-year-old granddaughter playing in the background, my father changed course, convinced by my sister’s passionate calls to vote to protect democracy and women’s bodily autonomy .

    Neither major candidate, he added, appears willing to use the power of the White House to bring peace to the Middle East. But for Americans, he surmised, one candidate is clearly a responsible choice over another. And he filled the circle next to Kamala Harris’ name.

    My mother, not usually one to get behind anyone, followed suit, decisively, if half-heartedly.

    I was stunned.

    For months, I’ve been telling people that my family was forced to make an impossible choice between self-respect with a third-party vote, or wisdom with a vote for Harris.

    My parents found a way to make this choice with honor and conviction, and I am extremely proud of it.

    I have not yet completed the presidential portion of my ballot.

    I am not as pragmatic and clear-headed as my parents. But I’m working on it.

    Khalil AlHajal is deputy editorial page editor for the Detroit Free Press. Contact: [email protected]. Send a letter to the editor to freep.com/letters and we can publish it online and in print.

    Pabio
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