Monthly Archives: October 2024

Arab and Muslim American Support for Trump Is Self-Sabotage

This op-ed was published by The Atlantic on October 30, 2024

Over the weekend, a group of Arab American and Muslim American leaders in Michigan appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally and urged their communities to vote for him. The outreach might be working: A recent poll showed Trump with a narrow lead among Arab American voters.

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. It’s shocking because Trump’s stated policies—on Palestine, on political freedom, and on the very presence of Muslims in America—are antithetical to so much of what most of these voters believe in. It’s unsurprising because we Arab and Muslim Americans have a long tradition of merciless political self-sabotage.

In 2000, angered by the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq, the use of “secret evidence” in deportation proceedings against Arab and Muslim immigrants, and especially the carnage of the Second Intifada, many liberal Arab Americans—myself included—decided not to vote for Al Gore and turned instead to Ralph Nader, himself a prominent Arab American. If the point was to advance Arab political interests, our protest was a pathetic failure. The election of George W. Bush led directly to the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategic disaster that continues to resonate in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

This time around, the primary grievance is the Biden administration’s support of—or, at least, inability to end—Israel’s invasion of Gaza and, now, its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran. Once again, the impulse is to express our anger and “punish” the politicians responsible by withholding a vote for them. In an election with only two viable candidates, however, there is no difference between not supporting Kamala Harris and actively supporting Trump. And a quick review of the most important issues on which there’s a consensus among Arab and Muslim Americans demonstrates that a second Trump term would be dramatically worse than a Harris presidency.

Read: What would a second Trump administration mean for the Middle East?

Start with Trump’s signature issue, immigration. Nothing in Harris’s agenda would restrict immigration from Arab or Muslim countries. Trump offers the precise opposite. One of his first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban,” flatly prohibiting the entry of nationals from a list of seven majority-Muslim countries. President Joe Biden rescinded that executive order; Trump has vowed to reinstate and possibly expand it.

Moreover, Trump’s likely attack on Temporary Protected Status, especially for Haitian immigrants, is ominous for a number of Arab and Muslim communities whose members currently qualify, including Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Sudanese. With a stroke of Trump’s Sharpie, all of them could find themselves stripped of this protection—and included in his promised “bloody” mass deportations. Efforts to extend Temporary Protected Status to Lebanese nationals, entirely plausible under a Harris administration, would be dead in the water under Trump. Defending his decision to endorse Trump, an imam in Michigan declared that the former president “promises peace.” He plainly does not. The Washington Post has reported that, according to six sources, Trump recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” militarily in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The notion that Trump would prioritize the interests of Arab civilians is simply absurd. This is a man who has repeatedly used the word Palestinian as an epithet against his (in many cases Jewish) Democratic political opponents.

Trump already has a long, instructive, and highly discouraging record on these issues. As president, he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and issued a statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in the contested holy city. He recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, in direct contravention of the United Nations charter’s rule against the acquisition of territory by war. And he slammed shut the Overton window on Palestinian independence and a two-state solution, which had been a matter of bipartisan consensus since the end of the Cold War. His “Peace to Prosperity” plan, released in January 2020, invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the West Bank. Such a move would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded entirely by Israel, and therefore incapable of meaningful sovereignty. The primary effect of this crude document was to create a permission structure for Republicans to support wide-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank and dispense with supporting Palestinian independence.

Harris, by contrast, has been categorical in her support of a real two-state solution that would mean the end of the occupation that began in 1967. The vice president has clearly stated that Palestinians and Israelis need to reach a peace agreement that affords them “equal measures of prosperity and freedom.” Trump has never spoken of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures of anything.

David A. Graham: Trump’s new racist insult

Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias extends to the home front. Arab and Muslim Americans have been emigrating to the United States in large numbers since the late 19th century in search of a better life characterized by liberty and democracy. And yet Trump’s whole campaign, and his entire agenda, amounts to an assault on those ideals. He has consistently singled out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” that he has pledged to eliminate. According to The Washington Post, he told a group of Jewish donors in May that he is determined to deport pro-Palestinian students and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Our communities are overwhelmingly aghast at the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel’s military campaigns. I share the sentiment. But channeling that anger into support for Trump would be an exercise in the most rarefied gullibility and naivete. Far from promising peace, Trump threatens war on “the enemy from within.” Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly those with pro-Palestinian sentiments, are likely to be high on the list of targets. We need to learn from the lessons of our own history. When we try to punish the politicians who have disappointed us without taking a serious inventory of the likely consequences, we usually just end up hurting ourselves.

This election is a referendum on American democracy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 16, 2024

IIn a mere three weeks, the American constitutional system will face its greatest test since the Civil War. The depressions of the late 19th century and 1930s, the two world wars, and the Watergate scandal never put the constitutional order on the ballot. But on November 5, American voters are being asked for what amounts to a yes or no verdict on a democratic future.

What the Republican Party is offering under Donald Trump – but hardly restricted to him – effectively pits a party that remains committed to the constitutional system versus one whose leader is on record as planning to dispense with it. The once Grand Old Party has become so extreme it is promoting candidates far beyond what would ever have been considered remotely acceptable.

Mr Trump is the most obvious and threatening, because he stands a good chance of being reelected president. But he is not the man he was in 2016 or even 2020. He is showing marked signs of decline, increasingly resembling US President Joe Biden in lapsing into incoherence and senior moments. He recently spent almost 40 minutes at a rally swaying silently to golden oldies instead of continuing to answer questions.

In 2016, most voters regarded Mr Trump as a successful businessman (mainly because of his stint on the hit TV show The Apprentice) given to eccentric, politically incorrect outbursts many considered refreshing. In 2024, most voters know that Mr Trump’s presidency was a chaotic mess and that he is now promising the very kind of autocratic misrule the Constitution was designed to prevent.

He has spoken of “ending” crime, which is on the decline in most areas, by unleashing the police without any restrictions or restraints for “one rough hour”.

He is still vilifying migrants, claiming they are killers and “animals” who are “destroying” the country and is threatening an unprecedented mass deportation of millions that he admits will be “bloody.” Mr Trump justifies this with absurd fabrications such as legal Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs, and vows to therefore remove their protected status.

But, he says, these millions of murderous migrants are hardly the biggest problem. That would be “the enemy within,” which he identifies as “crazy leftists,” which he says should be dealt with “by the National Guard or even the military.” As an example of who he is talking about, he specifies the liberal California representative Adam Schiff and has vowed to prosecute, along others, members of the House select committee that held hearings into the January 6 riot that he instigated to try to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election.

Reports reveal that on January 6, when Mr Trump was told that his vice president, Mike Pence, was in mortal danger from a mob chanting that he should be hanged and had erected a gallows outside of Congress, the former president replied blandly: “So what?” He has repeatedly promised to pardon all those convicted of attacking Congress and police officers in that unprecedented insurrection.

His attitude towards elections is summed up in another recently revealed statement: “it doesn’t matter if you lose an election, you still have to fight like hell” presumably to stay in power. And he has been laying the groundwork to reject another election defeat.

Many Trump voters don’t take these threats seriously, and are more afraid of the “woke Democrats” than Mr Trump’s promised violent authoritarianism. But there is no reason to think that he’s playacting. After his 2016 victory, he did his best to live up to campaign promises, including a “Muslim travel ban,” restricting entry from a series of largely Muslim-majority countries. Of course he has promised to reinstate that policy immediately.

Voters also know that he is now a convicted felon, and civilly liable for sexual abuse, defamation and serial tax fraud. None of it seems to matter.

Republican extremism is hardly restricted to Mr Trump. Its worst example is the candidate for North Carolina governor, current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson.

Mr. Robinson has been revealed – although he extremely unconvincingly denies this – of having made numerous bizarre and incendiary postings on a pornographic website. He described himself as “a black Nazi,” recommended Adolf Hitler’s memoir Mein Kampf as excellent reading material, and expressed a profound keenness for transgender pornography despite his bitterly homophobic and anti-trans pronouncements. He expressed strong support for the long-abolished American slavery system and the especially brutal transatlantic slave trade, lamented its passing, and expressed a keen desire to buy and own slaves in the present day.

Mr Trump lauded Mr Robinson, one of the most prominent black Republicans, as “Martin Luther King Jr on steroids”. He expressed astonishment at the nauseated look on Mr Robinson’s face. We now know that Mr Robinson regards the civil rights icon as “a commie” and derided him as “Martin Lucifer Coon,” the last being an incredibly offensive epithet for African Americans.

Mr Robinson was already on the record with a series of staggeringly vulgar extreme positions, including musing in a church sermon that “some folks just need killing.”

The Republican Party has stopped lauding Mr Robinson and Mr Trump failed to mention him at a recent North Carolina rally. But the party has done nothing to repudiate him. Apparently this iteration of the Republican Party is content to field such candidates if they stand a chance of possibly winning. Democrats do not tolerate anything analogous and they replaced the visibly aging Mr Biden.

Mr Robinson is the most extreme example, and Mr Trump is the most threatening, but around the country the Republican Party is being represented by candidates fully in tune with both of them. Meanwhile, traditional conservatives like former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney find themselves politically exiled by Mr Trump, while stalwarts like Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have endorsed the democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

Americans are being offered a chance to either reaffirm or repudiate the fundamental political ethos of the country. It is terrifying that so many of them are either supportive of Mr Trump’s overt promises of an experiment in American fascism or are so naively confident that he doesn’t mean what he says, or won’t be allowed by others to exercise his authority if he wins, that they will probably either return him to the White House or deliver him a narrow defeat.

Either way, the American system is facing its most severe threat since the Civil War. The Republican Party may never regain its constitutional or even fundamentally rational character. Win or lose in November, its shocking decline into extremism, with litmus tests of ritual dishonesty and the willingness to embrace the likes of a self-described “black Nazi,” could well mean the venerable Republican Party is in its final stages, at least as a respectable or even viable, American political institution.

Together Iran and Israel are destroying Biden’s Middle East policy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 3, 2024

U.S. policy regarding the crises in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, is hanging by a thread. Reckless actions by America’s closest partner, Israel, and primary adversary, Iran, are demolishing Washington’s goal of containing the conflict to Gaza. Tehran and Israel are both driving the region towards a multi-front conflict and war of missiles that could draw in the US. This is precisely what US President Joe Biden has been striving to avoid.

Last year, soon after October 7, the Biden administration concluded that US interests could probably withstand anything arising, strictly from the Gaza war. But they feared getting dragged into a conflict that would pose untold risks.

Therefore, Mr. Biden developed a policy of conflict containment. The virtual carte blanche Washington gave Israel regarding Gaza was intended to help him restrain Israel, particularly in Lebanon.

For many months, it appeared to be working. Despite the emergence of flashpoints in Syria and Iraq, and Red Sea piracy by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Israel was focused on Gaza rather than Lebanon and fighting wasn’t spreading disastrously.

Ironically, the principal threat to this US imperative has come from Israel rather than Iran. In the week following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began pressing for a major offensive against Hezbollah. Mr. Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reject these demands and focus on Hamas. A similar scenario was repeated at least twice.

But Israel sought two imperatives that were unavailable in Gaza. Both Israel and Iran assessed that Tehran had pocketed strategic benefits at the expense of Israel, Hamas and, above all, the Palestinians. That equation couldn’t be altered in Gaza, which has no meaningful importance to Tehran, and especially since Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and an unreliable ally that broke with the “axis” completely over the Syrian war.

The Israeli state badly needed a “win” to recuperate national security institutions whose reputations were damaged by the breathtaking failures on October 7. Mr. Netanyahu needed an unequivocal “victory” to restore his own reputation in advance of any future investigation into those failures.

Neither goal was going to be absolutely achieved by fighting Hamas. Instead, taking the fight decisively to Hezbollah, the prototypical and most potent of Iran’s Arab militias, offered the potential for both. But until recent weeks, Israel was largely content with gradual escalation against Hezbollah that made Washington distinctly nervous but never threatened to force the regional war the US was seeking, at virtually all costs, to avoid, although there were obviously making such a disaster ever more plausible.

When Israel’s operation in Rafah marked the end of the primary war against Hamas and transformed the continued conflict in Gaza into an amorphous counter-insurgency rather than a conceptually-coherent campaign against clearly-identified targets, Israel’s attention began to shift back north.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah expressed genuine interest in a US-proposed compromise in which the Lebanese militia would agree to withdraw its fighters and heavy equipment seven or eight km north of the border. Israel was demanding at least 20km while Hezbollah was insisting on an elusive and implausible ceasefire in Gaza.

Instead, Israel steadily increased pressure against Hezbollah and Iranian assets in Syria, while Mr Netanyahu rebuffed the intensified US efforts to achieve a four-week ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel’s extraordinary penetration of Hezbollah’s interworkings was the key to a series of devastating assassinations of much of that organisation’s key leadership while thousands of its operatives and associates were killed or debilitated by booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing air campaign severely damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure and equipment, including its all-important rocket launchers. These assets are crucial to Iran, serving as the primary deterrent against any attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

The remarkably successful campaign culminated in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his key deputies. But it was followed by precisely what Washington had, for a year, focused on preventing: an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.

While it is being marketed as “limited” and “targeted,” – and therefore implicitly not supposed to be the beginning of a new, open-ended Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon as a “security buffer zone” – Washington understands from its own bitter experiences that such adventures are easy to launch but difficult to end or even contain.

After months of perceived passivity, Tehran finally intervened with a large-scale rocket and missile attack against civilian targets deep into Israel and the headquarters of its intelligence services. While the attack has been deemed unsuccessful by Washington, it’s unlikely that Israel will accept Mr. Biden‘s renewed calls for restraint any more than it has so many other such calls over the past few months.

The Israelis knows that the weeks before a presidential election are a time of maximum impunity from US pressure, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of this. Washington’s reticence was on full display when Mr. Biden bizarrely stated he “would not object” if Israel ended its invasion and eased its bombardment.

Israel seems unlikely to react with restraint. And the Biden administration is divided, with some senior figures privately encouraging Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and humiliation of Iran, while others increasingly fear that Mr. Netanyahu is trying to drag the US into a military confrontation with Tehran and at last secure his long-sought goal of maneuvering Washington into intervening on Israel’s behalf and bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US has the firepower to potentially set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back a decade or more, while Israel probably doesn’t.

But Mr. Biden has little to work with. He’s clearly unwilling to exercise the kind of US leverage that could keep Israel in check. He must now hope that Iran and Hezbollah will seek an understanding with Israel to remove militia forces from the border area, even though Israel may no longer be in any mood to compromise.

If the Israelis persist, and Iran and Hezbollah won’t employ “strategic patience” and back down, the nightmare of a multi-front regional war that could force Washington’s hand in defence of Israel – particularly in the month before a crucial election – may become a reality. This is a profound threat to US interests and goals, and would constitute the complete meltdown of Mr. Biden’s entire approach to the crises started by Hamas a year ago.