Reena Ninan: I cannot find one Arab-American... who have said they will vote for Kamala
- Thread starter seminole97
- Start date
Smart move for Arabs to vote for Trump. It's like rabbits voting for the coyote candidate.
Trump banned, of course, flights and refugee resettlements from 7 Muslim and mostly Arab countries when he was President. Says he will expand the ban to most Arab and mostly Muslim countries in his second term. And emphatically will ban Gaza and Palestinians refugees. No wonder all those arab-americans don't want Harris in office.
time.com
Trump Says He’ll Bring Back ‘Travel Ban’
Speaking at an event about combating antisemitism, the former President and Republican nominee said he’d also ban refugees from Gaza from entering the U.S.
Guardian is left wing, right?
‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza
Hamtramck, population 28,000, has new Trump campaign office weeks from election in hopes of gains in swing stateThat the Trump campaign would open an office in Hamtramck, a tiny city of around 28,000 people north of downtown Detroit, less than a month before the election, speaks to a particular curiosity of the 2024 presidential race.
About 40% of Hamtramck’s residents are of Middle Eastern or north African descent, 60% are believed to be Muslim Americans, and the city has an all-Muslim city council.
Last week, as Israel was expanding its war into Lebanon and continuing its daily bombardment of Gaza, scores of locals – many immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab- and Muslim-majority countries – lined Joseph Campau Avenue to attend the official opening of Trump’s office.
“Peace in the Middle East will not happen under a Harris administration – she’s too weak,” said Barry Altman, a Republican party candidate who is running for a seat in Michigan’s house of representatives next month, and who was running the new Trump campaign office on a recent afternoon. “Trump is the only hope for peace.”
Altman is not alone. Last month, Amer Ghalib, the Democratic mayor of Hamtramck, announced his endorsement of Donald Trump after meeting the former president at a rally in Flint, Michigan, where the pair spoke for about 20 minutes.
In past elections, Arab Americans were a solidly Democratic voting bloc, especially in the years following 9/11 and given Trump’s overtly anti-Muslim rhetoric. But with Kamala Harris reportedly “underwater” in Michigan – now three points behind Trump among likely voters, having led the former president by five points as recently as last month, according to one recent poll – Muslim and Arab American communities across Michigan could play a major role in the outcome of the presidential election.
Angry with the Biden administration – and, by extension, Kamala Harris – for its support for Israel, Arab Americans may be willing to overlook Trump’s history of closeness with Israel’s hard-right leaders. “If, and when, they say, when I’m president, the US will once again be stronger and closer [to Israel] than it ever was,” he said last week. “I will support Israel’s right to win its war.”
Yet national polls show Arab Americans slightly favoring the former president; others are increasingly vocal in support of the Green party’s Jill Stein.
While Hamtramck may not sway a national election all by itself, it offers a window into how many Muslim and Arab Americans feel about their political leaders, as Israel’s war on Gaza enters a second year and spreads into Lebanon.
Hamtramck aside, Macomb and Oakland counties, north of downtown Detroit, are home to an estimated 140,000 people – around 45% of Michigan’s entire Arab American community, which numbers more than 300,000.
Previous elections show that voting in these counties historically runs very close.
In 2020, Trump won 53% of the Macomb county vote, a community that is home to an estimated 65,000-80,000 Arab Americans. Even within Macomb county, voters are divided: Trump won Sterling Heights, a city home to a large Iraqi Chaldean community, by 11%, while Biden won Warren, a neighboring city, by 14%.
Next door in Oakland county, a largely suburban community that’s home to around 60,000 people who identify as Arab American, Biden won 56% of the vote four years ago.
But over the past year, Biden and Harris have been repeatedly rebuked by Michigan’s Arab and Muslim communities. Earlier this year, a number of community leaders refused to meet with Democratic campaign officials rather than Biden administration representatives to discuss the war in Gaza. Weeks later, more than 100,000 people in Michigan voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries in a protest vote against Biden’s Gaza policy.
Despite initial cautious optimism, Biden’s replacement by Harris at the top of the ticket hasn’t much changed this picture, especially as the Middle East has grown more volatile.
“Harris made it very clear that she wanted to continue funding the state of Israel,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, the director of the Abandon Harris campaign, at a press conference in Dearborn on Wednesday to officially endorse Jill Stein for president.
Harris has maintained her stance on Israel’s right to defend itself and has largely ignored the conditions laid out by the uncommitted movement, which declined to endorse her (but has forcefully come out against Trump). A poll by the Arab American Institute has Harris 18 points below Biden’s 2020 level of support among Arab Americans.
“We know that we have 40,000 voters just in Dearborn. They are highly persuadable to our cause, and we believe fundamentally that if they come out to vote, they will vote against Harris,” said Abdel Salam.
“The former president prevented our families, our friends, our colleagues from entering the country,” he continued, referring to Trump’s 2017 travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. “But the vice-president killed them.”
Trump’s visit to Detroit on Thursday marks the 11th time the former president has come to the state. Harris, for her part, has campaigned here five times.
Wanting gays in the closet or in jail, and forcing women into servitude means MAGA and Arabs are naturally aligned. But Democrats have always been more welcoming because they aren’t white.
hawkeyetraveler
HB Heisman
Any Muslim radical enough to think a protest vote for Stein (or whoever) is helping their cause is a dumbass. If that gets Trump elected so be it. It will serve them right.
If trump is elected, I hope they are ready to go back where they came from. Maybe OP will as well.
Honestly, it’s somewhat comforting to know it’s not just uneducated white trash who are easily duped by bullshit.
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