Biden should reconsider his candidacy
His unflagging support of Israel in its genocidal campaign will sink his own
Keir Starmer, the UK MP who seeks to become the next Prime Minister, reportedly has been scrambling after polling revealed that the party he leads, the Labour Party, has lost the Muslim vote. LBC showcased a few call-in voters who expressed their consternation over Starmer’s comments several weeks back, where he defended the state of Israel’s “right” to shut off water, electricity, food and other vital supplies to the people of Gaza. (He attempted to walk this back immediately, but the damage had already registered.)
Now, it appears that the Labour Party has lost a constituency upon which it has long depended—indeed, it would seem, has taken for granted.
This seems to mirror the situation here at home, though things are a bit murkier. I don’t believe there has been representative polling nationwide of Arab Americans and their attitudes toward the two main parties. There was localized polling some weeks back that showed that, in the state of Michigan, which is home to Dearborn, the largest Arab American community, President Biden’s support has dropped precipitously. While that community had backed Biden in 2020 solidly, the poll showed that that support had dwindled to about 17%.
Michigan in 2020, a state in Biden’s win column, went for Democrats by about 155,000 votes. As the report says, “There are more than 200,000 registered Muslim voters in the state of Michigan.” In other words, Biden is currently underwater in the state.
According to those surveyed, this stems directly from his stance regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It’s one thing for Biden to have given Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a deep, thick bear hug at the beginning of hostilities and to have indicated again and again that, as far as the U.S. was concerned, there were “no red lines” when it came to Israel’s conduct. But it’s a different thing altogether when the President of the United States downplays the Palestinian death tolls from the conflict.
That showed a remarkable lack of respect. It was a form of dehumanization, and Muslim Americans recognized this.
Just this week, there were reports of some women wearing hijabs who had been refused entry to a Biden-Harris event, even though the women had been invited. An unnamed source indicated that those women had been “part of a group” that had earlier engaged in some manner of protest (the kind of protest was not indicated). Whether or not that is true—whether or not the women were part of a group (were they the ones that had actually engaged in disruptive behavior? Was this guilt by association?) or if this were some type of political stunt—it’s still a terrible look for this administration.
I swear, we on the Democratic side were just condemning Donald Trump for removing oppositional voices from his rallies. It wasn’t that long ago.
Biden seems to have made the calculation (and possibly Keir Starmer across the pond as well) that he can sacrifice the Arab or Muslim vote and still eke out a victory. I am not so sure. And I know for a fact that he should not have even made it so that he had to make a choice. He should have attempted to position himself so that he could represent and retain all of the constituencies that had supported him. If he had remained even somewhat aloof from Netanyahu’s plans at the beginning of the conflict, Biden might have been able to maintain some distance and ability to pivot. But now he’s in for a penny, in for a pound. There is no daylight between Biden and Netanyahu in terms of what the latter intends to pursue.
I’m not Muslim. I’m agnostic. I have no dog in that theological fight. However, I am a Black American, and I have been singularly struck by the abject treatment of the Palestinians, not only on the ground in Gaza but also in the media coverage of their plight. They are utterly racialized, anonymized, seen as one glob and not as individuals; and they are treated as Black people are treated here. It’s a very similar level of disrespect. It’s been quite instructive.
So it’s incredibly frustrating to see Biden consistently disregard the fate and the condition of Palestinians, even as Israel has been deemed by the International Court of Justice to be plausibly enacting a genocide against them. Not only is that a lack of human decency on the part of Biden, it’s a diabolical level of dedication toward a country committed to perpetrating the crime of crimes.
Just this week, footage from a hospital in Jenin, in the West Bank—far from the locus of fighting in Gaza—showed disguised Israeli soldiers invade the grounds. From the footage, if one hadn’t been informed by a media commentator that those persons were state actors, one would be forgiven for believing them to be terrorists. In a scene out of The Godfather, they went up to a room where a man was recuperating from wounds (whether or not he had previously been a combatant, as a patient, he no longer was on the battlefield, and he had been a patient for months), and they killed him while he was sleeping.
That’s an assassination under the color of state action, and still the Biden administration could not bring itself to criticize Israel for this act (much less condemn Israel, which is what the situation called for). The excuses that emanated from the Biden State Department essentially blessed what Israel did and ushers in more such extrajudicial killings. It’s clear murder. There’s no other way to read that situation. But the Biden administration can’t find it fit to enforce any lines of morality or decency on Israel’s conduct.
I’m beside myself that Biden has put me and other voters like me in this position, where we as an entire nation are complicit in Israel’s genocidal actions. By extension of what this White House is doing, I am being forced to underwrite things that go against my entire moral compass. I would never stand for what’s being done in my name (and that is exactly why I write, to speak my conscience).
But Biden has put me and those like me in a terrible position. Because a vote is an affirmative endorsement. This was exactly my problem with a lifelong friend of mine back in 2016, where I knew he would vote for Trump, as though his vote had no further ramifications. I ended that friendship, because his vote was an affirmative endorsement of Trump’s philosophy as well as Trump’s policies. As far as I could determine, my friend did not see the ramifications of his vote, that it would redound in many ways to the detriment of so many.
It is nine months out from the 2024 election. Biden has done himself grievous electoral harm. He has conflicted many of those who otherwise would vote for the Democratic Party, as we have always done. He has endangered the election. It’s possible that he could perform a sharp course correction, become the watchdog of humanitarian rights that the American president should have been all along, and redeem himself. I don’t think he has enough room to make that maneuver, even if he wanted to; and I don’t think he even has enough time.
As a voter, I don’t know what I’m going to do come November. I’ve never been in this position before, and I resent Biden for putting me here. I am a dedicated voter who turns out for municipal elections. I understand what my civic duty is. And I certainly don’t want to see any Republican, but especially Trump, back in office. That would be a disaster.
What I would like to see is Biden step aside. It’s late in the election season for him to make such a move, but I think it would be the best thing for the Democratic Party as a whole. Right now, Biden himself is the albatross. I stood behind him way back in the classified documents semi-scandal (remember that?), and I have been steadfast in my belief that the concern over his age is just rank ageism. His age is not a barrier. I see through all of those pretensions of the political opposition. But now I feel that the party would be well-served to have someone on the ticket who is not tainted by Israel’s actions, someone who could bring renewed enthusiasm to the contest. I’m leaning toward a Gavin Newsom, but there are others who would serve just as well.
But Biden’s not the one. His presence on the ticket will inspire many people to stay home. If he is half as insightful a politician as he seems to be, he would recognize this and allow the party to pick someone that will make the ticket viable.
At one point, Biden appeared to promise (or at least heavily hinted) that he would be a one-term president. He changed his mind along the way, but it’s not too late for him to do the right thing.