The Kamala Harris campaign kicked out a prominent Muslim Democrat from the vice president’s rally in Royal Oak on Monday, further driving a wedge between the Democratic Party and Arab and Muslim Americans.
Ahmed Ghanim, a Democrat, says he accepted an invitation to the event and was seated in the Royal Oak Music Theatre when a campaign organizer ordered him to leave.
“She took me to the door, and she closed it, and I found two police officers waiting there, and she said, ‘You have to leave right now,’” Ghanim tells Metro Times. “I asked why she was kicking me out. She wouldn’t answer. I was very calmly asking why I was being kicked out.”
This article lavishes praise on Trump with little mention of his stated policy positions towards Muslim Americans and Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Trump visited Hamtrack’s Muslim leaders last week in an effort to win over Arab American voters. Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, a Muslim immigrant from Yemen who campaigned on banning LGBTQ+ pride flags from city property, endorsed Trump in September.
“Trump was in Hamtramck eating with the Muslims with traditional Yemeni food,” Ghalib says. “That’s the difference between the two campaigns in Michigan.”
Oh, Trump's stance on such subjects is utter trash. But the fact that he's actually trying to make the appearance of support is going to matter in Michigan if Harris doesn't do the same. That sort of ground game matters, especially to low-information voters that aren't actively engaged in everything going on elsewhere in politics.
Because it's comically obvious that the attacks against Harris are bad-faith at best. Harris will be infinitely better on Palestine than Trump will be. She won't ban immigration from Muslim countries. She won't endorse Israel annexing the West Bank. She doesn't revile the very existence of brown-skinned people.
I get it, she's not perfect. She's certainly not. But she also is a politician trying to walk a very narrow line. Coming out and saying that Israel should be completely cut off and that we should institute a full trade embargo against them would be quite popular among the left, and it may even be the morally right thing to do, but it would also cost her the election. She's also running with the endorsement of a president that is himself an admitted Zionist, and she can't publicly stray too far from his positions, at least until she is elected. Once she is elected, she'll have some more room to strike her own path, but right now she needs to tow the line.
America does not elect the president by popular vote. Becoming president requires winning majorities in battleground states, many of them quite moderate and filled with religious and more conservative voters. Calling for an embargo of Israel will win her points on the left, but it will also cause her to lose Pennsylvania.
But the reason people downvote these anti-Kamala posts is that they are clearly in bad faith. You only see posts deriding Kamala on Palestine; you never see such posts about Trump. Trump is given a free pass to be overtly racist against Muslims, while Kamala is expected to be an explicit anti-Zionist. It's a clear bad faith double-standard that is obviously meant to help Trump get elected. People aren't stupid, they can see through this bad faith bullshit.
This article does not seem a bad faith argument though. This person is a registered Democrat, ran for a Democratic seat, canvassed for Democrats, was invited to a Democratic event. He didn't say, do, or even wear anything. Nonetheless he was singled out and threatened to leave with no explanation.
You seem to have a bit of an optimistic view on Harris position on Israel IMO. I won't begrudge you of that, you're free to think that way. But actions like the one this article reported doesn't do this opinion any favors.
Any article posted that is in any way negative on Harris, even if something she legitimately did wrong, gets massively downvoted in this federation. Kind of echo chambery, I guess.
That's how social media works. But also, the whole pro-genocide, anti-Muslim thing is just constructed narrative that the far left eats hook line and sinker. So the massive focus on this one thing when there are lots of other things going on feels inauthentic. Feels like astroturfing.
That doesn't mean every poster or article is part of an influence campaign. No one should be completely ignorant of these issues. It's important to have some of them. But because people are attaching an outsized importance to this thing, they all get lumped together as part of the same disingenuous push to elect Trump over Harris.