Why are America’s progressive Arab movements supporting Trump?

 Dr Nafeez Ahmed

Hassan Sheikh, executive director of eMgage Michigan, leads a chant during a protest of Muslim Ban 3.0 on October 4, 2017 in Detroit, Michigan, US [Stephen Perez/Getty Images]

Donald Trump is scared that he will lose on 3 November. Behind that fear is something even greater; most of all, he is scared that the Muslims are coming. And he’s right. What other reason could there be for Trump’s quiet but inexorable effort to capture the Arab American vote during this campaign?

That effort focuses predominantly on Michigan, one of a few crucial swing states including Ohio and Florida. How Michigan’s quarter of a million voters of Middle Eastern-heritage vote will be pivotal in determining who wins the White House. After all, Trump won by razor-thin margins in 2016. Just 107,000 votes across those three swing states effectively decided the election.

That’s why in August, John Akouri – who chairs the Lebanese American Chamber of Commerce – was appointed Co-Chair of the Trump-Pence Presidential Campaign in Michigan as part of a grand strategy to divide the Arab vote. Akouri has played this role supporting Republican candidates many times before to great effect. In the 2016 elections, it was Akouri who helped to ensure that Trump won the state of Michigan from his rival Hillary Clinton, by fewer than 11,000 votes.

Now he is set to play the same role again. Since his appointment, he has met personally with both Trump and Pence, as well as Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel; Donald Trump Jnr of the Trump Organisation; and Lara Lea Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and campaign advisor, among many other top Trump officials and advisors.

There is an even bigger ace up Trump’s sleeve, though: an unwitting and unlikely ally in the form of parts of America’s major progressive Arab and Muslim movements. Since early September, there have been a series of accelerating attacks against EMGAGE – the largest American Muslim political action committee (PAC) mobilising a million Muslim votes in support of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden – by a number of progressive Arab American groups. However, these attacks could end up gifting Trump an election-deciding victory in Michigan, as well as other important swing states.

When the NGO American Muslims for Palestine, for instance, puts out a call “prohibiting” Muslims from working with EMGAGE, it risks sealing not just the fate of American Muslims, but of all minorities across the United States, and of Palestine itself. It is effectively encouraging American Muslim voters to stay at home on 3 November, doing Akouri’s job for him. This could kill the Biden campaign at the most crucial time.

The challenge has been brought to the fore in the past week. Following Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power after the elections – justified by the idea that the Biden campaign might “rig” postal ballots – the president moved rapidly to consolidate control over the Supreme Court with his nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on 18 September. This was after admitting that his core strategy would be to take disputed election results to that very Court.

All of this suggests that Trump already anticipates losing the presidential election, but only by margins sufficiently narrow that would permit him to justify overturning a Biden victory through a Supreme Court under Republican control. As former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Well wrote in an urgent letter to his friends and family: “The only way that I can see that this threat can be eliminated is to vote for Biden. It will not be enough to just not vote for Trump. Any basis for a contested election can only really be eliminated by the election not being close.”

In other words, the only way to remove Trump from office is to widen the margin of victory to such a degree that contesting the results becomes so transparently implausible as to be politically impossible.

In 2016, the biggest reason that Trump won is because registered Democrat voters simply didn’t turn out on election day. Learning from this lesson, right now EMGAGE is leading the only mass campaign to mobilise a million American Muslims to vote against Trump in the forthcoming election, with grassroots efforts focusing on Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, New York, Illinois, Texas, and California. If those voters are led to believe that working with EMGAGE is equivalent to betraying the Palestinian cause, we should not be surprised if their disillusion leads them not to vote at all on 3 November.

Curiously, the anti-EMGAGE campaign began with a former Republican Party operative who helped George W Bush win the state of Florida. On 20 August, in a video released by the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Florida, the activist Professor Sami Al-Arian – currently exiled in Turkey after enduring a decade-long process of persecution under what many civil rights groups considered to be spurious terrorism charges – complained about EMGAGE: “We need to expose those people inside us trying to take credit for something they do not deserve. I have seen some of these people today they’re trying to promote Biden and to speak on behalf of the Muslim community, particularly an organisation like EMGAGE… which they try to dance with Zionists and try to infiltrate our community and claim they are going to bring a million votes.” [sic]

Al-Arian explicitly opposed the idea of bringing American Muslims out to vote for Biden, but offered no meaningful alternative as to how to prevent a Trump second term. This may not ultimately be surprising, because before he fell out of favour with the US authorities, Al-Arian was very much like Akouri.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden on August 12, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware, US [Drew Angerer/Getty Images]

He campaigned vigorously on behalf of the Republican Party at mosques and Muslim cultural centres, and would later boast of how the Muslim vote was responsible for Bush’s victory in Florida by very tight margins: “We certainly delivered him many more than 537 votes.” Al-Arian would go on to join the Bush administration’s American Muslim Council, and participated in meetings at the White House complex with Bush advisor Karl Rove. His flirtations with Republicans did not cease even after all the draconian measures against Muslim communities at home and abroad post-9/11. As late as the summer of 2004, he was meeting privately with Republican power broker Grover Norquist.

Al-Arian’s urging of American Muslims to boycott EMGAGE was followed by a series of stories by Electronic Intifada, arguing that various members of EMGAGE’s leadership had engaged previously with Jewish groups with close ties to Israel. American Muslim support for EMGAGE’s election campaigning was thus equated with a betrayal of Palestine.

But is it really the EMGAGE campaign that represents the fundamental existential threat to Palestinians at this time? While Biden’s approach to the Palestinian question may well be disappointingly tepid in many respects, it is still far ahead of Trump’s, and superior to any previous Democrat Party policy on Israel-Palestine.

Bernie Sanders’ Jewish outreach director, Joel Rubin, has described Biden’s Middle East platform as “the most realistic and most progressive of its kind” among Democrats, for the first time encompassing explicit opposition to settlements, condemnation of unilateral annexation, unequivocal support for a “viable” Palestinian state, and even protecting free speech that is critical of Israel, including around the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

In comparison, what does Trump offer Palestinians? Middle East experts recognise widely that Trump’s “peace plan” is on track to destroy any chance of a viable independent Palestinian state. Progressive American Jewish communities see the plan as a rubber stamp for “permanent occupation”. Even Alon Liel, Israel’s former Ambassador to South Africa and ex-head of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says that the Trump plan “looks a lot like apartheid”.

By seeking to neuter the most prominent American Muslim voter initiative in history at this crucial time, these progressive groups are on track to make the Trump vision to end Palestine a horrifying reality. They thus endanger the very cause that they champion. In the name of the Palestinian cause, they are unwittingly encouraging Arab and Muslim minority voters to disengage from the electoral process. This would guarantee a Trump victory.

It is crucially important to reflect on what this really means, given that we are at one of the most pivotal points in American and global political history. A Trump second term will reinforce the dangerous normalisation of white supremacism; embolden the crushing of Muslim, black and ethnic minority rights; accelerate the unconstitutional erosion of checks and balances in US democracy; and intensify the lurch toward dangerous climate change, while all but throwing Palestinians into the sea.

The Democrat Party is far from an ideal alternative to the age of Trump. Yet it is only by removing Trump from office that there can be any hope at all of beginning the urgently needed process of repairing America’s broken democracy.

Americans have just five weeks to go before the election. They can still snatch the White House out of Trump’s hands, but to do so Arab and Muslim opinion leaders in the US need to take stock of what is at stake, and stop cannibalising each other. The urgent focus has to be on getting everybody out to vote to prevent Trump from stealing the 2020 election.