US Politics

The White House has decried a Sunday evening protest targeting a Jewish restaurant in Philadelphia as “antisemitic and completely unjustifiable”.Video circulating on Twitter shows protesters chanting outside Goldie, a Kosher restaurant in the city owned by Israeli chef Michael Solomonov:Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro condemned the protest as “blatant antisemitism”, saying the restaurant was targeted simply because its owner is Jewish:In a statement from spokesman Andrew Bates, the White House echoed that criticism:
It is Antisemitic and completely unjustifiable to target restaurants that serve Israeli food over disagreements with Israeli policy, as Governor Shapiro has underlined. This behavior reveals the kind of cruel and senseless double standard that is a calling card of Antisemitism. President Biden has fought against the evil of Antisemitism his entire life, including by launching the first national strategy to counter this hate in American history. He will always stand up firmly against these kinds of undignified actions.
Lawmakers condemned a Sunday evening protest in Philadelphia that called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza while also specifically targeting a Jewish restaurant owned by an Israeli chef. The White House said the demonstration was “antisemitic and completely unjustifiable”, while Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, decried the protesters’ “hate and bigotry” – comments echoed by numerous members of Congress. Elsewhere, the White House is warning that it will run out of money to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion within weeks. A proposal to send military assistance to both Ukraine and Israel is tied up in negotiations over stricter border security, which reportedly have broken down.Here’s what else happened today:
Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, dropped out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination, winnowing the field to five major contenders.
Antisemitism and Islamophobia have both increased since the 7 October terrorist attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, advocacy groups say.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said lawmakers who oppose aid to Ukraine are helping Vladimir Putin’s invasion succeed.
The US defense industry would benefit from increased aid to Ukraine and Israel, the White House is arguing, as it presses Congress to approve a new military assistance package.
Liz Cheney said she hopes Democrats will win next year, arguing the GOP will help turn the country into a dictatorship.
Speaking at the White House press briefing today, national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned members of Congress who oppose military assistance to Ukraine that they are helping Russian president Vladimir Putin’s campaign to conquer the country:Earlier today, the White House office of management and budget warned that the funds allocated for military assistance to Ukraine will run out by the end of the year. Joe Biden has proposed legislation that would approve more money for Ukraine and Israel’s militaries as well as to pay for tighter US border security, but it needs Republican support to pass, and the party wants even stricter border security before they will agree.Speaking of former members of Congress, the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports that ex-House lawmaker Liz Cheney is rooting for the Democrats:Liz Cheney, whose opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency alienated her from her fellow Republicans, has said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship”.In an interview with CBS on Sunday, Cheney suggested a Republican congressional majority that would be subservient to another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.“I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican party, but the Republican party of today has made a choice, and they haven’t chosen the constitution,” the former Wyoming congresswoman said when asked if she was rooting for Democratic victories in the 2024 election cycle. “And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.”She went on to say that the US was “sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship” with Trump emerging as the clear favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, notwithstanding the fact that he faces more than 90 criminal charges, including some for attempting to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election against his Democratic rival Joe Biden.George Santos’s departure has created a vacancy in Congress that must be filled via a special election.Democrats are keen to see one of their own win the open seat, as it would put them closer to retaking the chamber in 2024. Tom Suozzi, the congressman who Santos defeated last year, is running again, and Axios reports that he today announced endorsements from several mayors in the Long Island district:Here’s more from the Guardian’s Edward Helmore on the big news of this morning, when the White House warned it may run out of money to assist Ukraine within weeks:The White House has said it is “out of money and nearly out of time” to provide more weapons to Ukraine as it tries to ward off Russia’s invasion unless Congress acts to approve additional funding and support.The warning, issued on Monday in a letter to congressional leaders, laid out how the government had already gone through about $111bn appropriated for Ukraine military aid.“I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks,” Shalanda Young, director of the office of management and budget, wrote in the letter, parts of which were published by the Hill.The latest plea for money comes after the White House asked Congress to act on a $100bn supplemental funding request in October, arguing that it “advances our national security and supports our allies and partners”.The request identified border security, allies in the Indo-Pacific, Israel and Ukraine. About $61bn covered money for Ukraine, which included $30bn to restock defense department equipment sent to support the country after Russia invaded in February 2022.In the letter to leaders in the House and Senate, Young said a failure to provide more funding would “kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories”.Lawmakers are condemning a Sunday evening protest in Philadelphia that called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza while also specifically targeting a Jewish restaurant owned by an Israeli chef. The White House said the demonstration was “antisemitic and completely unjustifiable”, while Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, decried the protesters’ “hate and bigotry” – comments echoed by numerous members of Congress. Elsewhere, the White House is warning that it might run out of money to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion within weeks. A proposal to send military assistance to both Ukraine and Israel is tied up in negotiations over tightening border security, which reportedly have broken down.Here’s what else has happened today:
Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, dropped out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination, winnowing the field to five major contenders.
Antisemitism and Islamophobia have both increased since the 7 October terrorist attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, advocacy groups say.
The US defense industry would benefit from increased aid to Ukraine and Israel, the White House is arguing, as it presses Congress to approve a new military assistance package.
Today is meanwhile the first day that the House of Representatives will convene without George Santos, the prodigious liar who represented a New York district until Friday, when the chamber voted to expel him.Throughout his tumultuous months in office, Santos juked and dodged when confronted about the many fibs, distortions and whoppers he issued – none of which saved him from getting booted out of office. The Guardian’s Edward Helmore went through many of them, so you don’t have to:The war between Israel and Hamas continues, with reports that communications have been cut in the northern Gaza Strip.We have a live blog covering the latest news from the conflict, and you can find it here:Criticism of the protest at Philadelphia Jewish restaurant Goldie continues to roll in, most recently from Democratic New Jersey congressman Josh Gottheimer:As well as from Mondaire Jones, a progressive and former Democratic congressman from New York who is campaigning to claim back his old seat next year. He’s faced criticism in the past for statements allegedly insulting Jews, and was forthright in condemning the Philadelphia protest:Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator John Fetterman also condemned the protest at Goldie in Philadelphia:As did Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman from California who is running to represent the state in the Senate:Since the start of the war in Gaza, the United States has experienced an uptick both in both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidences, the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last month:Islamophobia and antisemitism are seeing sharp increases across the US after war between Israel and Hamas erupted last month.According to a new report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), the Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization received a total of 1,283 requests for help and reports of bias between 7 October and 4 November.Cair, which has called the spike “unprecedented”, revealed that the recent increase in Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment across the US mark a 216% increase over the previous year. In an average 29-day period in 2022, Cair received only 406 complaints.The top reported type of case was first-amendment – or free speech – issues, marking 23.39% of the anti-Arab and Islamophobia reports received by Cair. The organization also said 20.56% of the reports involved targeting employment, and 15.32% consisted of hate crimes. Cair said 9.2% of the anti-Arab and Islamophobia reports revolved around education and bullying.“The Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric that has been used to both justify violence against Palestinians in Gaza and silence supporters of Palestinian human rights here in America has contributed to this unprecedented surge in bigotry,” said Cair’s research and advocacy director, Corey Saylor. More

Members of Texas’s Republican party are free to associate with Nazi sympathizers without worries of violating internal policy after they held a vote on Saturday.In a 32-29 vote, the party’s executive committee decided against excluding from their organization those “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial”. A proposal to ban such individuals was included in a resolution supporting Israel as it wars with Hamas in Gaza.Although the resolution passed, the clause banning members from associating with Nazi sympathizers did not make it in.Some members of the executive committee argued that the clause was too vague.One was committee member Dan Tully, who maintained that the clause “could put you on a slippery slope”.Committee members in favor of the clause expressed their disappointment of the vote to the Texas Tribune.Rolando Garcia, a committee member who drafted the language of the clause banning ties to Nazi sympathizers, said its removal from the approved resolution “sends a disturbing message”.“We’re not specifying any individual or association,” Garcia said. “This is simply a statement of principle.”Morgan Cisneros Graham, another committee member in favor of the clause, said she did not understand how some of her colleagues “don’t have the discernment to define what a Nazi is”.Some members of the board also tried to prevent evidence of the vote, the Texas Tribune reported.The vote was held shortly after the Texas Tribune photographed the Republican state representative Jonathan Stickland meeting with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.Fuentes is an avowed admirer of Hitler, whose regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust around the time of the second world war. He has also previously called for a “holy war” against Jews.After news of the meeting, the committee debated dissociating with Stickland’s political action committee Defend Texas Liberty. Instead, the clause aiming to ban antisemitism was added into the resolution.The vote in Texas came after Israel launched war in the Palestinian city of Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel killed at least 1,200 people. The number of Palestinian people killed by Israeli strikes and bombardments that followed has surpassed 15,200, according to the Gaza health ministry.Israel – one of the US’s closest allies – has long been supported by the American Republican party.Nikki Haley and Chris Christie are among the 2024 Republican presidential election hopefuls who have voiced support for more US military aid to Israel in its war with Hamas.The Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has been less clear about his approach to Middle East foreign policy, but the former president has said in the past that there had been “no better friend or ally of Israel” than his White House.Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said he would “stand with Israel and treat terrorists like the scum they are” if he was elected to the Oval Office.The Texas state Republican party did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

Jonathan Steele’s obituary of Henry Kissinger (29 November) omits reference to his part in what the author Gary J Bass calls “one of the worst moments of moral blindness in US foreign policy”, when in 1971 he advised President Richard Nixon to side with Pakistan’s military dictator, Gen Yahya Khan, in his war with Bangladesh, then East Pakistan.In his Pulitzer prize-finalist book on this “forgotten genocide”, The Blood Telegram, Bass describes how Kissinger and Nixon repeatedly ignored the pleas from the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, who was desperately cabling his superiors with reports of the massacre of thousands of civilians in the city. Pakistan was using US-made tanks, weapons and ammunition to crush the Bengalis.Senator Edward Kennedy declared this “one of the greatest nightmares of modern times”, but Kissinger used every power he (and Nixon) possessed to cover up their role. To this day, most Americans are oblivious to the appalling stain on their country’s history, in which as many as 3 million lives were lost.Robert EvansFormer MEP and chair of European parliament South Asia delegation More

Liz Cheney, whose opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency alienated her from her fellow Republicans, has said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship”.In an interview with CBS on Sunday, Cheney suggested a Republican congressional majority that would be subservient to another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.“I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican party, but the Republican party of today has made a choice, and they haven’t chosen the constitution,” the former Wyoming congresswoman said when asked if she was rooting for Democratic victories in the 2024 election cycle. “And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.”She went on to say that the US was “sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship” with Trump emerging as the clear favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, notwithstanding the fact that he faces more than 90 criminal charges, including some for attempting to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election against his Democratic rival Joe Biden.Polls also suggest it would be a competitive race if Biden is rematched with Trump, who has been running on promises to use federal authorities to crush his enemies and to dramatically expand the immigration crackdown that his White House oversaw after his 2016 victory.“The tools that he is using are tools that we’ve seen used by authoritarians, fascists, tyrants around the world,” said Cheney, the daughter of the ex-congressman, defense secretary and vice-president Dick Cheney. “The things that he has said and done, in some ways, are so outrageous that we have become numb to them.“What I believe is the cause of our time is that we not become numb, that we understand the warning signs, that we understand the danger, and that we ignore partisan politics to stop him.”Cheney served as the vice-chairwoman of the US House committee which investigated the deadly Capitol attack staged by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 in a desperate but failed attempt to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory in the election weeks earlier.Cheney and her colleagues recommended that the justice department file criminal charges against Trump in connection with the Capitol attack, portending the four indictments obtained against the former president this year.In her remarks on Sunday, Cheney asserted that the Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, was “absolutely” a collaborator in Trump’s attempt to remain in office after his 2020 defeat.Johnson voiced conspiracy theories about Biden’s victory; authored a supreme court brief as Texas sought to have key state results invalidated; and was among more than 147 Republicans who unsuccessfully objected to certifying the outcome of the 2020 election even after the Trump mob’s attack on the Capitol had been foiled.“What Mike was doing was taking steps that he knew to be wrong, doing things that he knew to have no basis in fact or law or the constitution … in order to attempt to do Donald Trump’s bidding,” Cheney said, echoing comments she has made in interviews and in her new book Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning.Cheney said Johnson “can’t be” US House speaker when the new Congress takes its oath of office in early January 2025 and begins grappling with certifying the outcome of a presidential election the previous fall.“We’re facing a situation with respect to the 2024 election where it’s an existential crisis,” Cheney said. “We have to ensure that we don’t have a situation where an election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority.”Cheney left office in January. She lost her bid to be re-elected to Wyoming’s sole House seat – which she had held since 2017 – after a Trump-supported challenger, Harriet Hageman, ran against her in a Republican primary.Hageman subsequently won a general election and succeeded Cheney in the House.Cheney’s thoughts do not seem to be her party’s mainstream position, if comments from the prominent US Republican senator Lindsey Graham are any indication.During an appearance on CNN, Graham – who has endorsed Trump – told Cheney that the former president “was far better” than Biden “in terms of actions and results”.“I think Liz’s hatred of Trump is real,” Graham said. More

The White House has said it is “out of money and nearly out of time” to provide more weapons to Ukraine as it tries to ward off Russia’s invasion unless Congress acts to approve additional funding and support.The warning, issued on Monday in a letter to congressional leaders, laid out how the government had already gone through about $111bn appropriated for Ukraine military aid.“I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks,” Shalanda Young, director of the office of management and budget, wrote in the letter, parts of which were published by the Hill.The latest plea for money comes after the White House asked Congress to act on a $100bn supplemental funding request in October, arguing that it “advances our national security and supports our allies and partners”.The request identified border security, allies in the Indo-Pacific, Israel and Ukraine. About $61bn covered money for Ukraine, which included $30bn to restock defense department equipment sent to support the country after Russia invaded in February 2022.In the letter to leaders in the House and Senate, Young said a failure to provide more funding would “kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories”.Young added that there is “no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment.We are out of money – and nearly out of time,” Young said.The Pentagon, she said, had used 97% of the $62.3bn it received as of mid-November. And the state department had run through all of the $4.7bn in military assistance it received, including money for humanitarian assistance and economic and civilian security assistance.“We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight. This isn’t a next year problem,” she added. “The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act.”The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said last week he was confident Ukraine and Israel funding would be approved. But he said the two should be handled separately, with the Ukraine funding linked to changes in US border policy – a red line for many Democrats.“Of course, we can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe. And we understand the necessity of assisting there,” Johnson said last week. “If there is to be additional assistance to Ukraine – which most members of Congress believe is important – we have to also work on changing our own border policy.”The latest pressure to approve additional funding comes as an unreleased draft of a new Pentagon report on the defense industry was leaked to Politico.The National Defense Industrial Strategy, which is set to be released in the coming weeks by the Pentagon, warned that the US defense industrial base “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale”.It noted the US buildt the best weapons in the world, but it could not produce them quickly enough. “This mismatch presents a growing strategic risk as the United States confronts the imperatives of supporting active combat operations,” the study said.Separately over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US had provided Israel with 100 bunker buster bombs, roughly 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells since Israel was attacked by Hamas on 7 October. More

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Plenty of observers seem to think that’s all one needs to know as one beholds Donald Trump’s seemingly inevitable Republican nomination for president and possible second term. They assume that because it wasn’t fascism the first time, it cannot be fascism the second time; Trump is expected once more to be the bumbling, blustering buffoon, supervised by adults in the room.This relaxed view ignores that, with today’s pioneers of autocracy, things tend to only get really bad when they enter office the second time. The difference with Trump is not that he would leave democracy intact; the difference is that figures like the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, or Polish strongman Jarosław Kaczyński carefully hid their authoritarian plans. Trump, by contrast, is broadcasting everything in advance – and, if elected, will claim that he has a mandate to exact retribution and occupy the White House permanently.One of the great illusions of the 1990s was not, contrary to conventional wisdom, the belief that history had ended. Rather, it was the notion that democracies make mistakes but that their leaders are uniquely capable of correcting and learning from them. By contrast, the thinking went, autocrats cannot face up to problems; dictatorships are destined to end like the Soviet Union ended in 1991.Today, we should know better. Whether the likes of Orbán and Kaczyński always wanted to be autocrats is beside the point. The fact is that they, just like Trump, considered it deeply unfair that they had suffered election defeat (duly attributed to various enemies, from judges to hostile media outlets). When they came back to power, they had learned one thing for sure: not to waste political capital on culture wars, but to capture state institutions, ideally on day one, with the judiciary and the state bureaucracy as primary targets. For once you control the judges, you can go after the journalists, the teachers and the academics, and forever wage culture war to your heart’s content.Whether Trump personally has learned anything we can debate. But those around him evidently have. In 2025, they will not permit the “deep state” to frustrate the leader again; as a number of astute analysts have pointed out, there is a detailed scheme to replace perhaps up to 50,000 civil servants with political cronies, and bring the justice department under political control.It is typical for authoritarian populists to hijack the bureaucracy in broad daylight, advancing the argument that only they represent what populists call “the real people” (Trump’s very words to his supporters on January 6). After all, who is the state there for? The people, of course. Hence, when populists take over the state, they claim it’s really the people themselves rightfully taking possession of what is theirs. Recall Trump’s inaugural address, when he claimed that “we are transferring power from Washington and giving it back to you, the people”. The people never got it back, of course, because of the supposed “deep state”; this time must be different.The fact that the Heritage Foundation, a supposedly mainstream, sort-of-Reaganite conservative thinktank, has taken the lead in working out a plan to destroy the US administrative state is symptomatic of the fact that plenty of Republicans outside the immediate Maga cult have not only made their peace with an election denier and insurrection promoter but would appear to be onboard with threats Trump has spelled out in speech after speech: on Veterans Day, he promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”Other aspiring autocrats were probably also seething with resentment – but they carefully camouflaged their intentions as they prepared the path back to office. In 2010, Orbán could wait for power to fall into his lap, in light of the Hungarian center-left’s disastrous economic record and corruption scandals (which pale in comparison with what Orbán would end up doing in his kleptocratic system); he never announced that he sought to replace independent judges, destroy media pluralism and pass a new constitution.Trump is not hiding anything; nor does a figure like the Heritage president, who considers Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model”. Trump threatens that “either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state”. Judges, journalists, anyone who didn’t do his bidding to steal the 2020 election, anyone in the Biden administration (communists!), anyone in foundations and universities declared by the Trump acolyte JD Vance to be “cancers on American society” – all should realize that he means it, and that self-styled center-right figures are not disavowing him.If Trump wins, he will claim that “the people” – for only his voters are the “real people” – democratically decided in favor of revenge and destruction.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More

A book about the improbable rise and rapid fall of former congressman George Santos has been optioned by HBO Films, it was reported Saturday, and will be produced under the guidance of Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist known for executive production credits on Emmy awards-winning Succession and Veep.HBO reportedly optioned the rights to Mark Chiusano’s The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, published last week.Chiusano, a former Newsday reporter, told the Guardian last week that the story of Santos, who was expelled from Congress last week after a damning ethics report that focused on his use of campaign funds and also faces criminal charges, was at its heart “a tragedy”.“He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years,” Chiusano said.A movie interpretation of Santos’s political career may have literary precedents to follow. Part of the New York district three that Santos served includes Great Neck, transposed as Little Egg in the story of Jay Gatsby, the (fictional) character who created his own fictional life in F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.According to Deadline, the adaptation of The Fabulist will be written by Mike Makowsky, who wrote the screenplay of HBO’s crime drama Bad Education, and will tell the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.The disgraced ex-congressman fired off a series of tweets late Friday night announcing he would file complaints about misdeeds involving former colleagues Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota and Bob Menendez.By Sunday, Santos’s controversial expulsion ahead of a criminal trial continued to attract political comment. Former Trump White House chief of staff and ABC political analyst Reince Priebus acknowledged splits within the Republican party on the vote to expel and the issue of the legislative body acting independently of voters in Santos’s district.“True, he lied. He has a big mouth, all of these things. You know, I do think there is a concern with taking that power away from the people in the district,” Priebus said.Santos, he added, was “a victim of himself. But he is also paying the price for having a big mouth, for being almost a comedian in front of his colleagues, who are now his judges. And he paid the price. And that’s a good lesson about, when you get in trouble, you keep your head down; you keep your mouth shut.”But the immediate aftermath of a year of Santos headlines has left an emotional vacuum – and the prospect of a hotly contested election in the New Year in which Democrats will hope to recover a seat they lost in 2022. New York Magazine, which exhaustively chronicled the Santos’s political epic, echoed the line from Dr Seuss: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” More

Muslim community leaders gathered on Saturday in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US, to protest President Biden’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, reiterating that the president’s stance could affect his support in crucial swing states next year.Jaylani Hussein, director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Biden’s unwillingness to call for a ceasefire had damaged his relationship with the American-Muslim community beyond repair. (Cair-Minnesota is not involved in his work on the Abandon Biden effort, which the organization said Hussein is doing in his personal capacity.)“We are not powerless as American Muslims. We are powerful. We don’t only have the money, but we have the actual votes. And we will use that vote to save this nation from itself,” Hussein said. “Families and children are being wiped out with our tax dollars,” he added. “What we are witnessing today is the tragedy upon tragedy.”After Israel resumed its bombing offensive on the territory after a five-day pause, the health ministry said 15,200 Palestinians, roughly two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed thus far. Israel’s air and ground strikes began after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 240 hostage in a cross-border attack on 7 October.From behind a lectern that read “Abandon Biden, ceasefire now”, leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania issued similar warnings that the president could not afford to lose the support of the Arab-American community in states critical to his chances for re-election.A recent poll showed Biden’s support among Arab Americans has plunged from a comfortable majority in 2020 to 17%.Dearborn is home to the highest concentration of Arab Americans in a state that has the highest number, 211,405 , and the highest percentage of Arab Americans, at 2.1%. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by 2.8% of the vote. Arab Americans account for 5% of the vote, according to the Arab American Institute.In Wisconsin, where there are 25,000 Muslim voters, Biden won by about 20,000 votes, Tarek Amin, a doctor representing the state’s Muslim community, said.In Arizona, where Biden won by around 10,500 votes, there are over 25,000 Muslim voters according to the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California San Diego, said Phoenix pharmacist Hazim Nasaredden.About 3.45 million Americans identify as Muslim, or 1.1% of the country’s population, and the demographic tends to lean Democratic, according to Pew Research Center. Like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are also home to significant Arab-American populations and critical to Biden’s re-election mathematics.The #AbandonBiden campaign began in Minnesota in October and has since spread to at least five other states represented at the conference.“The anger in our community is beyond belief,” Hussein, who is Muslim, told the Associated Press. “One of the things that made us even more angry is the fact that most of us actually voted for President Biden. I even had one incident where a religious leader asked me: ‘How do I get my 2020 ballot so I can destroy it?’”While the Biden administration has resisted pressure to call for a permanent halt in fighting, and continues significant weapons transfers to Israel, senior officials are going further in expressing their discomfort with the high level of civilian casualties.The Wall Street Journal reported that the US has provided Israel with 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker busters included in a transfer package of around 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells since 7 October.On Saturday, US vice-president Kamala Harris said that while the US supports Israel’s “legitimate military objectives” in Gaza, the suffering of the civilian population inside the enclave has been too high.“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating,” Harris said at a press conference in Dubai. “It is truly heartbreaking.”At a meeting with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Harris also said that Washington will not allow for the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the current border of the Gaza Strip.“Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza,” Harris said, according to a read-out of the meeting.Against a backdrop of pro-Palestinian protest in the US, Muslim leaders gathered in Dearborn said Biden or likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump were not their only choices next year, and they could choose to sit out the election.“We don’t have two options. We have many options. And we’re going to exercise that,” Cair’s Hussein said. More