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    Muslim Women for Harris disbands and withdraws support for candidate

    On the third night of the Democratic national convention, the group Muslim Women for Harris released a statement announcing that it was disbanding in response to the Harris-Walz campaign’s refusal to allow a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage.The statement was released as members of the Uncommitted National Movement, which won 30 delegates to the convention, and their supporters held a sit-in outside of the convention. Ilhan Omar joined the demonstration for some time, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called in to the sit-in via FaceTime. The sit-in came after the anti-war group was told a Palestinian person would not be allowed to speak on the main stage – until then, whether or not such a speech would happen was up in the air.During the sit-in, Muslim Women for Harris pulled their support for the Democratic nominee.“We cannot in good conscience continue Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, in light of this new information from the Uncommitted movement, that VP Harris’ team declined their request to have a Palestinian American speaker take the stage at the DNC,” the group’s statement reads.Kamala Harris’s campaign notably invited the family of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to speak on Wednesday, which Uncommitted supported. The group called for a similar platform for a Palestinian person.“Uncommitted delegates urge the Democratic party to reject a hierarchy of human value by ensuring Palestinian voices are heard on the main stage. We are learning that Israeli hostages’ families will be speaking from the main stage. We strongly support that decision and also strongly hope that we will also be hearing from Palestinians who’ve endured the largest civilian death toll since 1948,” the Uncommitted statement read.During the family’s speech, Goldberg-Polin’s father, Jon Polin, called for a return of the hostages and an end to “the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza”, joining other speakers like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who both made reference to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. During the course of the Democratic convention, calls for a ceasefire have been met with raucous applause from audience members. Still, some have said the party’s nods have fallen short.“The family of the Israeli hostage that was on the stage tonight, has shown more empathy towards Palestinian Americans and Palestinians, than our candidate or the DNC has,” Muslim Women for Harris’s statement read. “This is a terrible message to send to Democrats. Palestinians have the right to speak about Palestine.”Alana Zeitchik, who has multiple family members who are hostages, spoke out in support of having a Palestinian American speak on the main stage. “Rachel and Jon deserved every second on that stage. I also believe a Palestinian American voice deserves to be heard on that stage,” Zeitchik wrote on X. “I’d love to hear from @Ruwa4Georgia and I hope the DNC will give her the chance to be heard.”Chicago, where the Democratic convention is being held this year, has one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States. Muslim Women for Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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    Stop using the term ‘centrist’. It doesn’t mean what you think it does | Arwa Mahdawi

    I would like to start a petition for journalists – and everyone else – to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability.Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic.Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since 7 October, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.This narrative is so entrenched that people don’t believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians. Last October, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes may have told her that those innocent children were terrified; the narrative, however, was more complicated.Around the same time, Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel”. When it was pointed out the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.In 2022, a picture of a small blonde confronting a soldier was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people though. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of a then 10-year-old Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, interest in the image fizzled out.Again: when you lay out what is happening in clear language it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes. As someone who had to run from soldiers shooting teargas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an IDF soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another. If you experience life under occupation for even a day it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism”. Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist – and therefore reasonable – position.See, for example, this paragraph from the New York Times, earlier this month, when Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, was still being considered as a possible candidate for Kamala Harris’s running mate.“Mr Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”This paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means. Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own”. He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English. So let’s begin with “centrism”. If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead. The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It’s up to you whether you want to acquiesce.

    Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Walz, Bill Clinton and surprise Oprah: Democratic convention day three key takeaways

    The third night of the Democratic national convention featured a surprise speech from Oprah Winfrey, along with scheduled remarks from Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz and other major party figures, many emphasizing the “joy” of Kamala Harris’s campaign.Here are some key takeaways:1. Tim Walz’s pitch to voters: ‘We’ll turn the page on Donald Trump’Kamala Harris’s running mate gave his keynote pitch to supporters at the end of the third night of the convention, talking about his military service, coaching and teaching days, and his family’s fertility journey. He leaned into his humble roots and deployed repeated football metaphors: “I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks … It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field, and boy do we have the right team.”He called on his supporters to step up with urgency: “We got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re going to leave it on the field. That’s how we’ll keep moving forward. That’s how we’ll turn the page on Donald Trump. That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, healthcare and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom. That’s how we make America a place where no child is left hungry, where no community is left behind, where nobody gets told they don’t belong.”2. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Kenan Thompson and other celebrities invigorate the crowdThe convention continued with a packed celebrity lineup. Oprah Winfrey earned huge cheers when she made an unannounced appearance. She denounced “people who would have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe” and took a swipe at JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment. She put Harris’s candidacy into the historical context of other trailblazing Black women, including Tessie Prevost Williams, one of the “New Orleans Four” who helped integrate public schools. And she roused the audience with her call to action, singing the word “joy”.Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson had a lively appearance, entering with a large Project 2025 book and virtually interviewing Americans who would be harmed by the rightwing agenda: “You ever see a document that can kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”Musician Stevie Wonder urged the crowd to choose “joy over anger”. Actor Mindy Kaling gave a personal account of cooking with Harris. And musicians John Legend and Sheila E performed at the end of the night.3. Bill Clinton: ‘We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy’Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, addressed his 12th Democratic convention, reading off written notes, not the teleprompter, suggesting the speech was edited last-minute. He warned Democrats against complacency: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phoney issues. This is a brutal business.” He mocked Trump for his narcissism and obsession with crowd sizes, following Barack Obama’s widely cited joke on Tuesday: “[Trump] mostly talks about himself … his vendettas, vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.”Clinton preached a message of unity, echoing Obama’s comments, encouraging supporters not to demean or disrespect neighbors they disagree with. He praised Joe Biden for “voluntarily” giving up power and celebrated the hope Harris has injected into the race: “If you vote for this team … you will be proud of it for the rest of your life.”4. Parents of a Hamas hostage were featured while protesters and AOC pushed for a Palestinian speakerJon Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave emotional remarks about their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is held hostage by Hamas. Polin praised the White House and said they had met with Harris and Biden: “They’re both working tirelessly for a hostage and ceasefire deal that will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren home, and will stop the despair in Gaza.”Members of the uncommitted movement, who have been advocating for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, said they welcomed the speech, but continued to advocate that a Palestinian leader get an opportunity to address the crowd. Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who has treated patients in Gaza, spoke on a Democratic convention panel centered on Palestinian human rights, but there hasn’t been a Palestinian American on the main stage. Gaza solidarity protesters staged a sit-in outside the convention, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on the convention to “center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment”, posting: “To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.”5. Pete Buttigieg went hard after JD Vance: ‘Doubling down on negativity’Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation, went hard after Donald Trump’s running mate: “JD Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life that he has in mind for you, then you don’t count, someone who said that if you don’t have kids, you have ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country’ … When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids … but our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical. Choosing a guy like JD Vance to be America’s next vice president sends a message … They are doubling down on negativity and grievance, committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word: darkness.”6. Prominent Republicans again rallied for Harris: ‘Our party acts more like a cult’Prominent Republicans and former Donald Trump supporters continued to earn loud applause at the convention, arguing that GOP voters should reject the former president, even if they don’t agree with all of Harris’s positions. “If Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative, it’s chaotic and crazy, and the only thing left to do is dump Trump. These days, our party acts more like a cult, a cult worshiping a felonious thug,” said Geoff Duncan, former lieutenant governor of Georgia.Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence also spoke, saying: “Being inside Trump’s White House was terrifying. But what keeps me up at night is what will happen if he gets back there.”7. Speakers uplifted LGBTQ+ rights: ‘Trump wants to erase us’Speakers repeatedly promoted LGBTQ+ rights, offering a sharp contrast to the Republican national convention which continually featured extremist, anti-trans rhetoric. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ+ organization, warned: “Trump wants to erase us … He would ban our healthcare, belittle our marriages, bury our stories. But we are not going anywhere. We are not going back.”Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor and the first gay man to serve as a US state governor, highlighted the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of Project 2025: “Democrats welcome ‘weird’, but we’re not weirdos telling families who can and can’t have kids, who to marry or how to live our lives.” Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said LGBTQ+ Floridians were enduring “endless state-sponsored hate”. And Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, earned loud applause when she said: “I got a message for the Republicans and the justices of the United States supreme court: you can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead gay hand.”Democratic convention highlights:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

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    AOC’s power comes from her outsider status. Can that endure? | Moira Donegan

    She spoke loudly and with confidence, gesticulated broadly, and returned, several times over the course of her seven-minute remarks, to the struggles of working families. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York and standard-bearer for the post-Bernie Sanders US left, may have been an unlikely choice for a lengthy primetime speech at the Democratic national convention’s opening night. The last time she spoke at the Democratic convention, in 2020, she was given just a minute and a half, in which she indicted the party establishment from the left and endorsed Sanders’ campaign for the nomination, which by then had failed.But this time, the party showcased Ocasio-Cortez as one of its prime talents, and her rhetoric was starkly different. Though she focused her remarks on her trademark politics of class, emphasizing the struggles of whose who worry about “rent checks and groceries”, she spoke, this time, in the Democrats’ most comfortable terms. Ocasio-Cortez used to speak of the “working class”. On Monday night, she praised Kamala Harris as “for the middle class because she is from the middle class”.The remarks, and Ocasio-Cortez’s starring role at the convention, underscore both her own transformation in Washington DC and the uneasy integration of the US left into the Democratic coalition. Her presence signals not only that Washington has changed the leftist members of “the Squad” – including AOC as well as the likes of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley – but also that the left’s arrival in Washington has changed the Democrats.For one thing, it would have been easy for the Harris-Walz campaign to freeze her out. After all, AOC has not always been willing to play ball with the House Democratic leadership’s agenda. She has withheld her vote on key legislative priorities, such as Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, frustrating the likes of Nancy Pelosi. And over the course of her time in Washington, she has frequently used Instagram Live, her preferred method of public communication, to sidestep the establishment media and address her constituents and supporters directly, often in ways that counteract the party’s preferred messaging.Most recently, she took to a livestream on 19 July to push back against the then growing number of high-profile Democrats who were calling on the president to drop out of the race, saying that she thought the ageing and embattled incumbent should continue his campaign. Biden dropped out just two days later. As the party rapidly coalesced around the vice-president, it seemed that AOC had made a dramatic miscalculation.Another version of the Democratic party probably would have repaid these affronts with icy exclusion. But for the Democrats of 2024, AOC is an asset that they cannot afford to lose.This is not only because of her youth, or the extreme force of her charisma – whatever the contradictions of her position, AOC remains an uncommonly powerful speaker, signaling the Democrats’ shift to the future after their party had long been criticized for failing to develop younger talent and reflecting a stark contrast with the Republicans, whose millennial talent pool is overrepresented with charmless male grievance grifters and sex-obsessed creeps. But it is also because AOC has unique credibility with two pools of voters that Democrats have alienated over the past year, voters they cannot win without: the left block that was animated by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and the young.Biden’s successful 2020 coalition relied heavily on these voters – from the far-left Bernie supporters, who largely put aside their complaints about their hero’s treatment by the party to support Biden against a second Trump term, and young voters, who had similarly bucked historical trends to deliver an uncommonly high turnout for their age cohort.These voters, however, have drifted from the Democrats more recently. Some were turned off by Biden’s distaste for abortion; many felt that his age disqualified him, and found the ageing president an untenable vehicle for their future aspirations. But many from both of these camps began drifting away from the Democratic ticket not only because of the particular weaknesses of Biden as a candidate – they were driven away by moral outrage at his administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. These are voters who will not be so easily won back by a change of candidate; many of them are still waiting to see a change of policy.AOC is perhaps uniquely positioned, among the major Democrats who have quickly lined up to serve as Harris surrogates, to reach these voters. But her cooperation with the Democratic establishment could also threaten her credibility with parts of the left that define themselves by their opposition. At her speech on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken critic of the war, said that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire”. The Harris-Walz camp will likely use the clip in campaign promotions targeted at young voters. It is a valuable image for them. It is not yet clear what concessions AOC extracted in exchange for it.How long can Ocasio-Cortez walk this tightrope? Her career has been defined by her status as an insurgent critic of the party. But this position, which has long been AOC’s source of moral authority, may become a victim of her own success. She can’t keep claiming to be an outsider in a party that has rapidly reshaped itself in her image. But then again, it is her credibility with the left – her ability to claim status as an outsider – that is the very source of her influence.AOC’s mentor, Bernie Sanders – who campaigns as an independent, even though he has long caucused with the Democrats – has been able to maintain his distance from party leadership, showing uncommon integrity and consistency. But this stance, though it has won Sanders many moral and rhetorical victories, has largely excluded him from winning legislative ones. AOC seems to be taking a different track.She is embarking, instead, on what for American leftists is something of a novel path: an effort to join a governing coalition – and to take on the ambivalent responsibilities of real power.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Pro-Palestinian protesters march before Democratic convention: ‘This is about morality’

    About half a mile east of the Democratic national convention in Chicago, Union Park filled at noon Monday with demonstrators intent on sending a message to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, delegates and the world: that the war in Gaza should not be an afterthought.Organizers for the Coalition to March on the 2024 Democratic convention drew 172 local and national organizations together for the protest. Thousands of people gathered for the march, one of the main anti-war demonstrations this week.“This is not about some Machiavellian politics,” said social critic and independent presidential candidate Cornel West at the onset. “This is about morality. This is about spirituality.”View image in fullscreenMo Hussief, a Chicago accountant, joined the rally.“My family is in Gaza,” Hussief said. “I’ve had over 100 family members murdered over the last 10 months by the genocide. So, I’m here to protest as an American, to say I don’t want my tax dollars to be used to murder my own family.”Hussief is a Democratic voter. Or, he had been, he said. He supports labor rights and wants public healthcare support, key Democratic policy goals. But none of that brings back dead cousins in Jabalia, he said. The death toll in Gaza hit at least 40,000 last week.Hussief said it is impossible for him to cast a ballot for the vice-president as long as she supports arming Israel.“I want the Democrats to basically do a weapons embargo for Israel,” he said. “If there is a weapons embargo on Israel, I will 100% vote for Harris. I love Tim Walz. The Democratic party does align on domestic issues. But for me, they have to end the genocide.”Another rally-goer, Jonah Karsh, arrived as part of the IfNotNow movement of American Jews from Chicago area, who are opposed to the war.“It’s obviously a really painful issue for the Jewish community. It tears at the fabric of us. It is painful to feel like a community that I care so much about is divided by an issue like this,” he said. “At the same time when I see children being killed supposedly in the name of Jewish safety, it doesn’t make me feel like I’m being kept safe. It just feels wrong. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else”.More commonly at the protest, protesters waving Palestinian flags and carrying signs equating Harris with Donald Trump seemed to have long abandoned either major party and were voting for Green party candidate Jill Stein, a socialist candidate, or abstaining entirely.Matt Stevens, an undergraduate student in Nebraska studying medicine, said this was his first presidential election. He’s voting for Stein, even with the ascension of Harris as the Democratic candidate.View image in fullscreen“She was still the vice-president. She still had a voice in what Biden was doing,” Stevens said. “She still has an ability to make some decisions and voice her opinion. She can say all these things and talk a big talk, but until she shows actual action, I’m not going to vote for it. She has to earn my vote.”Protesters marched from Union Park about a mile, intent on being within “sight and sound” of the convention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRhetoric by speakers was strident, but there were no calls for violence. Police ringed Union Park in the hours before the march, and streets have been blocked off across the city to control for traffic and crowds.Disruption, however, was on the mind of some demonstrators.One protester, a former marine who deployed in Iraq in the mid-2000s, wore a pink N95 mask and a black-and-gold keffiyeh. He said his name was Andrew, but asked not to be identified by last name to discuss what he called the need for more “direct action”.“My opinion, I think more is required than just protesting,” he said. “I think that people need to get a little more hands-on. I think politicians need to be scared. I don’t think that we need to hurt them. But I think that politicians sit in their ivory tower … and they are comfortable. People don’t press them. This is the most pressing they get.”“Even if it’s as much as throwing rotting fish into their air conditioning systems. But I really think that we should press our politicians more directly to their face. The whole ‘give them no peace adage’. I really agree with that. And this today is not enough.”That said, other demonstrators were concerned about the effect violence or property damage might have on their political message.“When I thought about it, I knew that that was not the point,” said Teri Watkins, a demonstrator from Chicago supporting the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. “It messes up their messaging. We’re asking for peace, so it wouldn’t make sense to be violent.”If such things were to happen, it would be the work of outside provocateurs, Watkins said. “That would come in the evening. But I’m going to be home by then.” More

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    Biden’s Gaza policy is a liability for Kamala Harris. She must break with Biden now | Mehdi Hasan

    The sitting Democratic president is not running for re-election. His vice-president has inherited his campaign – and refuses to disown an unpopular foreign war. Robert Kennedy is running for president. The Republican candidate is a corrupt authoritarian. A Planet of the Apes movie is in theaters. And anti-war protesters are threatening to disrupt the Democratic convention in Chicago.Am I discussing 2024 or … 1968?Now, I’m far from the first columnist to make this comparison. Plenty of pieces have been published on the uncanny and, yes, undeniable similarities between these two consequential election years. “History,” as Mark Twain is said to have remarked, “does not repeat itself. But it rhymes.”Joe Biden, after all, is the first president to announce he is not running for re-election since Lyndon Johnson, 56 years ago. And just as Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket is his vice-president, Kamala Harris, so too was Johnson’s.Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had been a popular, well-respected senator from Minnesota and one of the architects of postwar American liberalism. He had served as a loyal deputy to Johnson over four years, even publicly defending a bloody quagmire in Vietnam on the president’s behalf that he himself had privately opposed.Yet in August 1968, the “Happy Warrior”, as Humphrey had been nicknamed, arrived in Chicago for the Democratic convention depressed and demoralized, trailing his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, in the polls by a whopping 16 points. The war had become a millstone around his neck, and yet Johnson had threatened to “destroy” his vice-president if he dared take a different line on Vietnam. When Humphrey in Chicago, as the official Democratic presidential nominee, tried to insert a compromise “peace” plank into the party’s platform that seemed to satisfy both hawks and doves alike, the Democratic president called from his ranch in Texas to block him.In the wake of that disastrous convention, where police brutally assaulted anti-war protesters on the streets of Chicago, the demonstrations against the hapless Humphrey intensified. “Dump the Hump” was on the gentler side; some protesters arrived at the VP’s rallies with placards denouncing him as “Johnson’s War Salesman” and a “Killer of Babies”. One woman spat in his face.“Let’s face it, as of now we’ve lost,” Humphrey’s national campaign director, Larry O’Brien, told him a few weeks after Chicago. “Unless you change direction on this Vietnam thing and become your own man, you’re finished.”On 30 September 1968, Humphrey finally became his “own man”, committing “$100,000 of the campaign’s dwindling funds to buy a half-hour on NBC television”, and delivering a speech from a TV studio in Salt Lake City calling for an end to the war. In his address, Humphrey made clear that Johnson was still in charge of the effort to reach a peace deal in south-east Asia, but by 20 January 1969, there would “be a new president” and “if there is no peace by then” then there must be a “complete reassessment” of the conflict because “the policies of tomorrow need not be limited by the policies of yesterday”.The vice-president laid out a four-point plan to end the conflict. First, “a stopping of the bombing”. Second, “a de-Americanization of the war”. Third, an immediate “internationally supervised ceasefire”. Fourth, “free elections”, which he described as “the ultimate key to an honorable peace”.It was a powerful intervention from Humphrey, aired to tens of millions of Americans, which allowed the Democratic presidential candidate to hit reset with the party’s base and, in particular, with younger voters and people of color. “He was a new man from then on,” O’Brien later declaimed. “It was as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. And the impact on the campaign itself was just as great.”Humphrey experienced an immediate surge in the polls, narrowing the gap with Nixon. By election day, the final polls “pointed to a dead heat”.Few now remember that the 1968 presidential election, in terms of the popular vote, was super-close. Nixon defeated Humphrey by less than a percentage point, or about 500,000 votes. The question is: what if the Vietnam war hadn’t dragged him down? What if he had been willing to break with Johnson over Vietnam much earlier than he did? Would the US have avoided Nixon, Watergate and the rest? Had he stood up to Johnson “over Vietnam in 1968”, writes Humphrey’s biographer Arnold Offner, “he might have won the presidential election”.The war, agrees Yale historian Michael Brenes, “alienated Humphrey from liberals, civil rights activists and young Americans – the same people who, for decades, had loved Humphrey for his support of racial justice, full employment and the labor movement – and ultimately cost him the presidency in 1968”.Has the 2024 Harris campaign learned any lessons from the 1968 Humphrey campaign?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo be clear: Gaza isn’t Vietnam. There is no military draft and US troops are not bogged down in rice paddies 8,000 miles from home. And Harris, unlike Humphrey, is leading right now in most of the polls.Complacency, however, would be a huge mistake for the Democrats. Harris, ideally, needs to maintain a sustained two-point lead over Trump to overcome the pro-Republican bias of our broken electoral college. Despite her clear momentum, she continues to struggle in the key swing state of Michigan, where “Uncommitted” voters are demanding a Gaza ceasefire paired with an arms embargo on Israel.Agreeing to such a demand should be a moral, geopolitical, and – for the Democrats – electoral no-brainer. Gaza may not be Vietnam but Harris should, nonetheless, be distancing herself from Biden on Gaza in the same way that Humphrey distanced himself from Johnson on Vietnam. She should be advocating for all four of the steps that he advocated for in Salt Lake City, beginning with a call for an immediate halt to the horrific Israeli bombing of Gaza’s schools, apartment buildings and refugee camps.Crucially, however, she should do it more than a month before he did; she should do it in her acceptance speech to the Democratic national convention in Chicago on Thursday night. (“I fear she will be Humphrey and break too late,” one prominent House Democrat texted me last week.)What does she have to lose? As the Financial Times pointed out last month, the polling suggests there is “less downside” on Gaza than one might expect: “a Democrat who is soft on Israel (as Biden is seen as having been) loses support on the left, but a candidate who takes a more critical line wins those voters back without losing votes among moderates.” A poll last week from YouGov and the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) showed over a third of voters in three swing states say they are more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if they pledge to withhold weapons to Israel, while only 5 to 7% said they would be less likely to do so.So what is Harris waiting for? More anti-war hecklers at her rallies? Even more civilian deaths caused by Biden administration-supplied munitions?Some might say that it is impossible for a serving vice-president to go against the sitting president, even a deeply unpopular sitting president, on a major foreign policy issue. They would be wrong. Humphrey did it – he just did it too late in the campaign to reap an electoral advantage.Harris is in a much stronger position than Humphrey. Biden would never dare try to humiliate her the way that Johnson regularly did to Humphrey. (On one memorable occasion, the then president insisted Humphrey continue reciting aloud from a draft speech of his on Vietnam as Johnson walked into a toilet: “Keep talking Hubert, I’m listening.”)Humphrey spent much of 1968 defending both Johnson and the war. He was less a candidate for change and “more like a son who feared a punitive father”, to quote Offner. “I don’t even know who Johnson would prefer as the next president,” the fearful vice-president told the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, “Nixon or me.”Harris is not Humphrey. Gaza is not Vietnam. 2024 is not 1968. Nevertheless, the similarities that do exist are too glaring to ignore.Biden may want to continue sending more and more weapons to an Israeli government accused of war crimes at the international criminal court and of genocide at the international court of justice, but Harris should take a different stance – a bolder stance, a stance that is more in line with her party’s base, as well as with the American public at large.The current vice-president would do well to recall the words of the then vice-president after his narrow defeat in 1968. “I ought not to have let a man who was going to be a former president dictate my future.”

    Mehdi Hasan is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo More

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    Tens of thousands of activists prepare protests over Gaza war at Democratic National Convention

    Some 40,000 protesters are expected to gather outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Monday to demonstrate against the Biden administration’s position on Israel, with some groups saying they will push for amendments to the party’s platform.The party is on guard for disruptions to high-profile speeches at the DNC, with one pro-Palestinian group called Delegates Against Genocide, angry at US support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza, saying it will press for an arms embargo this week.Delegates Against Genocide said it would exercise its freedom of speech rights during main events at the four-day convention. Its organisers declined to give details, but said they would offer amendments to the party platform and use their rights as delegates to speak on the convention floor.The group wants to include language backing enforcement of laws that ban giving military aid to individuals or security forces that commit gross violations of human rights.“We’re going to make our voices heard,” said Liano Sharon, a business consultant and delegate who signed an alternative platform along with 34 other delegates. “Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to stand up and be heard even when the authority in the room says to shut up.“They want the convention to go smoothly. They don’t want to have any kind of disruption or any kind of statement or anything like that,” he told Reuters at an event hosted by Chicago’s large Palestinian population. “I’m sorry. A convention is a political engagement vehicle, OK? And if we’re not using it for that, then it’s just a beauty pageant.”The Harris campaign declined to comment on the group’s plans.The Uncommitted National Movement, a separate effort pushing Democrats to change policy on Israel that won more than 30 delegates in primary elections, also wants an arms embargo. But it has focused, unsuccessfully so far, on winning a main-stage speaking slot for a Palestinian American or Gaza humanitarian worker.Uncommitted has said it is not planning to disrupt the convention proceedings.Late on Saturday, convention organisers added a daytime panel discussion on Arab and Palestinian issues to Monday’s agenda and one on antisemitism.Nadia Ahmad, a law professor at Florida’s Barry University and a delegate, said there were about 60 Muslim delegates, a fraction of the 5,000 overall. But their concerns were shared by others, she said.Demonstrations are expected every day of the convention and, while their agendas vary, many activists agree an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war is the priority.The largest group, the Coalition to March on the DNC, has planned demonstrations on the first and last days of the convention. Organisers say they expect at least 20,000 activists, including students who protested the war on college campuses.“The people with power are going to be there,” said Liz Rathburn, a University of Illinois Chicago student organiser. “People inside the United Center are the people who are going to be deciding our foreign policy in one way or another.”The Democratic party’s draft platform released in mid-July calls for “an immediate and lasting ceasefire” in the war and the release of remaining hostages taken to Gaza during the 7 October attack by Islamist militant Hamas fighters in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed.The platform does not mention the more than 40,000 people that Palestinian health authorities in Gaza say have been killed in Israel’s subsequent offensive. Nor does it mention any plans to curtail US arms shipments to Israel. The United States approved $20 billion in additional arms sales to Israel on Tuesday.Mediators including the US have sought to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza, based on a plan Biden put forward in May but so far have not succeeded.Pro-Palestinian activists say Harris has been more sympathetic to people in Gaza than Biden has been. Her national security adviser said on X this month that she does not support an arms embargo on Israel. After meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Harris told reporters not only that Israel had a right to defend itself but also in reference to Gaza: “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”Organisers of Monday’s planned-protest said the numbers outside the convention could swell to over 100,000.The city has designated a park about a block from the DNC’s venue, the United Center, for a speakers’ stage. Those who sign up get 45 minutes.The convention will draw an estimated 50,000 people to the nation’s third-largest city, including delegates, activists and journalists. Activists say they learned lessons from last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and are predicting bigger crowds and more robust demonstrations in Chicago, a city with deep social activism roots.The city says it has made necessary preparations with police and the Secret Service. Security will be tight, with street closures around the convention centre.With Associated Press and Reuters More

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    ‘The world is watching’: 1968 protests set stage for Democratic convention

    Sean Wilentz was in the convention hall when someone handed out copies of a news wire report. “I remember the first line,” he says. “It said, ‘The lid blew off of this convention city tonight.’” The article went on to describe chaos and bloodshed in Chicago as police clashed with protesters against the Vietnam war.Just 17 at the time, Wilentz and a couple of friends raced to the scene in downtown Chicago. “It was horrible. The cops were angry and didn’t like the kids and the kids were angry and didn’t like the cops. I saw a motorcycle cop go on a sidewalk and pin a kid against the wall. I was very scared.”View image in fullscreenMore than half a century has passed since a police riot scarred the Democratic national convention of 1968. On Monday Democrats return to Chicago with a spring in their step as they prepare to anoint Kamala Harris their presidential candidate. Yet some comparisons with the events of 56 years ago are irresistible.Just as in 1968, a would-be assassin has sought to change the course of political history. Just as in 1968, an incumbent president has stepped aside and a vice-president will gain the Democratic nomination without winning a single primary vote. And just as in 1968, protesters will gather to demonstrate their anger over US involvement in an unpopular war.Democrats are praying that the similarities end there. When the teargas cleared in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey, a self-styled “happy warrior”, emerged as the standard-bearer of a bitterly divided party. He went on to lose the election to Richard Nixon who, like fellow Republican Donald Trump, pushed a “law and order” message to exploit white voters’ fears and prejudices.View image in fullscreenMuch has changed since Trump secured the Republican nomination at the party’s own convention in Milwaukee last month. With 81-year-old Joe Biden fading in opinion polls, the Democratic campaign had come to resemble a death march. But his decision to quit the race and throw his weight behind Harris triggered an explosion of relief, self-belief and surging enthusiasm.Next week’s Democratic convention will put the capstone on the dramatic turnaround. Harris and running mate Tim Walz, who have been drawing huge crowds at rallies and millions of dollars in donations, will be formally nominated and deliver the most important speeches of their careers – probably resulting in a further polling bump.But the carefully stage-managed event – also featuring Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and A-list celebrities – could yet go off script. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to gather outside to demand that the US end military aid to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed 40,000, according to the healthy ministry there.The March on the DNC, a coalition of more than 200 organisations from all over the US, plans to hold demonstrations on Monday and Thursday, the days when Biden and Harris are due to speak. Its website brands the president “Genocide Joe Biden” and warns: “Democratic party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands.”Although a sprawling security plan has been drawn up by federal, state and city governments, some activists have vowed a replay of 1968, when years of unrest over the American misadventure in Vietnam came to a head in Chicago. Then, as now, students took up the anti-war cause with campus protests, including at Columbia University in New York, where Hamilton Hall was occupied in both 1968 and 2024.View image in fullscreenThere was already political uncertainty after President Lyndon B Johnson closed a speech about the Vietnam war with the stunning announcement that he would not seek another term. Biden has similarly dropped out of the election race, albeit later in the cycle and for very different reasons.America was further shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination, and by cities burning in protest at racial injustice. Last month Trump narrowly survived an attempt on his life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania but one of his supporters was killed.Wilentz, now 73 and a history professor at Princeton University, recalled: “The thing about Chicago: this is the culmination of a crisis that had been building in American politics for five or six years and it was also feeding off the civil rights movement. There was a real feeling of desperation, that this disaster is going to continue. The politics were very fraught and furious and one was not necessarily thinking strategically.”In late August more than 10,000 protesters opposing the Vietnam war and assorted other causes held huge demonstrations near the convention site. Some threw red paint to simulate blood and occupied major roads to block traffic. The official response was brutal with widespread use of teargas, beatings and arrests by the police and national guard. The carnage was broadcast live on television and demonstrators chanted: “The whole world is watching.”View image in fullscreenEyewitness Taylor Pensoneau, 83, who was reporting for the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, recalled: “The protesters were doing a lot to taunt the Chicago police. They were throwing bottles and stones at the police and they were calling them pigs and confronting them. It was a very incendiary situation.“It seemed inevitable that at some point the Chicago police were going to respond and eventually they did in a very forceful manner, swinging billy clubs and pushing protesters to the ground. A lot of people were getting hurt. It was a riot.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere was even mayhem inside the convention hall, including assaults on journalists. Supporters of anti-war candidates such as senator Eugene McCarthy clashed with supporters of Humphrey, who won the nomination with the backing of party elites and dared not defy Johnson over the war until much later.At first glance Humphrey appears to have little in common with Harris. But there is tonal echo. Humphrey had “The Happy Warrior” painted on his plane and, when first declaring his candidacy, remarked: “Here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy.” Terms such as “happy warriors” and “politics of joy” have been widely applied to Harris and Walz.Such an upbeat approach could come over as tone deaf as children are dying in Gaza, according to Norman Solomon, national director of the progressive group RootsAction. He said: “I was 17 in 1968 and I remember it was like, what are you talking about, the politics of joy? Maybe you’re happy but the administration that you’re part of continues to massacre people on a large scale in Vietnam.“Harris is on an upswing with Walz and in terms of defeating Trump that’s good but the disconnect with people in Dearborn [home of the biggest Arab American community] or people who will be in the streets in Chicago next week is pretty severe. She’s talking politics of joy and Congress is voting the billions more for weapons. The US keeps helping to kill people in Gaza and she dispatches her national security adviser to say she’s absolutely against an arms embargo. It’s almost split screen.”Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday night will be watched closely for clues that, unlike Humphrey at the convention, she is ready to put some clear daylight between herself and Biden, an ardent Zionist, on the Gaza issue. That could be crucial in persuading Arab American, Muslim and young voters to give her the benefit of the doubt.James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said: “She was the first one to call for a ceasefire. She was the first one to call for Palestinian self-determination. She was the first one to use very powerful language about the devastation of Gaza and the suffering of the people there.“She’s been about as clear as you could be that there is a difference in her outlook on this. I’m not going to let you in on all of them but there are indications we’re getting that they do want to turn corners here. They’ve opened a door already in terms of language and policy will follow.”Zogby also doubts that there will be any repeat of the mayhem inside the 1968 convention hall. Of more than 4,000 delegates, only 30 are “uncommitted”, representing a grassroots voter coalition that has opposed Biden’s Gaza policy. This is “nowhere near what you would require to have any kind of floor demonstration”, he said.View image in fullscreen“If there’s a disruption, it would be a handful of people in sea of other delegates. It would not be 1968. Outside, on the other hand, is a different story because, even though many of the groups demonstrating intend to keep it civil and constructive, anytime you get something that large, it develops a dynamic all of its own.”The parallels with 1968 are undoubtedly striking. But the difference may prove more important. The Vietnam war and its draft affected far more Americans than the current conflict in Gaza. Few analysts believe that Gaza will have as much electoral significance, except perhaps in Michigan. Nixon would become embroiled in the Watergate scandal but did not threaten democracy as Trump does.Wilentz commented: “1968 was a very different time than anything I’ve ever seen in this country. There’s certain similarities between this year and that year in the sense that you have events happening very quickly and they seem traumatic. But nothing in comparison to what 68 felt like.” More