Muslim Activists in Pennsylvania Join 'Abandon Biden' Campaign Over Gaza

IQNA – A national campaign to persuade Muslim voters and their allies to turn their backs on President Biden in the next election made its debut in Pennsylvania on Monday, denouncing his support for the Israeli regime amid its deadly war on Gaza.

The campaign, called "Abandon Biden," was launched in Michigan in December and has spread to other battleground states where Muslim voters could make a difference.

The organizers say they are not endorsing former President Donald J. Trump, but rather holding Biden and the Democratic Party accountable for failing to call for a cease-fire or condemn the Israeli regime's actions in Gaza, where more than 29,000 people have been killed since October.

"You have not only abandoned the American people, you have abandoned humanity," Hayla Solomon, 23, an activist, told a crowd of about 50 people at Independence Mall.

"We are abandoning you, Joe Biden," he said, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday.

The campaign began as an ultimatum to Biden in late October, demanding that he call for a halt to the violence in Gaza by the end of the month. When he did not, the organizers decided to mobilize Muslim voters, who overwhelmingly supported him in 2020, to withdraw their support in 2024.

They say they are willing to risk another term of Trump, who imposed travel bans on several Muslim-majority countries and stoked anti-Muslim sentiment, rather than reward Biden for aiding what they call a genocide.

"One banned my community, my family, from coming in; another one is killing my family," said Rabiul Chowdhury, 28, a cochair of the national campaign and its Pennsylvania chapter, who was born in Bangladesh. "I'm willing to take the ban over being killed, putting it in simplest terms."

Chowdhury, who lives in Ardmore, said he voted for Biden in 2020, but now regrets it. He said he hopes the campaign will send a message to the Democratic Party that Muslim voters are not a monolith and will not tolerate being ignored or taken for granted.

Pennsylvania is a crucial state for Biden, who narrowly won it in 2020 by about 80,000 votes. According to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, about 1 percent of the state's adults are Muslim, and another 6 percent belong to other non-Christian faiths. EmgageUSA, a group that mobilizes Muslim voters, estimates that there were about 168,000 Muslim voters in Pennsylvania in 2020, a 26 percent increase from 2016.

Some of the speakers at the rally said they were tired of being scared by Democrats into voting for the lesser of two evils. Khalid Turaani, a founder of the campaign and a cochair of its Michigan chapter, said that strategy was insulting and ineffective.

"You cannot scare us with Trump," Turaani said. "You cannot scare us with what potentially can happen when you're actively pursuing a genocide against the Palestinian people."

Source: Agencies