Summary
U.S. Muslim leaders who supported Trump to protest Biden’s stance on Gaza and Lebanon now feel betrayed by Trump’s pro-Israel Cabinet picks.
His appointments of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, and Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador have drawn sharp criticism, with some accusing the administration of pursuing “Zionist overdrive” and “neoconservative” priorities.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the “Abandon Harris” campaign and co-founded “Muslims for Trump,” and Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of AMEEN, feel betrayed by broken promises of peace.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” said Nazarko, adding, “it does look like our community has been played.”
And people in the community were warning for months that this was the consequence of refusing to denounce genocide. But somehow you only want to blame the racial and religious out group who can’t even be credibly blamed for losing the election. You guys were claiming for months they weren’t important and should be ignored, and now that the election is over and the thing Democratic leaders were warning of happened, suddenly it’s all their fault?
And they were told, repeatedly, that Trump would be worse. Guess what happens now?
Trump improved his margin across nearly every single demographic, so there’s plenty of blame to go around. But in a comment thread about Muslim voters feeling buyer’s remorse, I’m not going to talk about the white men who get fed shit from the manosphere podcast space, or the ghost of Phyllis Schlafly infecting women across this country to vote for the party that wants to take their rights away, or that when Trump was talking about Latino immigrants he was talking about them and not those other immigrants. It’s called “context.”
Nope, didn’t say that. I said that when your choice is token lip service about maybe stopping Palestinian genocide, and making the genocide worse, that you should vote for the former, because otherwise you’ll get the latter. Which is what happened. Congratulations, you told the Dems you weren’t going to vote for them, and now are surprised they ignored what you wanted.
This is such a completely broken and backward way to think about politics, but even so, the entire time representatives from that community (Democrats trying to get Harris elected) were trying to get them to do anything to head this off. At no point was there a “well, we’re just never going to vote for you so look elsewhere”, but that didn’t stop the campaign for prioritizing literal Republicans over previously Democratic constituencies with unsurprisingly bad results.
And I am a non-Muslim Harris voter, but this liberal tendency to blame minorities for the failures of existing power structures cannot be suppressed.
I personally agreed with undecided in principle and was sympathetic that Harris largely ignored them. The problem is that trying to leverage their position for actual good policy outcomes made for this nasty prisoner’s dilemna situation where both parties chose the bad option.
I honestly thought that they’d eventually come around because of just how bad Trump was going to be for democracy, and moreover for the people they cared about. Sadly, they were so devoted to their game of chicken that some of their loved ones will pay for it.
I also don’t think it’s that callous to engage in a little bit of “I fucking told you so.”
Most people I saw here were just trying to achieve the most favourable outcome, given the reality at the time.
The problem in this is that you can substitute either the Harris campaign or the Muslim voters for “they”, and far too few people are applying it to the people with power. It seems inconceivable to these people that politicians actually need to address the concerns of the people they want to vote for them. They’re like some sort of unknowable force without agency or responsibility. It’s always the little guy’s fault for not coming around to the whims of the politician.
What makes it all worse is that on one side you have a population with good reason to be acting emotionally and the other you have someone just making a calculation that they just didn’t think they were worth it. Everyone shares blame for this result, but I get acting emotionally when you’re being ignored by power while they send weapons to kill your families. I don’t have any grace for sociopathic Democrats who would rather chase Republicans than take a moral stance for a constituency that voted for them in the past.
Lol! You’re absolutely right. From my point of view, though, the democratic party is so fully captured and out of touch with actual issues that they’re beyond being reasoned with, so it should almost go without saying who I’m referring to. And yes, I acknowledge how completely fucked that is.
They’ve created this absolutely monstrous situation where we always have to choose between letting people we care about get hurt, or a tiny glimmer of hope of something better, and even though I pushed to avoid the former, I’m fully sympathetic to both sides.
I think the masses of voters who are much less easy to influence. They’re not on Lemmy debating the topic or waiting for a community leader to decide the strategy. They probably didn’t even do any sort of deep game theory about playing chicken and scaring the Democrats. They just got more pissed off as the news came through, as the Democrats made excuses and acted like nothing needed to change, and as people in their community reported deaths. We can debate and shout and rationalize here all we want, we can suppress the topic for the greater good, and all that will have zero impact on electorate-level perceptions. They’re not here, there are too many for us to individually convince to change their mind, and they’re probably not even open to listening to a coldly rational argument about lesser evils and other topics.
Even the people organizing these campaigns didn’t have the influence to change their votes. Uncommitted endorsed Harris! But the whole thing was never in their control. They can only report the temperature they’re feeling in the community and suggest moves they think would help get people back into the tent. Those Democratic operatives and elected officials should have the potential to influence Harris. They have names people know, and phone numbers to people of importance. If she was so corrupt and blocked off that even they couldn’t reach her then we kind of do need the reckoning that could come from such an abject failure to keep the coalition together. There’s no “push her to be better after the election” in that case.