SulaymanF @ SulaymanF @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It’s known as a rhetorical question. I was giving examples to show how stupid this double standard is, not that I was claiming you are bashing Jews. I can’t see your mod communities on mobile and frankly it’s not relevant.

You don’t have to be Muslim to be appalled by the carnage in Gaza or the rise of rightwing extremism now in charge of a nuclear armed state making aggressive wars on neighbors and oppressing minorities through continuous modern apartheid. Why are you so bent out of shape that this genocide shocked their conscience too? This wasn’t about self righteousness, it was about basic human morality; Biden actually spent his political capital and fought his own party and majority public opinion to accelerate Israel’s violence. He wasn’t just passively complicit but became an active accomplice and tried to make us all part of it by voting to continue it with zero changes or oversight. Browbeating the public to support it or else is not a winning strategy and he has only himself to blame, not any voters you want to castigate. A politician who can’t lead and can’t campaign and can hardly speak coherently in debates or policy discussions should be blamed for losing and not the voters. That’s how normal politics works. “Vote for the party no matter what” is not normal and you shouldn’t blame people for not sinking to your level of amorality or cynicism. You can’t blame Trump voters for ignoring his rape allegations and then get angry that Biden voters are wavering because of his inappropriate behaviors to women or his open support of genocide. It’s a double standard.

And despite this, despite breaking his campaign promises and shunning the community who helped him win last time, the Muslim-American community STILL turned out and majority voted for Democrats as we’ve done for the last 20 years. And we collectively lost anyway but you decided to make yourself feel better by blaming the victims here.

Nope. You said “people like yourself” and I was responding to that. You have no idea whether I’m Arab or not, and you may have inferred I’m Muslim because of my name or posting history, but you’re the one treating the groups as the same for this topic.

We feel the same way about you. I went to funerals and know grieving families but that’s less important to people like you, willing to sell out your principles with zero red lines. Blue MAGA is not altogether that different than Trump voters in this regard.

Read the actual articles you posted. Biden snubbed the community and sent an advisor instead. It was the illusion of pretending to care; he frequently hosted Jewish American families in the White House and filled up his social media feed with selfies of Israeli hostage families but couldn’t be bothered to meet any Arab and Muslim families who were affected by his policies. Biden couldn’t even walk back his insult where he told the press he has “zero trust for Palestinians.” (He later privately told people in the White House that he meant to say Hamas but never clarified his remark. And that’s one of many.) When Harris took over, she refused to meet any mainstream Arab or Muslim leaders and the campaign wouldn’t allow her to be photographed next to any until the last week of the campaign and only with local small town religious leaders in PA.

Again, Biden/Harris decided to snub their own party base and try running as a liberal Republican, in hopes of getting Republicans to switch their vote. It’s why Harris campaign wouldn’t let any trans people or Arabs speak at DNC and she avoided talking about things that Democrats wanted, instead saying “vote for us anyway because Trump.” We now see ONCE AGAIN that this strategy fails, as if if 2016 wasn’t proof enough they had to repeat it.

Dearborn is one town among many in the area, it doesn’t completely represent the Arab-American community in the state or the Muslim-American community.

Second, Trump pulled ahead in Dearborn because so many disgusted voters stayed home and voted for neither. Turnout was shockingly low compared to 2020, partly because both candidates had such an ugly unappealing stance on Gaza, and Dearborn wound up splitting their vote between Harris and Stein, giving Trump a mild plurality. It’s not all together different from Trump winning certain neighborhoods in the Bronx since so many people decided not to vote this year.

The sad reality is that Trump actually went to Dearborn and Hamtramack and publicly met with Arab American politicians and promised to make their lives better. He was lying of course and he’s already admitting that less than a month later, but he went to those towns specifically because Biden very publicly snubbed them and this spring he detoured his campaign stops in Michigan to skip them completely because he refused to meet any Arab-American community members or politicians. They’ve been loyal Democratic voters and donors for decades and he just refused to be seen with them, and once Harris took over her campaign also refused to let them endorse her at the DNC and waited until the first week of November for her to even meet any Muslim leaders in Pennsylvania and didn’t even meet with anyone notable.

And people are shocked that Trump made inroads with minorities? This is all on Biden/Harris, they didn’t just ignore the community but it was like they were intentionally throwing insults at it in hopes of seeming cool to Republicans on the fence, and then offering nothing but “fall in line or Trump will win.”

Binary race. Pick between the two.

I’m sure that’s what you want, but the Trolley problem actually does offer a third choice. And a significant number of people made that choice, so we could sleep at night. I went to funerals of Gazans killed by Israeli massacres. Do you think I could vote to kill more, based solely on hope against all evidence that it could be better? Harris refused to commit to even lightly pressuring Israel, to recognizing the state of Palestine, to stop blocking votes for Palestinian statehood, to even investigate war crimes. Everyone in north Gaza will be dead before inauguration; that’s on Biden/Harris not Trump. Talking to Palestinians, they saw no difference between Biden and Trump; both armed Israel and blocked each and every UN vote to help Palestinians. Trump cut all refugee aid to Palestinians and Biden continued it. To them, Biden and Trump are just shades apart in terms of actual policy regardless of Trump’s hateful speeches. Biden even fought his own party and majority public opinion to help Israel more and increase weapons shipments without preconditions.

You don’t seem to understand WHY the Trolley problem is so difficult. It’s not a simple matter of “one side is quantitatively better” so you pick it. It means you are actively making the choice to harm people even if you think it’s better in the long run. If you don’t see why people found this choice difficult (and it’s universally agreed upon that one choice is better than the other) then you’re blind to the problem and haven’t actually spoken to voters. Talking down to people that they only can make one choice and that they’re stupid for not making it is not helpful and sets you up for failure next time too.

Oh not this again, the flying carpet fallacy. Majority of American Muslims support LGBT rights, but that doesn’t matter to you because you’re judging me based on people in another country, who speak a language I don’t. Do you also bash American Christians because Ugandans lynch gays? Or do you bash American Jews because Israelis are terribly rightwing and extremist?

Way to push away your political allies who have been on your side for decades.

Oh come on, Harris lost by a larger margin of all the Arab American voters combined. It’s foolish to blame her losing on this one community (who voted for her anyway). The community is suffering and you decide to add insult to this injury, as if we somehow were responsible and not the 70 million Trump voters.

I wish I could upvote your comment more than once.

Harris didn’t call for a ceasefire. She called for both sides to voluntarily stop fighting and negotiate between themselves and that the US/Biden should do absolutely nothing at all to pressure Israel into making that ceasefire happen, while at the same time exerting maximum pressure on Palestinians to just surrender with zero guarantees of food or safety. In fact, she gave speeches that her support of Israel is unshakeable and they’ll give Israel whatever it needs, despite the majority of Americans in polling saying they favor conditioning military aid to Israel and Ukraine. She had a solid year of not just polling data but evidence that Biden’s policy was a failure and not just unpopular, and she just insisted on repeating his mistake. It’s like if a pilot is nosediving a plane and then a new pilot takes over but decides to keep flying exactly the same despite everyone telling to stop.

Trump did NOT win their vote. Way more Arabs and Muslims voted for Harris than Trump; CAIR survey reports Trump only got maybe 10% of the vote. Don’t blame us for the Harris campaign’s incredible screwups when they were gifted a reset from Biden and decided to repeat the same failure.

False. Biden infamously detoured his campaign stops in Michigan this year so he could avoid neighborhoods with Arab-American communities. He visited MICHIGAN often but avoided people and avoided meeting with community leaders. Trump, on the other hand, went to Dearborn and Hamtramack and met the mayor and told a bunch of lies about how he loves the community and wants to help them. The same mayor who Biden snubbed.

Harris had an open opportunity to wipe the slate clean, when she got the nomination the community was clamoring to meet and endorse her and her campaign said no to all of them. Delegates to the DNC wanted to endorse her publicly in hopes of getting their voters to vote for her and her campaign refused to let them do so. Even Trump let someone speak at the RNC. The Biden and Harris campaign created their own problem.

There’s people in my community who lost relatives in Gaza. I’ve been to their funerals. Their families will tell you, “Trump didn’t kill my family, Biden did.” Please tell me how I could convince them to put that aside and vote for Biden anyway. We tried, despite Biden’s speeches on the topic making it harder and harder since he decided to twist that knife in deeper and deeper by giving such helpful speeches saying that he doesn’t trust Palestinians or that Israel has not committed any war crimes.

In the end, Harris got far more votes in my community than Trump did, but it didn’t make any difference since Trump won by a margin bigger than all the voters in my community.

There was also pressure on the Trump campaign too. And what did he do? Went to Dearborn and met with Arab-American leaders and lied about how he wants peace. Biden/Harris couldn’t even do that minimum. Biden detoured his campaign to avoid the area completely. Harris got a lot of the community back on board but then couldn’t bring herself to say that she would have done a single thing differently than Biden. She couldn't even walk back Biden’s anti-Palestinian comments.

And you seem to miss the reason that the Arab and Muslim-American communities struggled this year; it’s the Trolley problem. You’re asking me to vote for someone who is actively helping murder people in your community, when asked about it he has no remorse and said he would do it all again and not even claim he will do better next time, and I’d better fall in line because the other person is worse. You’re asking me to actively vote to kill people in my community and threatening me with more deaths if I don’t. Can you see why this is such an unappealing choice? Obama killed innocent people in drone strikes but he at least tried to claim it was an accident and was doing better and supported us against the active bigots in the other party trying to ban our existence. Biden stubbornly ignored a solid YEAR of pressure, falsely promised he heard us after the primaries and then refused to hear anyone out. Well he lost by an even greater margin than our community and he has only himself to blame. He’s not even wallowing, he’s reportedly complaining that he could have beaten Trump if that awful Pelosi didn’t real his internal polling and make him stand aside.

You put this so much better than I ever could have. Thank you for this.

It’s not like he wanted his fan base to ever be let into his country clubs.

His campaign unofficially put that out in 2020, since he was near the bottom of the primary rankings. Campaigns that desperate start to float ideas as a trial balloon, to see if it would help or not. That’s how this works; a suggestion given by campaign staff that he can formally deny if it hurts his campaign or embrace if it’s helping. Once he started to gain ground in the primaries he backed off of the idea. He did many of these trial ideas.

He’s a stubborn idiot. He genuinely thought he’d be able to pull off a miracle and dig himself out of the hole he was in with the underwater electoral polls and falling favorability rating. When his internal polls said he was losing to Trump with a possible 400-138 split, he ignored it and said he would be able to comeback like he always does. Pelosi tried to force him to see reality and he went along with her plan angrily, and now he’s angry he didn’t ignore her and fight her on it.