Tag: united states

American Muslims helped Biden win in 2020. Will they abandon him now? | US Election 2024 News

In 2020, Joe Biden won the state of Michigan by a much closer margin over then-incumbent President Donald Trump than the polls and pundits had predicted: just more than 150,000 votes.

Two partly overlapping sets of voters helped tip Biden over the line in Michigan and other vital swing states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: Muslim Americans and Arab Americans.

Now, four years later, as Biden and Trump head towards a rematch in November, the current Democratic Party incumbent faces the mounting prospects of a backlash from those very same voters, many of whom are seeking to bleed his re-election bid.

Growing outrage over Washington’s support for Israel in its unprecedented bombardment of Gaza is many prompting Arab-American and Muslim voters to declare that they intend to stay away from the polls. As the US continues military funding for Tel Aviv, the number of Palestinians killed in the war on Gaza has risen to nearly 30,000 since October 7, many of them children.

In Michigan, where early primaries begin this week, one-time Biden voters have promised to send his administration a strong message by sabotaging the elections, even as the president’s aides have scrambled to meet and mend broken ties with community leaders.

Here’s what American Arab and Muslim communities want, why the two voting blocs are important for Biden, and the parts of the US where they are most influential:

Residents of Detroit and the Arab Community of Dearborn march in support of Palestinians on October 14, 2023, in Dearborn, Michigan [Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images via AFP]

What are Arab Americans demanding?

Arab and Muslim communities say they’ve called on the Biden administration to speak up and halt the killings in Gaza with no results. Some are Palestinians with families and friends in the besieged strip.

These communities have diverse demands, the main ones being that:

  • The US support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and work to see Palestinian political prisoners, as well as Israeli captives, freed.
  • Washington stops military funding to Israel.
  • The US pushes for sufficient aid to Palestinians and resumes paused humanitarian funding to UNRWA, the UN aid agency under investigation amid accusations its staff members took part in Hamas’s October 7 attacks when 1,200 Israelis were killed.
  • The US government do more to fight rising anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian hate.

However, many say they’re not being heard and that Washington’s stance is particularly painful because of how they’ve supported Biden in the past. Communities in Dearborn, Detroit, and other major cities with significant Arab-American populations have successfully lobbied their local council leaders to pass unilateral resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza.

While the local laws do not weigh on US foreign policy, Mai El-Sadany, director of the DC-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) told Al Jazeera that local resolutions are symbolic and are pointers to the concerns and priorities of American citizens.

“These spaces provide a platform for citizens to explain why this issue matters and how it affects them and their families,” El-Sadany said.

“[Local councils] have the potential to be mobilising spaces to bring like-minded individuals together, to create a larger sense of urgency and pressure on policymakers who do have foreign policy influence to reconsider their approach.”

What’s the ‘uncommitted’ option some voters want to go with?

Some Arab-American voters are choosing to pull a no-show in state primaries, and – if Biden does not call for a ceasefire – at the November polls. Community leaders in Minnesota launched the #AbandonBiden campaign in October.

Others say they plan to write “Free Palestine” on their unticked ballot papers.

Still others, particularly in Michigan, are planning to turn out for the Democratic primaries — not to tick Biden’s name, but rather to choose the “uncommitted” option on ballots.

The option signifies that voters support the party but are not attached to any of the listed candidates. An uncommitted vote will not count for Biden. At the same time, since Trump is not on the Democratic Party ballot, it will not count for him either. While there won’t be an uncommitted option in November in the general ballots, no-show votes and ballot papers not properly ticked from former Democratic Party supporters could reduce the vote count for Biden.

Lexis Zeidan of Listen to Michigan, a group that has organised call-a-thons to get thousands of “uncommitted” Michigan voters on board, told Al Jazeera the effort was “to put President Biden on notice” after protests had failed to change the White House’s stance on Gaza.

“You can’t weaponise this whole notion that because you’re not Republican, you’re the better party especially when you’re aiding a genocide and even more when you’re taking our taxes that could be reinvested in the communities that are suffering and you claim to care about,” said Zeidan, a Palestinian Christian who promises not to vote for Biden in November. The group is aiming for at least 10,000 people to vote uncommitted in the primaries, the same number of votes that helped Trump win Michigan in the 2016 elections, over Hillary Clinton.

“For us, at the minimum, that’s the margin of votes that we can showcase that we are able to swing Michigan in any direction,” she said.

Some 30 elected state leaders in Michigan have joined the movement, including Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in the US Congress.

Dearborn city mayor Abdullah Hammoud in a New York Times opinion confirmed that he’d vote ‘uncommitted’ in the primaries, saying that in doing so, he was choosing “hope that Mr. Biden will listen”.

Which states are Arab-American voting strongholds?

There are approximately 3.5 million Arab Americans according to the Arab American Institute, making up around 1 percent of the US population. About 65 percent are Christians, approximately 30 percent are Muslim, and a small number practise Judaism.

While these groups tend to vote based on varying interests, “there’s almost unanimous consensus on the need for a Gaza ceasefire,” said Youssef Chouhoud, a race and religion researcher with Virginia’s Christopher Newmark University (CNU).

Dearborn, Michigan, is home to the largest Arab-American community in the US — more than 40 percent of the city’s population. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Virginia are also home to large Arab communities.

At least three of those states – Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania — are going to be battleground swing states in November, where the difference in support for Democrats and Republicans is marginal, and small shifts could swing outcomes.

Arab votes made the difference in the tight 2020 race. Biden pushed ahead of Trump by 154,000 votes in Michigan – credited majorly to the Arab-American community, which accounted for 5 percent of the vote. Michigan is home to an estimated 240,000 Arab Americans.

In Georgia, Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. The state is home to more than 57,000 Arab Americans.

However, soaring discontent in those communities means for the first time in 26 years, the Democratic Party is no longer a choice for many Arab voters, whether Christian or Muslim. Biden’s approval ratings among American Arabs went from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent in 2023.

How might non-Arab Muslims vote?

There are about 4.5 million American Muslims, and a majority — almost 3.5 million — of them are not of Arab ethnicity. Most are of Pakistani and Indian descent.

But non-Arab Muslim communities who’ve traditionally voted Democrat are losing faith in Biden, too.

In all, about one million Muslims voted in 2020, and 80 percent of them voted for Biden. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), some two million Muslims are already registered to vote in the 2024 elections.

This time, though, only 5 percent of Muslim Americans say they’ll vote for Biden in November, according to a poll by Emgage, a Muslim civic engagement group.

American Muslims are concentrated in New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Georgia and Michigan.

What effects will no-show voting have?

Some analysts say that, whether they withhold their vote or go for Trump, the Muslim and Arab-American vote is not going to make a huge dent in Biden’s campaign as they only make up about 2 to 3 percent of the total voting population.

But no-shows or damaged votes, from those who will write on the ballot, for example, could put Biden at risk of losing tiny margins in swing states and could clear the ground for another Trump White House, Chouhoud of CNU said.

“It is well within the realm of reason that he will lose over 50 percent of the votes that he got in 2020 from Arabs and Muslims collectively, and that’s equivalent to the margin of victory that he got just from those two groups alone,” Chouhoud said. “He cannot count on their votes.”

Such a scenario, Chohoud added, would make it likelier for Trump to get elected. The former president has signalled he’d bring back a controversial ban on travel to the US from several Muslim-majority countries.

“That’s not to say that we should, quote-unquote, blame the Muslims,” Chouhoud said. “They’ve been telling you what they were going to do for months now. If the Democratic establishment really cared about a second Trump presidency as much as they say they do, they would have done something different. So, it’s really not on Arabs and Muslims, right?”

Other communities, too, might hurt Biden at the ballot box. Polls by the Pew Research Center show that 40 percent of Americans across party lines do not approve of Biden’s response to the war, particularly young people.

How well is Biden’s damage control working?

Biden’s campaign has tried to paint the president as frustrated with the situation in Gaza to appeal to Arab and Muslim communities, as well as other Americans across religious affiliations who support a ceasefire in Gaza.

According to an NBC news exclusive this month, Biden privately vented his frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unwillingness to agree to a ceasefire, and called the prime minister an “a******”. The president also told reporters at a February 8 news conference in the White House that the Israeli response in Gaza “has been over the top”.

But in moves contradicting the president’s alleged private stance, Washington has so far continued to back Israel’s war. In mid-February, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was the sole hand to oppose, and veto, a resolution proposed by Algeria calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Thomas-Greenfield said that could jeopardise continuing negotiations aimed at freeing Israeli captives still held by Hamas and that an immediate ceasefire would derail US attempts to build a “lasting peace” in the region. It was one of several such vetoes blocking an end to the war since October 7.

In January, the US Senate also approved an additional $14bn package to fund Israel’s war on Gaza. Already, Israel receives the largest chunk of US aid, according to the Council on Foreign Relations – about $3.3bn a year. Nearly all of that funding goes to military operations.

In a flurry of activity in recent weeks, Biden representatives have attempted to soothe Arab leaders in meetings, with limited success. Dearborn officials were set to meet Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez in a sit-down but cancelled at the last minute after pressure mounted from community members who were against any talks regarding the elections. At another meeting with Biden’s senior advisors in February, Dearborn Mayor Hammoud said the community was not shifting from its demands for a ceasefire.



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US Supreme Court casts doubt on GOP efforts to tackle alleged Big Tech bias | Technology

Conservative justices express concerns about Florida and Texas laws that curb platforms’ content moderation policies.

The United States Supreme Court has cast doubt on a conservative push to crack down on the alleged liberal bias of social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

In arguments at the top court on Monday, several justices expressed reservations about laws in Republican-led states that aim to curb Big Tech’s alleged censorship of right-wing viewpoints.

The tech industry’s biggest lobby groups are suing Florida and Texas over the laws in a case that cuts to the heart of the fraught issue of regulating speech in the digital era.

President Joe Biden’s administration has backed tech companies’ bid to challenge the laws, arguing they violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which upholds freedom of speech.

In remarks that appeared to be sympathetic to the tech companies, Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr, a conservative, expressed concern about government regulation of the internet.

“I wonder since we’re talking about the First Amendment whether our first concern should be with the state regulating what we have called the modern public square,” Roberts said.

“The First Amendment restricts what the government can do,” Roberts added.

“What the government’s doing here is saying ‘You must do this, you must carry these people.’”

Fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett also questioned why tech platforms should not enjoy the same discretion as newspapers to publish or not publish content.

“If you have an algorithm to do it, is it not speech?” she said.

Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, voiced similar concerns, asking why it would not be a “classic First Amendment violation” to tell private companies that they cannot enforce their own content moderation policies.

In an exchange with a Biden administration lawyer, conservative Justice Samuel Alito appeared to side with Florida and Texas, asking whether content moderation is “anything more than a euphemism for censorship”.

Although six of nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans, the reservations expressed by several conservative justices on Monday suggest the Florida and Texas laws are unlikely to stay on the books unchanged.

Florida and Texas passed the laws after Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, banned former US President Donald Trump over his posts about the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by his supporters.

Both laws are on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision, which is expected by the end of June.

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Biden hopes for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza by Monday | Israel War on Gaza News

United States President Joe Biden has said that he hopes to have a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza by next Monday as negotiations to halt hostilities and secure the release of captives appeared to gather pace.

Biden’s comments in New York on Monday came as Israeli media reported that an Israeli military delegation had flown to Qatar for intensive talks.

The negotiations – mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the US – seek to secure a pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas to allow aid into Gaza, where the United Nations says some 2.3 million people are on the brink of famine.

The proposed pause would also allow for the release of dozens of captives held by Hamas in return for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Biden, when asked when he thought a ceasefire could begin, said he hoped for a truce to take effect within days.

“Well, I hope by the beginning of the weekend, by the end of the weekend,” he told reporters at an ice-cream shop in New York. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close. We’re close. We’re not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we’ll have a ceasefire.”

The US has been stepping up pressure on Israel in recent days to agree on a truce soon in a bid to head off a threatened Israeli assault on Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where some 1.4 million people, many of them displaced by war, have sought safety.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, DC, said Biden’s comments could be read as a message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He may be trying to push parties in the talks and laying a mark or two for Netanyahu that, come Monday, there needs to be a ceasefire. And if there isn’t, the president will have looked publicly embarrassed by him and that is not something that sits well with US presidents,” she said.

Biden’s comments could also be aimed at voters in the state of Michigan, which is due to hold its presidential primaries on Tuesday, said Culhane. Many Arab- and Muslim-American voters there have pledged to vote “uncommitted” on their ballots in protest of Biden’s support for Israel.

“The anger in Michigan is palpable,” said Culhane, noting that Biden’s own emissaries to the Arab and Muslim community say the president cannot win Michigan unless there is a major change in foreign policy.

“Biden won Michigan by more than 157,000 votes in the last election in 2020, and there are some 300,000 Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, not to mention young people of all races, all religions who are turning their backs on Biden. So they are very nervous,” she said.

Biden’s comments came a day after his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said representatives from Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the US discussed the terms of a ceasefire deal in Paris over the weekend and had come to “an understanding” about the contours of such an agreement.

The talks in the French capital did not include representatives from Hamas.

The Reuters news agency, citing Egyptian security sources, said the Paris meeting would be followed by proximity talks involving delegates from Israel and Hamas, first in Qatar and later in Cairo.

Hamas has its political office in the Qatari capital, Doha.

In Qatar on Monday, the country’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani met Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh and discussed efforts to reach an “immediate and durable ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip,” according to the Qatar News Agency.

Following the meeting, Haniyeh said Hamas welcomed mediators’ efforts to find an end to the war and accused Israel of stalling while the people of Gaza die under siege.

Israel, meanwhile, continues to maintain in public that it will not end the war until Hamas is eradicated and that its planned assault on Rafah would continue even if a ceasefire deal was reached.

Israel’s offensive on Gaza has killed 29,782 Palestinians since October 7, when Hamas launched surprise attacks inside southern Israel.

Some 1,139 people were killed in the Hamas offensive.

The armed group also took some 250 captives into Gaza.

More than 100 of the captives were released during a short-lived ceasefire in November, while some 132 remain in Gaza, according to Israeli officials.

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Suicide vs genocide: Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell | Israel War on Gaza

On Sunday, February 25, 25-year-old active duty member of the United States Air Force Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in the US capital of Washington, DC, in a one-airman revolt against the US-backed slaughter currently being perpetrated by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.

Over the past 143 days, Israel has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave. In video footage recorded prior to and during his self-immolation, Bushnell states that he will “no longer be complicit in genocide” and that he is “about to engage in an extreme act of protest – but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers is not extreme at all”.

To be sure, Palestinians have long been accustomed to, well, burning to death at the hands of Israeli weaponry, ever since the state of Israel undertook to lethally invent itself on Palestinian land in 1948. The Israeli military’s use of skin-incinerating white phosphorus munitions in more recent years has no doubt contributed to the whole Palestinian “experience”.

After pertinently observing that US complicity in the genocide of Palestinians is “what our ruling class has decided will be normal”, Bushnell plants himself directly in front of the Israeli embassy gate – in full US military fatigues – and proceeds to douse himself with flammable liquid. As he rapidly burns to death, he repeatedly shouts: “Free Palestine”, while security personnel order him to get “on the ground”. One particularly helpful individual points a gun at the blaze.

In the aftermath of Bushnell’s self-immolation, the New York Times announced: “Man Dies After Setting Himself on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington, Police Say” – a rather strong contender, perhaps, for the most diluted and decontextualised headline ever. One wonders what folks would have said in 1965 had the US newspaper of record run headlines like: “Octogenarian Detroit Woman Dies After Setting Herself on Fire, Police Say – An Event Having Nothing Potentially To Do With Said Woman’s Opposition To The Vietnam War Or Anything Like That”.

Speaking of Vietnam War-related self-immolations, recall renowned US historian and journalist David Halberstam’s account of the 1963 demise in Saigon, South Vietnam, of the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc: “Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly… I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered even to think”.

And while such an intense and passionate form of suicide is no doubt bewildering to many, genocide should be all the more appalling; as Bushnell himself said, self-immolation is nothing “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine”, where people know all too well how quickly human beings burn.

In Bushnell’s case, the US political-media establishment appears to be doing its best to not only decontextualise but also posthumously discredit him. Time Magazine’s write-up, for example, admonishes that the US “Defence Department policy states that service members on active duty should ‘not engage in partisan political activity’” – as though actively abetting a genocide weren’t politically “partisan”.

Furthermore, the magazine specifies, US military regulations “prohibit wearing the uniform during ‘unofficial public speeches, interviews’”, and other activities.

Perhaps Bushnell’s ashes can be tried in military court.

At the bottom of the Time article, readers are charitably given the following instructions: “If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988” – which naturally implies that Bushnell was simply the victim of a “mental-health crisis” rather than someone making a most cogent and defiant political point in response to an extremely mentally disturbing political reality.

At the end of the day, anyone who is not experiencing a serious “mental-health crisis” over the genocide going down in Gaza with full US backing can be safely filed under the category of psychologically disturbed.

Of course, the US also perpetrated its very own genocide against Native Americans – another bloody phenomenon that has not been deemed worthy of diagnosis as a severe collective mental disturbance or anything of the sort. As per the official narrative, if you think it’s crazy for the US or its Israeli partner in crime to commit genocide, you’re the crazy one.

Coming from a family of US Air Force veterans myself – both of my grandfathers participated in the carnage in Vietnam – I have personally witnessed the psychological fallout that can attend service as empire’s executioners. Aaron Bushnell was meant to be a cog in the killing machine, but his principles cost him his life.

Indeed, according to a former colleague of Bushnell’s who worked with him to support the homeless community in San Antonio, Texas, he was “one of the most principled comrades I’ve ever known”. And while we journalists are supposed to be the ones speaking truth to power, suffice it to say that Bushnell has put Western corporate media to shame.

Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.



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US serviceman dies after setting himself on fire in Gaza protest | Israel War on Gaza

NewsFeed

US serviceman Aaron Bushnell, who set fire to himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC saying he was protesting against the genocide of Palestinians, has died in hospital from his injuries.

Published On 26 Feb 2024

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Meta unveils team to combat disinformation and AI harms in EU elections | Elections

Tech giant’s head of EU affairs says team will bring together experts from across the company.

Facebook owner Meta has unveiled plans to launch a dedicated team to combat disinformation and harms generated by artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections.

Marco Pancini, Meta’s head of EU affairs, said the “EU-specific Elections Operations Center” would bring together experts from across the company to focus on tackling misinformation, influence operations and risks related to the abuse of AI.

“Ahead of the elections period, we will make it easier for all our fact-checking partners across the EU to find and rate content related to the elections because we recognize that speed is especially important during breaking news events,” Pancini said in a blog post on Sunday.

“We’ll use keyword detection to group related content in one place, making it easy for fact-checkers to find.”

Pancini said Meta’s efforts to address the risks posed by AI would include the addition of a feature for people to disclose when they share AI-generated video or audio and possible penalties for noncompliance.

“We already label photorealistic images created using Meta AI, and we are building tools to label AI generated images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads,” he said.

The launch of AI platforms such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini has raised concerns about the possibility of false information, images and videos influencing voters in elections.

The EU parliament elections, which take place between June 6 and 9, are among a raft of major polls taking place in 2024, which has been dubbed the biggest election year in history.

Voters in more than 80 countries, including the United States, India, Mexico and South Africa, are set to go to the polls in elections representing about half the world’s population.

Meta earlier this month joined 19 other tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, X, Amazon and TikTok, in signing a pledge to clamp down on AI content designed to mislead voters.

Under the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections”, the companies agreed to take eight steps to address election risks, including developing tools to identify AI-generated content and enhancing transparency about efforts to address potentially harmful material.

The influence of AI on voters has already come under scrutiny in a number of elections.

Pakistan’s jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan used AI-generated speeches to rally supporters in the run-up to the country’s parliamentary elections earlier this month.

In January, a fake robocall claiming to be from United States President Joe Biden urged voters not to cast their ballots in the New Hampshire primary.

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Tuvalu names Feleti Teo as new prime minister | Politics News

Former attorney general is named new prime minister after a general election that ousted the island’s pro-Taiwan leader.

Lawmakers in Tuvalu have named former Attorney General Feleti Teo as the Pacific Island nation’s new prime minister, weeks after a general election that put the country’s ties with Taiwan in the spotlight.

In a statement on Monday, Tuvalu’s government said Teo was the only candidate nominated by his 15 lawmaker colleagues and was declared elected without a vote.

The swearing-in ceremony for Teo and his cabinet will be held later this week.

Teo’s elevation to prime minister comes after his pro-Taiwan predecessor, Kausea Natano, lost his seat in the January 26 election.

Natano had wanted Tuvalu – which is home to a population of about 11,200 people – to remain one of only 12 countries that have official diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the self-governed island that China claims as its own territory.

Natano’s former finance minister, Seve Paeniu, who was considered a leadership contender, had said the issue of diplomatic recognition of Taiwan or China should be debated by the new government.

The comments prompted concern in Taiwan, especially as Tuvalu’s neighbour Nauru recently severed diplomatic ties with Taipei in favour of Beijing, which had promised more development help.

There had also been calls by some lawmakers in Tuvalu to review a wide-ranging defence and migration deal signed with Australia in November. The agreement allows Canberra to vet Tuvalu’s police, port and telecommunication cooperation with other countries, in return for a defence guarantee and allowing citizens threatened by rising seas to migrate to Australia.

The deal was seen as an effort to curb China’s rising influence as an infrastructure provider in the Pacific Islands.

Teo’s position on Taiwan ties, and the Australian security and migration pact, have not been made public.

Teo, who was educated in New Zealand and Australia, was Tuvalu’s first attorney general and has decades of experience as a senior official in the fisheries industry – the region’s biggest revenue earner.

Tuvalu lawmaker Simon Kofe congratulated Teo in a social media post.

“It is the first time in our history that a Prime Minister has been nominated unopposed,” he said.

The naming of the new prime minister had been delayed by persistent bad weather that left several lawmakers stranded on the nation’s outer islands and unable to reach the capital.

Jess Marinaccio, an assistant professor in Pacific Studies at California State University, told the AFP news agency it was too early to say whether Teo would maintain ties with Taiwan.

But international relations will be high on the list of issues for Teo’s new government, she said.

“It will definitely be something they talk about. They also have to choose high commissioners and ambassadors, so Taiwan will be in there,” she said.

“It will be a high priority, along with climate change and telecommunications, because the coverage in Tuvalu is not fantastic.”

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Watching the watchdogs: Biden, US media and Arab-American political power | Israel War on Gaza

Arab- and Muslim-Americans and some 60 percent of all Americans have wanted for months for US President Joe Biden to pressure Israel into accepting an immediate ceasefire in the war on Gaza. The White House has all but ignored them.

So Arab- and Muslim-Americans decided to flex their political muscle by using their electoral power in critical swing states in this year’s presidential election. In December, community leaders from nine potential swing states met in Dearborn, Michigan under the slogan “Abandon Biden, ceasefire now”. They vowed not to vote for Biden in the November presidential polls unless he changes his policies that enable Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, rob Palestinians of decent life conditions, and largely ignore the views of significant minority communities in the United States.

The campaign quickly attracted support in Michigan and other states with large Arab-American communities, along with criticism from Biden supporters who feared that the campaign to pressure the president might inadvertently guarantee a Donald Trump victory.

Arab- and Muslim-Americans intensified their campaign in February, when demeaning articles in the mainstream press helped mobilised even more community members.

On February 2, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an op-ed by Steven Stalinsky, titled Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital, which alleged “Imams and politicians in the Michigan city side with Hamas against Israel and Iran against the US.” The article tarred the entire community as dangerous extremists.

On the same day, a New York Times op-ed by Thomas Friedman metaphorically compared Middle Eastern countries and political actors to animals in the jungle, including trap-door spiders and wasps.

Whatever these – and other offensive articles and cartoons – aimed to achieve, they inadvertently propelled Arab-American engagements in high-stakes electoral politics. The city of Dearborn, Michigan, singled out by name and smeared in the WSJ article, became ground zero for this effort.

The Michigan community reached out to mobilise nationally with other marginalised communities that the White House has often ignored – notably African-Americans, Hispanics, progressive Jews, labourers, women, university students, and others. They joined hands because they share concerns about foreign policy as well as the White House’s domestic priorities and its opportunistic and self-serving citizen engagement.

The activists demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the implementation of existing legal restrictions on the unconditional aid and arms the US has provided Israel for decades. They are fed up with being ignored by a White House that takes their votes for granted, as well as by the Democratic Party they have helped boost through voter-registration drives since the mid-1980s. They are also incredibly frustrated with mainstream, often racist, media that misrepresent, demean, and ignore them.

I asked Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud this week why his town joins hands with other disgruntled American communities to impact national politics and foreign policy at the highest level. He said: “This is all about trust and respect between officials and citizens. We must end the discrepancy we see today between elected officials and the values of citizens. There are no possible justifications or qualifiers for genocide or killing babies and civilians on such a large scale. None at all.”

In our conversation and his public statements, Hammoud spelled out how US foreign policy and media coverage directly impact ordinary citizens.

“It’s personal for us, as some of our families have experienced Israeli occupation or wars, or volunteered in refugee camps,” he said. “When foreign policy decisions directly impact the wellbeing of Dearborn residents, it is irresponsible to walk away from difficult policy conversations that can lead to saving the lives of innocent men, women, and children.”

Hammoud was clear on his community’s demands: “We want action, not words”.

But so far, Arab- and Muslim-Americans have received mostly words. Worried about the “Abandon Biden” campaign, the president’s campaign staff approached local leaders to meet, but they refused. They insisted they wanted to talk with policymakers at the White House. And it worked.

Biden quickly sent to Michigan several of his staffers, including Jon Finer, principal deputy national security adviser; Tom Perez, senior adviser to the president and director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs; and Samantha Power, head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

But after the meetings, nothing changed yet again. The Arab- and Muslim-American community received more nice words, and no action.

So as Biden maintained the flow of arms and money for Israel’s assault on Gaza, community leaders, including US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, decided to raise the stakes. They launched the “Listen to Michigan” campaign that asks “people of conscience” to list themselves as “uncommitted” in the presidential primary on Tuesday, February 27. This signals to Biden and the party that they must listen to citizens’ concerns, and earn their votes, or else risk losing in state and presidential elections.

The community leaders and activists dare to do this because they enjoy unprecedented leverage from the size and distribution of Arab- and Muslim-American voters in swing states like Michigan, where elections are tightly contested. Michigan is home to more than 300,000 Arab-Americans. Trump won the state by less than 11,000 votes in 2016, and Biden in 2020 by 154,000 votes, including many cast by Arab-Americans. Biden also won by 10,500 votes in Arizona, which is home to 60,000 Arab Americans, and by 11,800 votes in Georgia, where 57,000 Arab-Americans live.

Veteran Arab-American activist James Zogby, co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute, told me that this burst of action builds on 40 years of community capacity-building across the country. It captures Arab-Americans’ mindset that “is moving from paralysis and despair in the early 1980s to today’s feeling that we can control our destiny.”

The other partners in the informal coalition to change US policy add clout. Michigan’s large United Autoworkers Union has called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, recalling how it had also opposed apartheid in South Africa. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has also demanded an immediate ceasefire and called the attacks on Gaza “mass genocide”.

Progressive groups, such as US Senator Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution, have also joined the “Listen to Michigan” campaign.

Mayor Hammoud told me that coalitions of minority communities have always worked together on shared causes at the local level. But, he added, “I’ve never seen a paradigm shift on the Palestine issue like we see today, with up to 80 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of youth supporting the ceasefire we call for.”

One Arab-American who advised the White House in recent years also told me the newfound political leverage of the community “is unexpected, unfamiliar, and unprecedented.”

Indeed it is, and Tuesday’s Michigan primary should reveal precisely how impactful it might be – and if it can temper American war-making abroad by acknowledging its citizens at home who take seriously that their governance system is anchored in “the consent of the governed”.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Ukraine’s Umerov says delays in Western arms deliveries costing lives | Russia-Ukraine war News

Ukraine’s defence minister says delayed shipments of arms lead to losses of troops and territory.

Half of promised Western military support to Ukraine fails to arrive on time, complicating the task of military planners and ultimately costing the lives of soldiers in Russia’s war, the Ukrainian defence minister has said.

Speaking at the “Ukraine. Year 2024” forum in Kyiv on Sunday, Rustan Umerov stressed that each delayed aid shipment meant Ukrainian troop losses, and underscored Russia’s superior military might.

It has been two years since Russia invaded Ukraine and while commemorations to mark the second anniversary brought expressions of continued support, new bilateral security agreements and new aid commitments from Ukraine’s Western allies, Umerov said that they still needed to deliver on their commitments if Kyiv was to have any chance of holding out against Moscow.

“We look to the enemy: Their economy is almost $2 trillion, they use up to 15 percent official and nonofficial budget [funds] for the war, which constitutes over $100bn annually. So basically whenever a commitment doesn’t come on time, we lose people, we lose territory,” he said.

In recent weeks, fighting has intensified on parts of the front line. On Sunday, Russian shelling and rocket strikes continued to pummel Ukraine’s south and east, as local Ukrainian officials reported that at least two civilians were killed and eight others were wounded in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces.

Moscow and Kyiv also continued to trade nightly drone attacks, with Ukraine’s air defences shooting down 16 of 18 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched overnight by Moscow and a Russian drone on Sunday morning struck an unspecified facility in Ukraine’s western Khmelnytskyi region, the regional military administration reported without giving details.

Russian troops also appeared to be pressing on west of Avdiivka, the strategic city whose capture this month handed Moscow a significant victory.

Umerov and the Ukrainian military’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, toured front-line combat posts earlier Sunday amid a worsening ammunition shortage and dogged Russian attacks in the east.

They heard from front-line troops and “thoroughly analysed” the battlefield situation on their visit, Syrskii said in a Telegram update. He did not specify where exactly he and Umerov went but said that “the situation is difficult” for Ukrainian troops and “needs constant control” along many stretches of the front.

Europe has admitted it will fall far short of a plan to deliver more than one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March, instead hoping to complete the shipments by the end of the year.

Umerov highlighted that such delays put Ukraine at a further disadvantage “in the mathematics of war” against Russia, which the West has said is increasingly building a war economy.

Kyiv has also been weakened by the blocking of a vital $60bn US aid package amid political wrangling in the US Congress.

US President Joe Biden said the hold-ups directly contributed to Ukraine being forced to withdraw from Avdiivka.

On Sunday, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said he was “deeply convinced that the US will not abandon Ukraine in terms of financial, military and armed support”.

Meanwhile at the forum in Kyiv, besides highlighting issues in military deliveries, Umerov insisted that Ukrainian forces were doing “everything that’s possible, and also what’s impossible, to secure a breakthrough” this year.

The defence minister said that a “strong” military strategy is already in place for the coming months, but did not disclose details.

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Five moments from Trump’s CPAC speech | Donald Trump

NewsFeed

Self-described ‘political dissident’ Donald Trump mocked Joe Biden and praised Argentina’s confrontational populist leader at CPAC, the largest annual gathering for conservatives in the US. Here are five unfiltered moments.

Published On 25 Feb 2024

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