A big issue for Democratic US presidential election nominee Kamala Harris is her party’s handling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Many argue that the US could end the suffering overnight by cutting off funding. The fact that the US continues to send money and weapons is seen as a clear endorsement of the situation. Given this, it’s a difficult topic for Harris to talk about, but that doesn’t explain how she could be foolish enough to phrase it like this:
In Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked if she could lose due to the anger felt by Arabs, Muslims, and supporters of the Palestinian cause over civilian deaths in Gaza.
As part of her response, Harris said, “The first, most tragic story is October 7.”
That line, in… pic.twitter.com/UhuqA7bM9V
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 19, 2024
Harris: what’s ‘most tragic’?
There’s seldom any benefit in comparing atrocities, but as Harris has decided to go down this route, here are some of the acts she’s chosen to minimise:
- 40,000+ Palestinian deaths (this could actually be much higher due to issues with verifying casualties).
- Indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.
- Israel targeting health care facilities, refugee camps, aid workers, and UN peacekeepers (war crimes).
- Reports from doctors that Israeli forces are regularly shooting children in the head and chest.
- Famine.
- Disease.
- The killing of journalists, including ‘deliberate’ targeting.
- Torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel’s actions have led to harrowing scenes like that of displaced Palestinians burning alive in medical tents:
There are no words powerful enough to capture the agony of human beings being massacred & burned alive.
The U.S. is funding & arming the Israeli military’s extermination of the Palestinian people. It’s unconscionable.
End this genocide. There must be an #ArmsEmbargoNow https://t.co/7sG0YKmFFx
— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) October 14, 2024
Understandably, Harris’s response has provoked fury:
Kamala Harris is seriously pissing me off. Did she just refer to Oct 7 as the 'first and most tragic story'? So she considers extermination of 40,000+ incl 16,000 kids, starvation & ethnic cleansing of millions, systemic rape of Palestinians & life changing injuries for over… pic.twitter.com/3BUctOfSqZ
— Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu (@SholaMos1) October 19, 2024
I'm seeing way too much "Here's proof Kamala doesn't care about Palestinians" and not enough "Kamala is perpetrating a Holocaust that has already taken over 200,000 Palestinian lives". Do y'all forget she's been VP for the last 4 years? Catch up. Catch UP. https://t.co/eM9tlfMF7D
— Ghada Sasa | غادة سعسع PhD(c) 🇵🇸 (@sasa_ghada) October 20, 2024
This while Palestinians are exterminated in Jabalia.
IDGAF whether KH is the first Black and South Asian woman to become president. The Black radical tradition didn’t fight colonialism, so future generations could assimilate with white supremacy, incl worst crimes of our age. https://t.co/uGBV0wInrQ
— Francis Awaritefe (@FrancisAwartefe) October 20, 2024
Michigan
It’s always been clear to anyone reading between the lines that Harris thinks more of Israeli lives than Palestinian ones. She’s such an incompetent politician, however, that she’s openly just stating this. In such a tight election, her inhuman stance could be enough to lose her the election.
Harris was speaking in Michigan which has one of America’s largest Arab American populations. AP reported on Harris’s visit:
Michigan is one of three “blue wall” states that, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, will help decide the election on Nov. 5. Diverse voting blocs are key to winning virtually any swing state, but Michigan is unique with its significant Arab American population, which has been deeply frustrated by the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Earlier in October, Rolling Stone reported:
While Arab Americans voted nearly 60 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, with Donald Trump garnering just 35 percent of their support, the new poll finds Trump winning the Arab American vote 42 to 41 percent over Harris. The picture among likely voters is even worse, with Trump leading 46-42, pointing to a politically perilous enthusiasm gap.
In the same piece, they interviewed James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. In an illustrative passage, he said:
I remember going and seeing somebody at the White House early on, like two weeks into this. And he went on about the trauma of the Jewish people and what happened and how it was unforgivable. And I said, ‘I agree with you. I understand that.’ I grew up with a mother who made me read the Diary of Anne Frank. I had an uncle who was in the infantry in World War II and went into the camps, and told me the stories about what it was like, what he saw. The first time I ever got a headline in a newspaper was The Washington Post in the 70s. And the headline was: “Arab Speaker Chides Community About Antisemitism.”
What I told him is that I grew up understanding this issue, and I do. I understand the trauma and what it evokes in terms of fear of pogroms and the Holocaust. I said: ‘And there’s another people in this conflict who also have fears and trauma, and what’s happening now is evoking for them, fears of the Nakba.’
Well, he shot back at me, “What you say sounds like smacks of ‘whataboutism,’” he said, and “Don’t come here with that. It makes me so upset.” I was startled that this guy is advising the president and without an ounce of compassion for Palestinians. I was urging that there be compassion for both people who have suffering and fears. American policy needs to understand both, not prioritize one human life over another.
Democrats are the ones who wrote in their platform about the equal worth of Palestinian and Israeli lives. Right? I didn’t write it. They wrote it. But when the body counts are 40-to-1, and we still don’t have equal compassion for both, then I’m stuck. I don’t know what to think, or how to operate in this realm.
Oct. 7 was a horrific tragedy and an act of terror that is inexcusable, and Hamas committed crimes. But my God, the crimes committed afterwards, and the crimes committed before, have to be weighed in the balance. And no one in this crowd is willing or able — they don’t have the perspective to do that.
The lesser candidate
Trump’s rhetoric on the genocide is worse than Harris’s, with AP reporting that he said:
Even as he reached out to disillusioned Arab American voters, Trump suggested he would end efforts to encourage Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrain military operations that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Even though Biden “is trying to hold him back … he probably should be doing the opposite, actually,” Trump said.
What Harris would do well to remember is that many voters don’t see it as their duty to vote for the lesser of two evils; they just stay home instead. Democrats can get as angry as they like about that, but their anger may do nothing to inspire the voters whose lives they say matter less.
Featured image via Forbes
