Hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian flags are flown throughout a crowd in Dearborn, Mich. on Sept. 25 as people attend a rally to show their support for Lebanon as the conflict in the Middle East escalates.Joey Cappelletti/The Associated Press
Imam Belal Alzuhiry shifted on his feet one morning this week as he glanced around the unusual place he found himself. A few steps away, retirees shuffled down escalators to the MotorCity Casino. And in a conference room nearby, workers prepared for an address by Donald Trump, who as president imposed a travel ban on Islamic countries.
Imam Belal had never before attended a political event. He is an undecided voter whose mosque’s members have in the past, like many Muslim Americans, enthusiastically supported Democrats. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has regularly invoked Muslims as enemies. One of his recent social-media posts showed men in keffiyehs setting fire to an American flag. “Meet your new neighbours if Kamala wins,” it warned.
Michigan is among the few states likely to decide the results of an election that is just a few weeks off. Mr. Trump won here in 2016 by less than 11,000 votes; four years later, Michigan went for Mr. Biden by a margin of little more than 150,000 votes. Across the U.S., nearly 60 per cent of Arab Americans voted for Mr. Biden in 2020.
But a bloody year in the Middle East has jolted political loyalties. Michigan has one of the largest Arab-American populations in the country. In places such as the Hamtramck mosque where Imam Belal serves, there is anger at the White House, which has continued to provide military support to Israel in its war on Gaza and deadly attacks on Lebanon, even as the U.S. has sought a ceasefire.
So when Mr. Trump’s campaign extended an invitation to hear the former president in person, Imam Belal and a handful of other imams from the Detroit area accepted.
A person walks past the Trump campaign office in Hamtramck, Mich., on Oct. 11.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
“Nowadays, we want to listen to other alternatives,” Imam Belal said. “We want to give the opportunity, also, to president Donald Trump to tell us what are his policies – and then we’ll go from there.”
Within groups that have pushed the Democratic Party to change course on the Middle East, meanwhile, new turmoil is erupting.
Earlier this year, critics of U.S. support for Israel rallied behind the Uncommitted National Movement, a push to cast protest ballots marked “uncommitted” during the Democratic primary. This ultimately robbed President Joe Biden of more than 700,000 votes. In the last few weeks, leaders of the Uncommitted movement have joined with other liberal Arab Americans in a new attempt to nudge those voters toward Kamala Harris, after months of declining to endorse her.
“The reality is that it can get worse. Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map,” Lexis Zeidan, a prominent Uncommitted spokesperson, warned in a video this week. “We have to do everything in our power to stop him,” she said, in comments that were seen as a soft endorsement of Ms. Harris.
With the election now weeks away, new clarity is emerging about the stakes, said Wa’el Alzayat, who leads Emgage Foundation, a national grassroots organization for Muslim Americans that has formally endorsed Ms. Harris.
Mr. Alzayat pointed to Mr. Trump’s support for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, in contrast with the calls from Ms. Harris for a ceasefire. “There’s no comparison,” he said.
In the mosques, Yemeni coffee shops and Lebanese restaurants around Detroit, however, a revolt is brewing among those who say it’s wrong to endorse a candidate who they do not believe has listened to their demands.
This week, dozens of Uncommitted organizers held an hours-long Zoom call to discuss how to prevent the movement from endorsing any candidate. Hundreds have joined a rebel WhatsApp group.
“They are all mad about how this movement has been hijacked, and how it is being used right now as a tool for Democratic propaganda,” said Ahmed Ghanim, an organizer of the call and a dedicated Democrat who now will not commit to voting for Ms. Harris.
“We are putting them on notice and we are taking control,” he added.
For Americans who want more muscular U.S. effort to constrain Israel, Ms. Harris has delivered little. She has rejected demands for an arms embargo, and White House calls for a ceasefire have yielded no apparent results. Her party kept Palestinian voices off its national convention stage, and she lashed out at a pro-Palestinian protester this summer, saying, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.”
Meanwhile, the war has escalated, with Israel destroying parts of Beirut.
James Zogby, a Democrat who is president of the Arab American Institute, noted that even Ronald Reagan blocked arms shipments to Israel, telling then-prime minister Menachem Begin in 1982 that the bombing of Lebanon amounted to “a holocaust.”
Forty-two years later, “we have the capacity to do that. We just haven’t,” he said. Polling released by his institute this month found that among Arab Americans who are very likely to vote, 46 per cent support Mr. Trump, while only 42 per cent back Ms. Harris.
For the White House to keep standing with Israel amounts to “maintaining support for Netanyahu’s genocidal war at the cost of winning this election,” Mr. Zogby said. (Israel has denied allegations it is committing genocide.)
Even a soft endorsement of Ms. Harris is deeply out of step with current sentiment, said Rex Nazarko, a 27-year-old who is executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network, or AMEEN, a grassroots organization. He moderated the Zoom call with unhappy Uncommitted members.
Of the 1,016 people who responded to a recent informal AMEEN poll, only 5 per cent favoured endorsing Ms. Harris. Fully 70 per cent supported an endorsement of Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
A vote for Ms. Stein is the clearest way to express displeasure at Democrats without directly supporting Mr. Trump, Mr. Nazarko said. If those votes alter the outcome of the election, that will only cement the influence of Arab Americans, he said.
In Dearborn, Mich., home to the largest mosque in the country, anger with Democrats began to build in 2022, when Republicans joined hundreds of community members in protesting sexually explicit books in schools. “My community was painted as radical, as religious extremists, as wanting sharia law – and it wasn’t by the right,” said Samra’a Luqman, a local activist.
Ms. Luqman is a progressive Democrat who became active in her community to advocate for environmental issues. Mr. Trump has done himself few favours, she acknowledged. When supporters gathered in a new Trump-Vance office in Hamtramck to watch the former president speak in Butler, Penn., last week, he inveighed against “a lot of people coming out of Yemen, and they’re known terrorists.” Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, a Democrat who has openly endorsed Mr. Trump, is an immigrant from Yemen.
Ms. Luqman knows Mr. Trump’s long history of hostility toward Muslims. For now, though, she believes punishing Democrats for their support of Israel is more important.
“My feelings getting hurt are nothing compared to those children dying,” she said.