“After extensive consultation, discussion, and deliberation, the American Muslim 2024 Election Task Force has decided to encourage American Muslims to vote for any presidential candidate of their choosing who supports a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a US arms embargo on the Israeli government, such as candidates Dr Jill Stein, Dr Cornel West or Chase Oliver,” read the statement, obtained by Middle East Eye.
The statement was written by the American Muslim 2024 Election Task Force, an umbrella group formed this year that consists of a number of prominent Muslim organisations including the political arms of Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP), Cair, and the US Council of Muslim Organizations.
“We cannot endorse Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy because of her refusal to even consider imposing the arms embargo on the Israeli government required by US laws and her failure to promise any other changes whatsoever to President Biden’s failed policy of steadfast financial, diplomatic and military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” the statement read.
I don’t understand why you can’t recognize that you can do both. Voting to mitigate as much damage as possible doesn’t mean DON’T organize and protect yourself. Casting a vote for the party that is less likely to trample individual rights in less arenas is more effective than wasting a vote on something that has a net negative effect. Voting is the absolute minimum and takes near zero time and effort and has potential (depending on where you live) to affect millions of lives.
That party is PSL, the DNC and GOP are far more similar than different.
You also haven’t proven this “net negative effect” of increasing exposure for PSL.
Completely agree, DNC & GOP are far too similar. I’m focused on the differences between them. They are also significant.
There is no net negative of increasing exposure for PSL. Increasing PSL exposure is a good thing. The net negative is in voting PSL on a presidential ballot. There are not enough people concentrated in any area for PSL to register enough to cause any exposure. It simply won’t register in a contest this large. Voting PSL in that contest is only taking votes away from one of the two parties that are going to win. If we can agree that DNC and GOP have differences between them, then those differences should be enough to decide where to spend your vote in that contest. The net negative comes in where the vote for PSL could have fallen in one of the two columns that matter in this contest. Instead of going in those columns, it causes those columns to come up one vote short.
Having a PSL candidate that gained 16% running for Mayor of Long Beach in 2010 is a great way to increase exposure. That’s a blip that registers. That’s only possible in local elections at the moment.
Please, read theory.
This forces the parties to make concessions, while gaining exposure.
You’re trying to say that minor, inconsequential elections are the best way to increase visibility? That’s utterly nonsensical, and very liberal.
No, I’m saying make noises in rooms where you can be heard.
Squeak in a tiny corner where nobody can hear you?
Read theory.
I agree. And if you seriously wish this then you will agree with us that we must all vote PSL, (or Green if you’re a liberal, and your state is strong for it) to visibly starve the democrats of the working class margins that they actually rely on (unlike the Republicans) — that they have forsaken; instead choosing to fight over the (shrinking) bourgeois and petty-bourgeois voter-base on the right with the Republicans and accepting for granted the working class margin they NEED for a mandate.
The way to be heard by the Democrats is to starve the Democrats of the votes they rely on, and instead giving them to organizations which deserve them; while and in doing so visibly elevating and joining with the socialists and throwing our weight behind them and continuing to throw our weight behind them; so that if the Democrats ever want power again, they are FORCED to reorient; and if they don’t (and they might break in half if they tried — a good thing for democracy and workers, breaking the duopoly from the ground up in light of a rising Socialist party), the masses who never held any illusions about the Republicans in the first place will become increasingly radical; and the PSL elevated by us will be there to brief them and into the wings bring them, and the revolutionary moment comes all the sooner. And the further-elevated a real left party is, that both is elevated in elections and on-the-ground with our help organizing working people around material issues like the PSL does; the more those 35-50%, who have stopped voting entirely because of how betrayed and disaffected and abandoned they’ve been by the vampire-and-fascist show of the single-party-with-two-faces-duopoly, will be reactivated; and reactivated with purpose and direction under a banner of Socialism and Liberation. If you’re actually interested in building revolution, and/or you’re actually interested in “making noises in rooms where you can be heard” and/or you’re actually interested in taking the most intelligent decisive steps toward breaking up the dupoly and progressing the standing of the socialist movement and the working classes of the world and alleviating suffering of those under imperialism; this is not only the best option — it is the only option.
Because right now, the democrats have ZERO reason to not totally disregard any and all of these demands or desires or criticisms (as they have been doing) because “they’ll vote for us anyway — we’re not the Republicans!” and you are standing as an active agent to defend that and further that for them so they can continue all of this with your mandate and all those you mislead. Which is exactly how and why things got to this point and the Democrat party has become so right wing. As it stands The Dems are sending PAC-lawyers to purge 3rd parties from ballots because they’re scared. And we have watched them utterly disregarding and talking down to and violently repressing large portions of their own constituency on the left making demands on them, such as to end the murderous nuclear-brinksmanship and arms-dealer and billionaire-imperialist financed proxy wars, and to STOP THIS GENOCIDE; and the same bad-faith slanders are used to malign them.
The genocide that Biden sidestepped around congress twice to shovel guns and bombs to execute faster than even the imperialists and zionists in Congress could — who were already themselves bi-partisanly moving to do the same; meanwhile the Dems and their obedient college-liberal footsoldiers are browbeating Palestinian rights groups and leftists and people who are sick of facilitating this crap by shaming them for wanting to vote their conscience or politics, through pretending Trump is worse rather than the same, and we need to vote for Democrats “for the Palestinians” who themselves have told us that both parties are the same to them and whose biggest representative base in the US are, as per the article in the OP, TELLING US NOT TO VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATS; And how is Trump worse for Palestinians one might ask them? Only because Trump is telling the TRUTH about what he wants. He’s OPEN about it. The “harm reduction” they’re advocating — you’re advocating — is doing the same harm as, while somehow managing to be more duplicitous and dishonest about it than Donald Trump. That’s the state of things, that the “lesser evil” is lying more than Trump about Palestine.
Biden wanted Gazans wiped off the face of the earth before the elections hit because he wanted to avoid exactly this; and now they haven’t; and to not push for there be electoral consequences is a shameless opportunist dereliction of democratic duty. It would be too a callous disregard for the suffering of those Palestinians if we allow this cynical ploy to work and let their martyrdom be in vain, that we do not allow it to help us break apart the bipartisan genocide machine step-by-step in the most effective ways we can. The Palestinians have said that there is no difference between the duopoly candidates for them, and Muslims in the US are also saying this as linked above. The Democrat wing of the ruling class NEED TO BE REMINDED of who gives them their mandate; by punishing them for actively continuing this and stating in published statements it’s going to continue and nothing policy-wise will change while at the same time lying to our faces in vague gestures during speeches about how ‘we need a ceasefire in gaza!’ when they could pick up the phone and make that happen, and don’t and we know they won’t.
This exact delusion that you hold regarding the duopoly-of-exploiters (many of whom donate to the Democrats and then vote republican, and win either way) is exactly how the Democrats have flown rightward for decades, because “they’ll vote for us anyway.” Without any actual reason to fear being starved of their working class margin, they can continue to have outright anti-human policies and become more and more indistinguishable from the Republicans, and where they are still vaguely distinguishable constantly capitulate in the name of “reaching across the aisle” to the Republicans anyway, furthering all of the same policies.
They can continue to be no different than the Republicans on increasing the funding and expanding the planet-destroying global-militarism. No different on financing, growing, and supporting the fascistic and bipartisanly-militarized police state. No different on increasing the funding and power of surveillance, intelligence, and gestapo agencies in the US and using them to COINTELPRO anyone who challenges them; including Black radicals who’ve been in the struggle for decades with more bad faith slanders, and the old “outside agitators” schtick and dogwhistle (just like Walz used when sending in an army to repress an uprising in Minneapolis) while pretending to be a friend to any minority. No different on the global racketeering of neo-colonialism and using asset theft and sanctions as a genocidal weapon to mass-murder children.
They can keep doing this because they have no reason to stop, they get in power anyway because of this mindset they’ve conditioned in you. They can work to continue to outflank the Republicans on the right on immigration like they’ve been doing, continuing the rightward-slide legacy of Obama the “Deporter-in-Chief” and his border cages and draconian policies —where Biden not only didn’t close the concentration camps he said he was going to, but actually deregulated them and opened them up for (and advertised for) private subcontracting of the border concentration camps for profit. Which is somehow worse than Trump was. And he even did things like an executive order to totally shut down the border, a far right action that was blocked by the courts when Trump tried the same thing.