Above photo: Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam speaks with a reporter. Abandon Harris.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam, director of the Abandon Harris Campaign.
The campaign seeks to draw votes away from Harris in key swing states.
For one year, demonstrators at Palestine solidarity marches in the United States have been chanting “In November, we’ll remember.” With US presidential elections happening tomorrow, this promise could finally come to fruition.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam, director of the Abandon Harris Campaign, which initially launched as Abandon Biden last year, in response to Biden’s refusal to call for a ceasefire. Although the US has since issued verbal support for its version of a ceasefire agreement, to this day the US government continues to provide the military support necessary for Israel to perpetuate this genocide, with no signs of stopping.
This policy of unconditional support for Israel is one of the few things both establishment candidates fully agree on. With that reality, what are the options for voters heading to the polls who want to firmly oppose genocide?
For Dr. Salam, the option is to “send a signal to the political landscape that you should never have ignored us, and that when you engage in genocide, you lose.” This means not voting for Harris, with full acceptance of the fact that this might lead to a second Trump administration.
“It’s an argument based on sacrifice, that we have to tough it out, that we have to struggle,” Dr. Salam said, who himself, as a survivor of torture within Israeli prisons, is no stranger to sacrifice and struggle. Dr. Salam has spent this past year building a powerful base of voters in key swing states that are prepared to face the consequences of a Harris loss, if that means voting their conscience.
Peoples Dispatch: We’re only a few days from November 5. What is your overall message to voters in this country that want to end this genocide?
Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam: We have a historic opportunity, unparalleled, to punish a genocidaire.
Never has this happened. A peaceful deposition of a leader, complicit in genocide in Gaza. This will be a moment in the history of civil rights, human rights, globally, that will be recounted again and again.
How will this happen? At the hands of people of conscience who come out, walk gently behind the curtain at the ballot box to speak the truth against the pharaohs in the White House.
It is truly a strategy that we have pursued from the very beginning, in October, when Abandon Biden emerged.
Our strategy was to punish the President, and now the Vice President, for her genocide. To take the blame for her defeat, in so doing, buy power to send a signal to the political landscape that you should never have ignored us, and that when you engage in genocide, you lose.
There’s truly a cynical thing that’s taking place here, that the Democratic Party, which supposedly stands for values like life, health care, equality, for the end of racism, the end of anti-Semitism, the end of Islamophobia, that party that Muslim-Americans and their allies, people of conscience, supported in droves in 2020. 85 to 90% of Muslim Americans alone voted for President [Biden].
And now we see a cynical attempt to do what? To engage in genocide. After everything we’ve learned in our history: segregation, slavery, separation, inequality, Jim Crow. We should never allow and reward leaders who speak to us and say, I’m going to offer you Social Security and health care, forgiveness of student debt, fight climate change, and yet shed blood across the planet.
What we believe is that since we, in huge numbers, voted for the Democrats, now we have the power to say you should never, ever have engaged in genocide. And because of it, you will lose. History will have a resounding message that when you engage in genocide, your own people will come out and ensure finally your rule will come to an end.
PD: What would you say to someone who seems deeply convinced of the need to vote for Harris to avoid a second Trump administration? Trump has enacted many racist policies as president, and promises even more racist policies. What would you say to someone who is afraid of that, and wants to stop that from happening by any means they can?
HAS: When we began Abandon Biden in November, you should have seen how much we were talking to our community.
They were skeptical in the swing states throughout the country. The major question they asked, the question that came again and again perpetually was, but [what about] Trump?
The truth is that when I was living under Trump between 2016 and 2020, I literally closed my laptop. I couldn’t hear his grating voice talking about Latino judges and people living with physical disabilities, him spewing racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism. We remember Charlottesville. And then the [January 6] insurrection, his COVID denialism, his absolute rejection of climate change. This is a person who is despicable.
I canvassed for Senator Casey in Philadelphia in 2006. I canvassed for Barack Obama in 2008. I cried when Hillary lost. I jumped in my living room when Fox News called Arizona for Biden, because I knew what that meant. It meant that he won, that he was going to be the President.
How could this have happened? How could a community that has suffered Islamophobia at the hands of a despicable candidate, like Trump, who awaits in the corridors to become the president? If our strategy wins, he is the president. How could this have happened?
The reason in one word: genocide.
There is no such thing as a lesser evil when it comes to genocide. You pass a threshold of no return. When we were persuading our community, we would say four years under any Republican is incomparable to one day in Gaza. It’s an argument based on sacrifice, that we have to tough it out, that we have to struggle.
If we were to walk to the ballot box in droves again, and reward the Vice President and the President after this horrifying year, what would that mean for the country? It would mean you could do anything. You could even claim that there’s a lesser evil.
It’s an existential question, no longer a simple political calculation between tax rates, tax cuts, infrastructure plans, health care plans that have public options or no public options. We are in a territory that is truly unimaginable.
We have got to get rid of foreign policies that execute human beings, that mean a reign of bombardments upon innocent people on the verge of disintegration.
And this is just Gaza. It’s happening across the world at the hands of American policy. American exceptionalism must end.
We follow the light of Martin Luther King, not just the Martin Luther King that we remember so dearly who sung those songs, We Shall Overcome, on that Selma Bridge, or who penned a letter from a Birmingham jail telling all people to end the vile segregation that America was drowning in.
But we remember the Martin Luther King, [who] a year before his assassination, spoke out against the Vietnam War, a man who knew then in the 1960s that American exceptionalism was vicious. Civil rights belong to all people, not just Americans.
PD: Is there anything that Harris could do at this point that would, in fact, win your vote?
HAS: There is absolutely nothing that she can do at this point. We are three days away from the election. Nothing can happen that she would say or do that would change our position.
We put out an ultimatum on October 27, asking the president to call for a ceasefire by October 31. History wrote that this didn’t happen on November 1, Abandon Biden emerged. Then we vowed to actively campaign against the President because three weeks of genocide is intolerable to the American conscience.
We are now three days from the election. [There is] nothing that she can say.
We only need 70,000 votes in Michigan, 10,000 in Arizona, 10,000 in Wisconsin, 10,000 in Georgia, 10,000 in Pennsylvania. Because we’re not seeking to bring someone into the White House. We are seeking the defeat of a genocidaire.
Many people around the world don’t know that these states are neck and neck. And it’s the swing states that decide this election. In fact, our democracy does not abide by the popular vote, but by states. States determine the outcome of the presidency. These swing states, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, these states will determine the presidency.
One shocking thing, by the way, is that the Republicans constantly are courting us, asking us to endorse them, saying that they’ll have peace, that here are these positions that people will get, that you will have the opportunity now to actually be a part of the party, that we will not be Islamophobic, we will not have a Muslim ban, that we seek to have more just policies throughout the world and the Middle East, that we don’t wish to be a racist party.
And this is incredible, because it shows that when you stick to your position and your resolve, then you gain leverage. Of course, we will never endorse the Republicans. The Republican Party must be a party of unity, of inclusivity, a party of diversity, a party that seeks justice at the level of foreign policy abroad and not just in America. And so we’re in no place to endorse them.
PD: What is the future of the Abandon Harris campaign after November 5?
HAS: A lot of people ask us how is it that you’re endorsing the Green Party? Are they going to win? Our campaign is a campaign of truth. I will be completely transparent. We endorse knowing that the Green Party has no chance of winning.
Why did we endorse? To show our power to be a credible threat, as I described. But there is another reason a lot of people don’t realize the importance of having a third party. We believe that it is essential to stand away from these two despicable parties and to build from a distance, even if we never win the presidency.
Why? Because we can gain leverage and actually compel these parties to shift their policies from that distance by showing that we are galvanizing and mobilizing the community.
Then we have a base, a headquarters from which we can actually alter these two parties, put them into a competitive bid as they seek to get voters from the Green Party to come in and vote for them.
At Abandon Harris, we want policies to end genocide and torture, to bring an agenda of universal health care, an agenda to end racism in our country, an agenda for us to have economic equality.
The Green Party, people in the party should be as durable as your supermarket, as durable as the stations, health care, hospitals, schools. That’s how permanent we should be, and we should be everywhere. We should be not just in the swing states, we should have a 50 state strategy, and that will be so much easier for us to galvanize, to bring in volunteers, to then create a base from which we can fund for justice.
We need a new voice, a new representation, and then we feel people will get excited, will hear a message of hope, will come into the party and we can attract millions.
This is just the beginning, when we show we can defeat with such a small percentage. Imagine, with 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, we could turn the tide away from this two party system and capture the two parties as their policies become greener and greener, because inevitably they’ll discover they can never win without that bulwark of conscience.