by Ann Garrison, published on Black Agenda Report, September 4, 2024
Abandon Harris is now campaigning to defeat Kamala Harris in the battleground states, saying that genocide is a red line. A new poll shows Muslim voters evenly divided between Kamala Harris and Jill Stein.
ANN GARRISON: Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam, the last time we spoke to your group, it was still Abandon Biden. When did you change your name to Abandon Harris?
DR. HASSAN ABDEL SALAM: Our movement became Abandon Harris on August 19, 2024, a few blocks away from the DNC convention, where we declared in clear terms to the vice president and the Democratic Party that we will never vote for her and we will actively campaign for her defeat on November 5th.
AG: Did you even consider disbanding and supporting Harris?
HAS: In July, immediately after President Biden dropped out of the race, we reappeared in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC demanding that Vice President Harris speak to us, meet with us. We extended our hand, asking what her policy on Gaza was. What was her policy on the genocide? We wanted to know exactly what was in her mind, since she had worked actively with the president since the genocide began. We wanted to hear from her mouth, in front of us, what she would do if she became the president on January 20.
The media took our message, our demands for a permanent, unconditional ceasefire and a full arms embargo, and we were met with complete rejection, no comment, no meeting. That’s what led up to our decision that we had no choice but to do what we began in October, that we would denounce the party’s position on genocide and begin a campaign against her, as we did on August 19, 2024, outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
AG: So you’re looking to win a moral victory by helping to cost the Democrats the election?
HAS: Yes, our strategy is to punish the president and the vice president now running at the top of the ticket for the genocide. It should be known in history that people of conscience came out and ensured her defeat. We want to send an undeniable signal to the political class that they can never engage in genocide and win.
We’re counting on the people of this country to respond to this moment, this moral urgency, that a genocide is happening, that we are investing billions of dollars in the destruction of an innocent people on the verge of destruction.
We told her that we would do this, and that we hope a reckoning will come to the party on November 5th.
AG: So you were at the Democratic National Convention. Did you take part in any of the rallies?
HAS: Yes, we took part in the rallies and marches on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We spoke to folks, we spoke to the media. We protested, and on Tuesday, alongside Jill Stein, I participated in a rally at Grace Church in Chicago.
AG: Who else did you meet with at the church, at the church or at the convention?
HAS: The Workers Strike Back was also at that meeting at Grace Church.
We met with lots of media folks and supporters. We had Jill Stein, Claudia de la Cruz, Cornel West and their supporters with us, and we were talking to people of conscience from all different backgrounds in the park and on the marches.
AG: What did you think of Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech?
HAS: The speech represented to me, a remarkable feat in double speak. She was promising to the American people gifts that we all believe should be part of our nation, health care, forgiveness of student debt, fighting climate change and ending police brutality, but she also promised the military dominance of the State of Israel, promised that she would support, enhance, and maintain that military dominance. She would continue to send Israel the bombs raining down on an innocent people, killing tens of thousands of them. It’s estimated that more than 200,000 have been killed, displaced or injured.
We in Abandon Biden and now Abandon Harris believe that civil rights don’t just belong to the American people. Civil rights belong to every single human being. We follow and are guided by the light of Dr. Martin Luther King, the one who wrote the letter in a Birmingham Jail, and the people who protested with him, where dogs ripped into their flesh.
We are also guided by the Martin Luther King who spoke out against the Vietnam War. America should never be part of a genocide. The fact that I even have to utter these words is despicable.
We were working on one of our state launches last November when one of the people who was going to represent us at a press conference in Fort Lauderdale called and told me that he had just lost 24 members of his family, and I just couldn’t contain myself. I started crying, but he was very composed, which was truly remarkable.
AG: What do you say to those who will inevitably say that Trump will be worse for Palestinians?
HAS: That ultimately the act of murder must be punished, that we have no choice at Abandon Harris.
We know we’ll have to sacrifice. I myself shut down my laptop during the Republican National Convention because I couldn’t listen to the words of the former president, a despicable candidate.
Imagine though if we were to come out in droves again, as we did in 2020, for Joe Biden and vote for Kamala Harris after we protested again and again and again only to be met with silence. We would be rewarding the very murderers who killed our families, and sending a signal that they could do anything without consequence. They could put us in concentration camps. They could go and shed blood in any part of the world. They could come into our homes and steal our property and take our children away, and still tell us that we have to elect them because they are the lesser of two evils.
There might someday be a moment where we do have to choose the lesser of two evils, but now we’ve reached a point where the evil is so pronounced that we must denounce it at every moment, regardless of the cost, to send an undeniable signal that a reckoning will come upon this party, and it will have to ask why it lost. We have to reject this party that values American life more than the billions of people with whom we share this planet.
AG: You used the term concentration camp. The people of Gaza can’t even leave if they want to at this point, can they? Egypt has said it won’t accept them into the Sinai.
HAS: No, they’re effectively trapped. Gaza is so tiny, and all these bombs and munitions are falling upon a people who have no place to go. In the south and the north these blockades prevent them from moving, so they can’t even be rescued. Any Gazans still alive know that at any moment they can die.
AG: Is there anything that Kamala Harris can do now to make you stop the Abandon Harris campaign?
HAS: No. Even if a ceasefire is called, the damage to millions of people will be irreparable. We must hold this administration to account. We can’t condone trapping a people in prison with bombs raining down on their heads.
We can’t stand to hear that the people bombing them are righteous and that those being bombed are terrorists. There must be a reckoning, a moment of accountability, and every day that passes without a permanent ceasefire redeems the strategy that we began last November 1. The hundreds of thousands of bombs raining down on Gaza exceed those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I worked for years as a professor of human rights strategy and movement making, and I can tell you that, today, the trauma has not only persisted in the people who witnessed it, but it’s been inherited by the next generations. What will happen now to Gaza? What will happen to our people here in America and our children and grandchildren, who will have to suffer for years to come with this pain and trauma?
AG: You said that you’re focusing your efforts on the battleground states. How are you doing that?
HAS: We’re campaigning. We’re going out to our community with our flyers and calling all our people to come out and vote. We’re asking them to register. We’re asking imams, community members, priests, religious figures, and leaders in community centers with folks from all different backgrounds, including even folks who might be homeless, to come out and vote. We’re making every effort to make sure they come out and vote before November 5 or on November 5 to ensure Kamala Harris’s defeat.
I myself have been personally campaigning across the country, even delivering Friday prayers in mosques in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and soon among students at Georgia Tech in Atlanta on September 20.
My effort is to get the message to every single person of conscience, everywhere throughout this country, and tell them that this vote is incomparable to any vote they’ve ever cast. Just like David threw that rock at Goliath and he fell, and a new kingdom was born. Your rock is your vote to nonviolently depose the pharaohs who reside in the White House, who sit atop a superpower.
I conducted human rights research in Jerusalem for a year in 2022. During that time, we called for the liberation of Palestine in Arabic with my research assistant from the University of Minnesota, and we put our message on YouTube from Al Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam, in the city that is also the holiest site for Christians and Jews.
I was strategizing with youth activists amidst hundreds of soldiers. Israeli forces were in the mosque itself wearing shoes, which is forbidden in Islam. We were strategizing right under their noses. We called on the youth of Palestine to tell us their stories peacefully. We wanted to attract people of all faiths, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, to hold hands and sing “We Shall overcome.” We wanted them to hear the stories of people like Osayd, who is everyday weeping because his father is in prison in Hebron. Or Imam Sami, who walks the streets of Silwan calling people to protest peacefully, but keeps rotating in and out of prison. Or Amran, who worries about getting married or purchasing a car because of the occupation. The way the occupation has so deeply infiltrated their lives that my research assistant and I felt we had no choice but to invite the media to hear their stories.
On December 1st, after almost a year in Jerusalem, as I was walking towards Al Aqsa Mosque, the primary site of my research, there was a guard running towards me, scrolling down his phone, and there are guards everywhere around Al Aqsa Mosque.
That was the beginning of a chapter of research from hell. They handcuffed me and shackled my feet, stripped me naked and paraded me through the Old City, then threw me into a van and sent me to the infamous Moscobiyeh Prison, where I faced countless interrogators asking me questions in multiple languages. Why are you here? What does it mean that you are trying to end the occupation?
I met one of the youth when I was being sent through the mock justice of the courts in Jerusalem, one of the youth who was working with us, who was also imprisoned. He asked me, “What will you do if you go back home?”
I didn’t think that I’d ever get back home because my interrogators were telling me that they’d keep me there forever.
The young men in prison knew that one day we would talk about them, organize for them, that there are people out here thousands of miles away worrying about them, that we would struggle not only to stop the bombs but also to free them from prison.
AG: It does seem like organizing voters is the only thing that the Democrats care about. We can march around in the streets all we want, but all they care about, ultimately, is how we vote.
HAS: Absolutely. It has been a huge struggle. In October here in Minneapolis, we were in the streets shouting and crying for justice. Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! This slogan emerged ten months ago, and spread throughout the nation, with people from all backgrounds: African Americans, Latinos, progressives, libertarians, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Independents, Muslim Americans, and Jewish Americans. We all came out side by side.
I met one of the heads of a civil rights organization, brother Jaylani Hussein in Minnesota, and I told him I didn’t think these protests would work, that the only way the Democratic Party would change its position, the only way that the president would recognize that it was a mistake to persist with this genocide, would be if we showed that we were going to punish because of the genocide, that we came out in droves to vote against the president.
It took some time but he ultimately recognized that was so. We are redeemed every day that an unconditional, permanent ceasefire, as per the International Court of Justice, has not been called. Now here we are on September 2nd, just 64 days away from this election, and we ask everyone to vote against genocide.
AG: CAIR , the Council on American Islamic Relations, estimates that there are roughly two and a half million Muslim voters. I believe they are especially concentrated in Michigan. Are they concentrated in any of the other battleground states?
HAS: We’re looking at the polling data and the Muslim populations relative to the margins in the current polls and the 2020 election. In Arizona, we have a smaller population of Muslim Americans than in Michigan, but Biden won by only 10,500 votes there. We have nearly 10 times that many Muslim Americans there, and so we are investing extremely heavily in the state of Arizona. We are also working tirelessly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, and Minnesota. We feel very good about states like Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, and we’re also excited about Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina.
One thing that we recognized when we called on people to vote uncommitted in the primary was that our struggle is not only with Muslim Americans, but with all Americans. Many of the people who voted Uncommitted were non-Muslim, non-Arabs, people who believe in civil rights, people who stand for justice. We are guided by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and John Lewis, and we call on all Americans to join us. We hope to join with Third Party campaigns and the candidates that lead them. If just a fraction of those who came out to vote uncommitted in the Democratic primaries will do the same, we would easily accomplish our task and deliver the swing states away from the vice president.
AG: Will you be endorsing a Third Party candidate?
HAS: The leadership at Abandon Harris has been studying the question of endorsements since February, and our leadership are now moving towards an endorsement of a single candidate. It’s extremely likely that we will do so in September. We’re very excited about that.
We wanted to be sure to study who is the candidate with the ballot access to win. And when we say win, we mean Abandon Harris. To win is to punish Kamala Harris, to deliver the swing states away from Kamala Harris by voting for a Third Party candidate.
AG: Have you had any contact with CAIR, or with their political wing, CAIR Action, or any other Muslim American groups?
HAS: Absolutely. We’ve been working with leaders across organizations, including CAIR. CAIR cannot endorse a candidate because it is a nonprofit organization, but individuals from CAIR are working with us to advance the message that we must punish the president and now the vice president, that they must be defeated at the ballot box.
AG: How are you organizing?
HAS: Every day we’re speaking out with our neighbors and our friends and our colleagues. We’re exchanging messages, posting to social media, and texting through WhatsApp.
This is deeply emotional for us, it’s our everyday world. Everyday we talk with friends about this election as we talk about the weather. We hug each other. We cry together repeatedly. We struggle with one another. We come out to the protest as though it’s one of our appointments, like we’re going to the doctor. You ask what we are doing to organize and our answer is everything. The answer to the real question–what are we doing that is outside this campaign?–is nothing.
AG: The US, including both its Democratic and Republican candidates, has made it clear that they will continue to send Israel all the arms it wants to destroy the Palestinian people. The response of the Palestinians’ allies in the region–Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah–has to be tempered by the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons, which it is likely psychotic enough to use. So where do you put your hope?
HAS: We put our hope in what we are doing every day. It will take just a single phone call from the United States president to stop this. The president can call and tell Netanyahu that he must stop these bombings, that no more military aid will be sent from the United States.
By standing for the moral imperative that the president end the genocide in Gaza, we hope to give a gift to history, to shine a light from here throughout the world.
AG: Dr. Hassan, I’m truly sorry for what you’re suffering. I’ve heard the pain and desperation throughout our conversation.
HAS: Thank you for giving us a voice.
Abandon Harris can be found at their website, AbandonHarris24.com , and on their X page .
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at . You can help support her work on Patreon .