Muslim leaders from several swing states will gather Saturday in front of the White House to take their national campaign against reelecting President Biden directly to the commander-in-chief.
The group, which is operating as #AbandonBiden, announced late Thursday that it will hold a rally Saturday afternoon, starting at the Supreme Court before marching to the White House. The protests are in response to Mr. Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Muslim leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania have formed the group with the goal of ensuring Mr. Biden is a one-term president.
They have held separate rallies in their respective states, but this is the first time they’ve coordinated their response in Washington ahead of the 2024 election.
“As a Michigander and a Muslim, I am disgusted at the President’s abandonment of our moral principles and refusal to call for a ceasefire,” Samra’a Lugman, the Michigan coalition leader, said in a statement announcing the rally.
“His bypassing of Congress twice in the last month to send nearly $250 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to support the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian Muslims and Christians shows that he not only is complicit in but is an actual party to genocide,” he added.
Hassan Abdel Salam, of the National Abandon Biden campaign, said in a statement that the president is taking Muslim votes for granted.
“What Muslim Americans have been demanding from Biden is so minimal. We ask for the end of the killing, of the bombardments, of the famine. Of this extreme policy of death. We are not asking for an extra inch of land; we’re just asking to stop the killing,” he said.
Mr. Biden has tried to balance his support for Israel with calls for restraint in its military response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7. But he’s been unwilling to urge Israel to pursue a cease-fire.
The boiling anger among Arab and Muslim Americans could prove fatal to Mr. Biden’s chances of reelection and many of the swing states contain large pockets of Muslim and Arab voting blocs.
Arab Americans account for just a fraction of the U.S. population and about half the number of Jewish Americans. But their largest communities reside in battleground states that could shift an election if they withhold their support from Mr. Biden in 2024.
Mr. Biden squeaked about a victory in Nevada in 2020 over former President Trump by about 34,000 votes. Although the Muslim population in the state is about 7.400, any erosion of support could be fatal to Mr. Biden’s reelection chances in the Silver State.
In several other swing states, the U.S. Religious Census found that the Muslim adherent population in several states exceeded Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.
Mr. Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, and its Muslim population is around 123,000. He won by about 154,000 votes in Michigan, which has more than 242,000 adherents of Islam. Wisconsin, which Mr. Biden won by 21,000 votes, has 69,000 Muslim residents.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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