Muslim North Carolinians say they feel alienated by Democrats by Mehr Sher December 1, 2023. https://carolinapublicpress.org/62387/muslim-north-carolinians-say-they-feel-alienated-by-democrats/
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Muslim North Carolinians say they feel alienated by Democrats
Like Doha Hindi, other Muslim voters interviewed by Carolina Public Press said they feel increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party, which they have historically supported. This rejection of President Biden and state and local Democratic leaders is part of a widespread trend in states such as Michigan that have significant Muslim populations.
by Mehr Sher December 1, 2023
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Attendees at the Nov. 4 protest in downtown Durham view a memorial for the victims of the Palestine-Israel war. Photo: Nikki Witt / Carolina Public Press
Doha Hindi, 28, a North Carolinian of Palestinian origin, has spent the past two months aghast at the news coming out of Gaza, as Israeli forces inflicted catastrophic damage on the Palestinian territory and its civilian population. All the while, she waited for Democratic officeholders, especially President Joe Biden, to call unequivocally for an end to the all-out Israeli assault on Gaza.
Hindi, a resident of Raleigh, who works in health care technology, has been involved with grassroots activism efforts and local organizations, including The Light House Project and Muslims for Social Justice.
“The attacks on civilians in Palestine have made me and many other Muslims feel disenfranchised from the political system in this country, especially because we have been so outspoken in our demands for a cease-fire,” said Hindi. Israeli strikes killed more than 13,300 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, before a temporary cease-fire ended on Dec. 1. Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza after the week-long pause. It has vowed to destroy Hamas, the organization that has governed Gaza, following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, which killed 1,200 people.
Before the temporary cease-fire ended, American negotiators worked alongside those from Qatar, Egypt and Hamas this week to extend the precarious pause in the fighting. Biden sought to walk a fine diplomatic line. On Tuesday, he cautioned Israel not to play into Hamas’ hands by continuing down the “path of terror” the Palestinian attackers had chosen. Within hours, in the face of questions about his intent, the White House reasserted the president’s support for Israel’s right to wage war on Hamas.
For Hindi, it all adds up to a breach of the trust she once felt in Democrats. “No Democratic political leader did anything prior to this that shocked me,” said Hindi. “This situation in particular was definitely the catalyst for my feelings of disgust at how they’ve handled the situation.”
She said the temporary cease-fire didn’t address the concerns Muslim Americans have been raising. “It’s almost comical that it lined up with the holidays, as if they needed to like pin the murders into their calendars,” Hindi said. “The only thing it’s doing at this point is delaying the inevitable bloodshed that’s going to continue with all of the additional funding that the U.S. government is trying to send Israel.”
Several protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza have taken place across the state, including in Greensboro, Durham, Wilmington, Charlotte, Asheville, Raleigh and on various college campuses. Earlier this month, on Nov. 14, Carrboro became the first town in North Carolina to narrowly pass a resolution for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Eight thousand names of victims were printed and hung during the protest on Nov. 4 in downtown Durham. Photo: Nikki Witt / Carolina Public Press
Thirty state organizations, including nonprofit groups such as Muslim Women For, which is calling for a permanent cease-fire, recently sent a letter to Gov. Roy Cooper to “issue a statement calling for a cease-fire and an end to Palestinian genocide that billions of U.S. tax dollars are being used to fund.”
Like Hindi, other Muslim voters interviewed by Carolina Public Press said they feel increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party, which they have historically supported. This rejection of President Biden and state and local Democratic leaders is part of a widespread trend in states such as Michigan that have significant Muslim populations.
North Carolina hasn’t produced a true nail-biter at the presidential level in recent elections, but the vote has been relatively close. In 2020, for example, former President Donald Trump won in the state with a margin of approximately 74,000 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast. But the races for governor and attorney general have been much closer, and they can be influenced by what happens in the presidential contest.
“The Democrats will take a significant hit, if they don’t have our support, which is why I think many of us are so surprised at how unwilling a lot of them are to hear us out.”
Doha Hindi
Carolina Public Press raised the concerns of Muslim North Carolinians to the governor’s office.
Eight-year-old Tula Bir-Zaslow speaks to the crowd about the children who have suffered during this conflict. She writes her name on her hand in Arabic just as Palestinian parents have done to mark their children’s bodies for identification during the war. Photo: Nikki Witt / Carolina Public Press
“I mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis and Palestinians in this war, which has been painful for many people here in North Carolina, including those who fear for their own safety,” said Gov. Cooper in a statement to Carolina Public Press. “We continue working on strategies to combat antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, which will not be tolerated in North Carolina,” he said.
“If fighting resumes, I join the president and his team in urging Israel to do everything possible to protect innocent people in Gaza. Hamas, which has promised future attacks with the goal of destroying Israel and endangers civilians by hiding weapons in hospitals and schools, must be stopped,” Gov. Cooper said in the written statement on Nov. 30, a day before the temporary cease-fire ended.
The state Democratic Party said that it “has and will continue to stand in strong support of our Muslim neighbors” in a written statement to Carolina Public Press.
It’s impossible to know exactly how many of North Carolina’s nearly 7.4 million registered voters are Muslim, or how Muslims who are registered cast their votes. Emgage, a national nonprofit that “educates and mobilizes Muslim American voters,” estimates that approximately 54,000 Muslims were registered in the state in 2020, a sharp increase from 2016, when, it estimates, roughly 30,000 were registered. Emgage uses an algorithm that incorporates “likely Muslim names” and other variables designed to gauge ethnicity, as well as census and other demographic data, to filter voter rolls for “likely Muslim voters,” according to Mohamed Gula, executive director of Emgage. The North Carolina figures appear in a report touting the success of the group’s efforts to spur Muslim participation in 12 selected states leading up to the 2020 election.
“Most Muslim voters are well positioned to not only swing elections but tip them in crucial battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina,” said Robert McCaw, the director of the government affairs department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Washington D.C.-based, national nonprofit organization.
Some North Carolinian Muslim voters and organizers interviewed by Carolina Public Press say the Democratic Party in North Carolina may lose the Muslim vote in 2024.
CPP contacted the White House for comment on Muslim North Carolinians feeling alienated by the Biden administration and local Democratic Party leaders but did not receive a response.
Muslim voters in North Carolina say they feel unheard
Mohammed Riyami, 38, a resident of Raleigh, said the current sociopolitical climate is giving him flashbacks of the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “when things got worse for Muslims.”
For as long as he has been able to vote in the U.S., he said, he has voted for Democrats.
“This time, I don’t feel comfortable voting Democrat, and this is not just on Biden, this is on the whole. I feel very silenced, betrayed and like we are not equal to other races, religions or other Americans.”
Mohammed Riyami
Riyami, who works in information technology, has Black and Arab roots. He was born and partially brought up in Dubai. He moved to the U.S. in 2001. As father to a 4-year-old son, he said the hardest part about the visuals coming from Gaza “is seeing children suffer” and feeling like the loss of lives is “not looked at as equal.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Riyami said, he saw an outpouring of support and Ukrainian flags in people’s cars and homes. But he has not seen Palestinian flags anywhere outside of Western Boulevard in Raleigh, which has many Muslim-owned businesses, he said.
“It’s hard, because we practically dehumanize Black and Brown children, and Gaza is a prime example of that,” he said. Voting “feels like a lose-lose situation,” Riyami said, whether he votes Democratic or Republican.
Riyami said while he’s glad that there was a temporary cease-fire, it doesn’t mean there isn’t violence outside Gaza in the West Bank, where there were raids and arrests taking place during the pause. “I feel like there should be a permanent cease-fire and no genocide at all,” he said, “and I can’t give any credit to Biden for this.”
Nasir Khatri, 32, a Pakistani-American who works as an anesthesiologist, is a registered voter and a resident of Charlotte. Khatri feels discouraged by how the Biden administration has handled the war in Palestine-Israel, he said.
“We have come to just trauma-bond with Democrats over some issues of diversity, when in reality I think that our values are not always aligned,” he said. He doesn’t think Democratic leaders have supported Muslim Americans, he said.
It’s not that the Biden administration is the first Democratic regime to ignore Muslims, Khatri said, but rather that it has become more evident “because the Muslim voice is louder now than it has been before.” Muslims are far more vocal and collective in the wake of the assault on Gaza, “whether it’s the marches, boycotts or calling people in Congress,” he said.
“I think this is all taking everyone by surprise just because I don’t think the Palestinian or Muslim voice was expected to be so loud, yet it is, and that’s what gives me hope.”
Nasir Khatri
Khatri said he hasn’t felt a strong affinity at the ballot box toward one party or the other in the past several years.
Organizers: Biden Administration’s response to war in Palestine-Israel is the underlying cause
Muslim American organizers and nonprofit organizations that work on a grassroots level to increase civic engagement in the Muslim community say the U.S. stance on Palestine-Israel over the past few weeks has set back their efforts.
McCaw, the director of the government affairs department at CAIR, said in an interview with Carolina Public Press on Nov. 8 that the organization “had to work twice as hard to encourage Muslim voters to turn out in yesterday’s off-year election, when so many are disheartened in how the American political system has responded to the crisis in Gaza.” There is a sense of betrayal nationwide, said McCaw.
American Muslims are one of the most demographically diverse faiths in the country, and their concerns work into other ethnic communities, too, according to McCaw.
Some Muslim American and Arab American groups said in an open letter last month that they would withhold donations and votes for President Biden’s reelection unless his administration took steps toward a cease-fire in Gaza.
Burhan Ghanayem, 71, is a retired research scientist and a local organizer who was born in Palestine. Ghanayem moved to North Carolina in the 1980s and has since spent more than 40 years working on grassroots efforts for social justice causes and activism with the Palestinian, Muslim, Black, Jewish and Latino communities in the state.
Ghanayem, a Democrat, has been a donor to Democrats on both the national and local level and is the chair of the board of a North Carolina-based advocacy group called Voices for Justice in Palestine.
“In the last few weeks since the situation began to deteriorate in the Middle East, I have become very disenchanted with the Democratic Party in general and with Biden in particular,” he said. “The majority of our Muslim and Palestinian community are extremely disappointed.”
Many in the Muslim community in North Carolina are looking to other candidates and parties, according to Ghanayem. He said he has been getting calls and emails from people in the Muslim community across the state “saying you’re the one who led us to support the Democratic Party and look what’s happening.”
“They are ready to abandon the Democratic Party,” he said.
“We are essentially sanctioning the genocide of innocent people in Gaza,” said Ghanayem, who has family members living in the West Bank, the larger of the two Palestinian territories created by Israel.
Lela Ali, an Egyptian-American and native of North Carolina, is the co-founder and co-director of Muslim Women For, a nonprofit and Muslim women-led, North Carolina-based organization working to build political power within Muslim communities statewide. Ali said the current situation among Muslim voters in North Carolina poses challenges for organizers.
“We were building a program, an infrastructure to build power and civic engagement, advocacy efforts within Muslim communities, a community that has had distrust with government and has experienced surveillance and anti-immigration policies post-9/11,” she said.
Now, Muslim voters across racial and ethnic lines, she said, are “holding this sentiment that they feel betrayed by the people they have elected into office from the federal level all the way to the state and local levels.”
Ali said many Muslim voters are expressing to Muslim Women For that they don’t want to vote because of the U.S. stance on Palestine-Israel. “When you don’t have these folks coming to vote, that means we as a state are facing a threat of really protecting our democracy and what that means,” she said.
Ali said, based on her interactions with Muslim voters recently, that in 2024 many Muslim voters may not vote, “or leave the first line blank and not vote for president, but also not vote for the top three lines on the ballot, like governor and attorney general, even.”
Just as identifying Muslim voters is an inexact science, attempts to measure their sentiments produce disparate results. Some variability may reflect differences in methodology; some may show changes over time.
In 2017, 66% of the Muslim population in the U.S. either identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, and 13% leaned Republican, according to a survey conducted by the Washington D.C.-based, nonpartisan think tank Pew Research Center.
A 2022 poll conducted by a Michigan-based research organization, Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, showed that Muslim American voters were not aligned with either dominant political party, according to Petra Alsoofy, a senior outreach and partnerships manager for the organization.
Only 17% of Arab Americans interviewed in the wake of Israel’s attacks on Gaza expressed support for Biden in the upcoming 2024 election, according to a recent poll conducted by John Zogby Strategies, a political survey company. That’s a precipitous decline from 2020, when 59% told Zogby they favored Biden. The report found that two-thirds of Arab Americans negatively view President Biden’s response to the current violence in Palestine and Israel.
In 26 years of surveying Arab Americans, this is the first time Zogby has found that a majority of Arab American voters did not prefer the Democratic Party. This data does not include Muslim Americans of other ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Local Democratic official speaks about the backlash she faces
Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner, is the first Muslim American woman to be elected to office in North Carolina and the first Muslim American to serve on the North Carolina Democratic Party’s executive council. Allam has always been a proud Democrat, she said, and she thinks “that our Democratic Party can and should do better.”
Allam is speaking out but was silent at the beginning of the Palestine-Israel war. She said she “was worried and fearful of her safety as an elected official and a Muslim American woman,” but remaining quiet made her feel guilty. She has personally faced backlash and dealt with Islamophobic tropes while in office and said “it shouldn’t have to come with the role,” but “it does.”
“I don’t see how someone can justify that an elected official sticking up for humanity, sticking up for the end of a genocide is an extremist.”
Nida Allam
She said she has had to “have uncomfortable conversations” with some Democratic political leaders because many “don’t want to acknowledge and face the fact that they are losing the Muslim vote.”
“They’re not listening to the pain that Muslims are bringing to the table,” Allam said. “My Palestinian friends that I’m talking to are losing family members and are looking at the election here in America and thinking how they are supposed to vote for the oppression and murder of their family members,” she said.
State lawmakers response to the war in Palestine-Israel
Last month, the N.C. House adopted a Republican-led resolution to urge the U.S. Congress to offer “full and unequivocal support of Israel financially and otherwise for as long as it takes for Israel to bring justice in light of the unprovoked attacks on innocent Israeli civilians.” No one voted against the measure, but 12 Democratic representatives did not vote, including Rep. Nasif Majeed, D-Mecklenburg, who later said he didn’t support the language in the resolution offering unequivocal support for Israel.
On the other side of the General Assembly, three Democratic Senators didn’t sign onto a statement supporting Israel last month, according to the News and Observer. They included Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, D-Mecklenburg, who instead released a joint statement with Sens. Julie Mayfield and Natalie Murdock condemning the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
Sen. Mayfield said she did not have an objection to the senatorial statement but “did think it was incomplete.” The statement “did not acknowledge the devastating attacks that were sure to come in Gaza, and it did not express any concern for innocent Gazans who die,” “nor did it call for peace,” she said in a written statement to Carolina Public Press.
CPP also sent interview requests to Rep. Majeed and Sens. Mohammed and Murdock but did not receive a response.
Republican lawmakers have criticized Democratic lawmakers who didn’t vote in support of the resolutions in support of Israel.
The decision not to vote sent a “terrible message” to the people of Israel, said Rep. Erin Paré, R-Wake, in the statement, adding that the 12 House members who didn’t vote had chosen to “turn their back and walk out in shame.”
Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, one of the 12 who didn’t vote, responded to Paré on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“It was not shame, it was because this resolution was hollow,” Morey said. “I condemn violence against all civilians and children, including shutting off water, electricity and food from children in Gaza.”
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MEHR SHER
Mehr Sher is the staff democracy reporter at Carolina Public Press. Contact her at msher@carolinapublicpress.org.
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