Agencies
The front page came with a full-width photo of United States President Joe Biden and a stark message: “He lost our votes”, written in thick red letters.
That was the main headline for last week’s Arab American News, a bilingual weekly publication out of Dearborn, Michigan, catering to the area’s large Arabic-speaking population.
But as Biden campaigns for reelection in 2024, the newspaper’s headline serves as a bellwether for his prospects among Arab and Muslim American voters — and how his overtures to their communities are being received.
Many Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Americans have expressed frustration over the Biden administration’s “unwavering” support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Biden and his top aides have responded with an outreach effort over the last two weeks, in an apparent push to allay some of the outrage.
Those included State Department and White House meetings in late October with Arab and Muslim advocates, as well as the announcement of a first-ever national strategy to combat Islamophobia on November 1.
The US government’s rhetoric about the war has also shifted, with more explicit emphasis on protecting civilians and calls for “humanitarian pauses” amid the fighting to allow aid into Gaza.
But Palestinian rights advocates say that the Biden administration’s charm offensive is falling short.
“They’re trying to cover up. That’s why we’re not buying into this Islamophobia strategy. We’re not buying into these meetings,” said Abed Ayoub, executive director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
“We’re past that. We need action. We need this administration to show some leadership and not throw us crumbs. We don’t care about a meeting. We really, truly don’t. Nothing is coming out of those meetings obviously.”
A survey by the Arab American Institute last month showed a drastic drop in support for Biden in Arab American communities. Only 17 percent of respondents said they would back the president, down from 59 percent in 2020.
Similarly, an NBC News survey this week revealed that only 16 percent of Arab and Muslim respondents in the key swing state of Michigan said they would vote for Biden if the elections were held today.
Analysts say several factors contributed to this decline in support. Early in the war, Biden was unequivocal about his “unwavering support” for Israel but said little about the spiralling humanitarian situation in Gaza.
All the while, he pledged increased political and military support for Israel, asking Congress to provide more than $14bn in additional aid to the US ally as it bombed Gaza. Israel already receives $3.8bn in assistance annually.
Biden further enraged Arab Americans and progressives when he cast doubt over the death toll in Gaza, saying that he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”. That death count has since surpassed 10,000.
But growing reports of domestic Islamophobia prompted a shift in the Biden administration’s tone. On October 14, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy named Wadea Al-Fayoume was stabbed to death near Chicago in a suspected hate crime. His mother was badly injured.
Biden responded to the attack with a public address. “We must, without equivocation, denounce anti-Semitism,” he said. “We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.” Off-the-record meetings with Palestinian and Muslim advocates followed Al-Fayoume’s killing.
On October 23, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he met with “representatives of the Arab- and Palestinian-American communities”, and a few days later, the White House hosted five Muslim advocates and officials in a meeting that was not publicised by the administration.
Dana El Kurd, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, told Al Jazeera that these outreach efforts appeared “performative” and were “falling flat”.
“People are super angry at how the administration has approached all of this. They feel like it’s fuelling the flames of ongoing violence,” El Kurd said shortly after the meetings.
For her part, Yasmine Taeb, the legislative and political director at MPower Change, a Muslim American advocacy group, said the administration’s messages to Muslim and Arab Americans seem designed to address Biden’s slipping poll numbers, nothing more.
“I don’t see it as being genuine,” Taeb said of the administration’s push. “They’re in damage-control mode.”
