Grief and vengeance

This is a tragic story in more than one way:

Mohammad Enayah relied on a cousin in Gaza for regular updates on his extended family living under Israel’s bombardment. He heard about the daily challenges his family faced in trying to survive: no access to running water, regular bombings and fleeing from one stranger’s home to another seeking safety.

Then, in November, he received the news he had been dreading: 30 members of his extended family had been killed by an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp. He began to look at the list of names of those killed but couldn’t make it past the first one.

“The first name was so familiar,” Enayah said, his voice breaking as tears streamed down his face. “I just put it aside and I said, ‘I don’t want to read it.’ But to honor them, I had to. It took me a week just to go through the names.”

It is for that reason that Enayah, like many Arab American and Muslim voters in Dearborn — where Arab Americans make up the majority of the population — is resolved not only to withhold his vote from President Biden, but also to actively campaign against him. Some Michigan Arabs and Muslims have launched an “Abandon Biden” campaign — part of a broader national movement still getting off the ground — to ensure that those in their community show up to cast their vote, but not for Biden.

The campaign’s organizers, who also oppose Donald Trump, have not yet coalesced around a strategy for the general election. They are still debating whether to encourage voters to support a third-party candidate or to skip the presidential contest altogether while still voting for other offices. Either way, the organizers are telling Muslim and Arab voters that they should show up and vote, rather than stay home, so it is clear that Biden specifically has lost their vote.

I don’t know what else to say.