‘Uncommitted Vote’ Campaign was Designed to Unify Fractious Islamists

Although the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations are now secured, mainstream media continues to show significant interest in the “uncommitted” vote. Ostensibly a protest over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, an array of state-based campaigns aimed at derailing Democratic politics has picked up remarkable momentum.

In Michigan, some 13 percent voted “uncommitted” in January’s Democratic primary. According to one telephone poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), these uncommitted supporters included an overwhelming 94 percent of Muslims polled.

Then, a week later, the “uncommitted” vote reached 19 percent in the Minnesota primaries. Strong “uncommitted” support has since been found across the country, with healthy showings in Washington and North Carolina, and most recently reaching an astonishing 29 percent in Hawaii.

The uncommitted campaign started off as an Arab and Muslim community issue, according to early reports. But now, the movement has been adopted by progressivist campaign groups all across the country. As interviews with voters across the country have made clear, the reason for the grassroots support is apparently Gaza.

And certainly, support for Palestinians, apologism for Hamas, and revulsion against Israel are key factors for many of those voting uncommitted. But the actual origins of the campaign are more complicated than mainstream media seems to realize. Not all of the organizers are driven solely by anti-Israel rage; some of the efforts appear to have emerged out of internal American Muslim and Islamist politics, and its radicals’ quest for more power and fewer divisions.

The emergence of the “Abandon Biden” campaign in late October, along with other campaigns threatening the Biden ticket, sparked considerable concern among Democratic Party leaders. Angry crowds of American Muslims even booed senior Muslim Biden administration figures sent to address concerns.

Abandon Biden was established by Islamist activists, who appeared keen to capitalize on fury over Gaza and dissent in the Left over the Biden administration’s attitude towards Israel. But as Umar Lee posits, some in the Abandon Biden campaign appeared to be working towards a political power-grab within American Islam – activists keen to usurp leftist control over American Muslim activism culture.

Indeed, in sharp contrast to the media narrative, it would be a mistake to regard Abandon Biden as a wholly left-leaning initiative. Khalid Turaani, a radical Islamist and terror-tied founder of the Abandon Biden movement, openly argues for a Trump presidency, calling it a “short-term pain for long term gain.” Indeed, as a few others have noticed, Turaani in fact has a long history of GOP involvement.

For what it’s worth, Khalid Turaani publicly campaigned for George W. Bush in 2000 and organized Arab-American Republicans Against Bush in 2003. I have not seen any evidence that he has ever been a Democrat or that he ever supported the President who he is claiming to “abandon” https://t.co/4jI1jvwCq0

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) February 21, 2024

Other leading Abandon Biden figures include Hassan Shibly, who refers to leftism as “quite frankly...antithetical to prophetic teachings.”

But Abandon Biden, which has emerged as a key backer of the uncommitted vote, is also not some secret ploy of the GOP. Other leading members of the movement including Jaylani Hussein, an avowed leftist and official of the Islamist-founded Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The ultimate aim seems, instead, to be unified Islamism.

Abandon Biden campaign leaders are looking for a middle-ground around which they can control an undivided Muslim vote, necessary after several years of bitter divide in the face of a growing Muslim embrace of the Right, after decades of dependency on the Left.

This is a difficult game to play. On the one hand, Turaani embraces Amer Ghalib, the hardline Islamist mayor of Hamtramck, and praises his “fight” against “political coercion by the LGBTQ community"; while at the same time, he works closely with Representative Rashida Tlaib, whose involvement with “LGBT” causes has evoked significant anger among Michigan Muslims, as Turaani’s fellow activists have pointed out.

As Focus on Western Islamism has extensively documented, over the past year a furious internal battle has raged within American Islamism, with an uncompromising Islamist “Right” convinced that the embrace of progressivism has diluted Islamic values; and an opposing Islamist-tinged progressivism that argues Leftism affords American Muslims unprecedented political power and opportunity.

The divide has led to extraordinary new axes and enmities, with Muslim politicians such as Ilhan Omar becoming the subject of jeers at Islamist rallies organized in cooperation with the GOP; popular mainstream imams being ambushed on camera by Islamist hardliners armed with Trumpian-sounding rhetoric about weak liberals; a growing Islamist embrace of far-Right and “alt-Right” activists; and panicked internal Islamist arguments about interfaith dialogue, LGBT politics, abortion, among other matters.

Now, the “uncommitted” campaign appears partially designed to transcend these issues. Gaza, American Islamists realized, could unite an American ummah, which had fractured not over Islamic issues, but over many of the same Western political sores that divide non-Muslim mainstream politics as well.

Gaza is an opportunity, Islamist leaders noted, not just to re-unify American Islam, but to re-Islamize its politics as well.

The establishment of Listen to Michigan – which quickly became the face of the uncommitted vote movement in the state – before the February 27 primary appears to be further evidence of this new Islamist political drive. The organization brings together conservative and leftist activists from across the Islamist spectrum, finally sharing a platform after several years of bitter internal political conflict.

While there are non-Muslim progressivists involved in Listen to Michigan, and the movement operates out of the legal infrastructure of Arab Americans for Progress, a Michigan 501(c)4, the public backing for the campaign has been predominantly Muslim. And these Muslim voices include plenty of Islamists.

On the one hand, the campaign’s chief figures include activists such as Representative Rashida Tlaib, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud and a number of prominent Dearborn council members. All have longstanding histories of involvement in Islamist causes, but, to the fury of other local Islamist leaders, they have stood with progressivists in defense of “LGBT” books in public schools.

An opinion piece by the Middle East Media Research Institute’s executive director Steven Stalinsky in the Wall Street Journal recently referred to Dearborn as “America’s Jihad Capital,” and quoted Mayor Hammoud’s denunciations of the Biden campaign: “If you’re planning on sending campaign officials to convince the Arab-American community on why they should vote for your candidate, don’t do it on the same day you announce selling fighter jets to the tyrants murdering our family members.”

This placed Hammoud in a much improved light, after years of Michigan Islamists and GOP activists repeatedly protesting his administration, accusing both Hammoud and Congresswoman Tlaib of “being in favor of LGBTQ books” that are “offensive and violate their religion.”

Indeed, the very groups and activists who attacked Hammoud and Tlaib for their ostensible progressivism are now also happy to back Listen to Michigan’s unifying message. Islamist activists such as Hassan Chami, who led the anti-LGBT protests in Dearborn and urged Muslims in 2022 not to vote for Tlaib, told radical British MP George Galloway on February 11 that he was also involved in the campaign to push for the “uncommitted” vote.

Other leading Islamist voices within Listen to Michigan include Amer Ghalib, the Hamtramck mayor who banned LGBT flags from city buildings. In contrast to fellow Listen to Michigan supporter and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, Ghalib sided with Islamist and conservative fury about “LGBT” books in public institutions.

Other commentators have noticed the origins of the uncommitted vote in the “LGBT” furor, with one Michigan Democratic activist referring to the initiative as “a tiny group of extremist[s] in MI who’ve spent the last few years advocating against LGBT rights.”

The momentum and success of Listen to Michigan, which secured over 100,000 uncommitted votes, prompted other Islamist activists around the country to launch uncommitted initiatives in their own states. In Minnesota, Vote Uncommitted MN was launched, with figures from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) closely involved.

A considerable number of radical imams across the country subsequently backed the uncommitted vote in Minnesota. And national Islamist organizations with links to foreign Islamist regimes also joined in. The 501(c)4 arm of the Turkish-linked U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), for instance, officially backed the uncommitted vote.

At the same time, further support for the uncommitted vote came from Emgage, which was a leading voice for the Biden during the 2020 election, promising to gather a million Muslim votes for his campaign. During Biden’s first term, Emgage served as the administration’s go-to Muslim group. Now, they have publicly rejected Biden, and endorsed Listen to Michigan and other “uncommitted” groups.

Importantly, Emgage has spent the last few years at war with USCMO and CAIR, over the latter groups’ involvement with the Turkish regime and other matters of perceived foreign interference in domestic Islamist politics. The healing power of the uncommitted campaign and the pretext of Gaza have helped these various Islamist organizations overcome a seemingly irreconcilable divide.

The Islamists have already begun to lose control of the uncommitted vote campaign, however. Various socialist activist organizations, impressed at the campaign’s reach, have quickly become involved. For these non-Islamist radicals too, claiming solidarity with Gaza affords influence and allies. Progressivist embrace of the campaign perhaps explains the 29 percent uncommitted vote in Hawaii, a state in which the Islamist presence is negligible.

It is not clear whether the “uncommitted” and Abandon Biden campaigns will continue to campaign in the run-up to the general election, but all this newfound unity and political influence is unlikely to be wasted.

As some of the Abandon Biden campaigners have made clear, the uncommitted vote might prefer a Trump administration over a second Biden term. Their public reasoning is that such a demonstration of Muslim and progressivist voting power will irrevocably change Democratic Party politics towards Islamist issues.

Privately, the real reasoning is perhaps that Islamists do better in opposition: greater pan-Islamist unity, better funding arrangements and more political influence, earned through protest politics.

As one Muslim-American blog put it following the end of the Trump administration: “Donald Trump is gone from the White House, but let’s face it: The Donald was good for business for the Islamist groups who claim to represent us. No more Muslim travel ban. No more urgent federal civil rights lawsuits... And perhaps not as many donations to CAIR.”