Arab-American leaders in Michigan refused to meet with President Biden’s campaign manager on Friday over the commander in chief’s backing of Israel in its war against Hamas.
The planned Dearborn, Mich., get-together was part of a Biden campaign “listening tour,” according to the Detroit News, and was expected to involve Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and roughly a dozen Muslim and Arab American elected officials, office holders and community leaders.
When word of the scheduled summit got out, Wayne County deputy executive and meeting coordinator Assad Turfe canceled it, because of community “outrage.”
“Unless something drastic happens, you have lost the Arab American and Muslim community,” Turfe told the outlet of the community’s feelings toward the 81-year-old president. “At this point, from what I can see, there’s no winning them over. That was the idea of the meeting.”
“Until there’s a cease-fire, the overall consensus in the community is they’re not welcome here, essentially,” he added.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud, a Democrat, said he was invited to attend the meeting but has no interest in speaking with Biden campaign officials until Israel’s military operations in Gaza are halted.
“The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers,” Hammoud wrote on X. “Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”
“I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government,” he added.
Biden’s support among Arab Americans has tanked in the aftermath of his support for Israel in its war against Hamas – the terror group that massacred some 1,200 people in the Jewish state and kidnapped about 240 on Oct. 7, 2023.
Only 17.4% of Arab American voters said they would vote for Biden in 2024, according to a John Zogby Strategies poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute last October.
In 2020, the same poll measured Arab American support for Biden at 59%.
The negative feeling could be a massive problem for Biden in Michigan this fall, where Muslim and Arab Americans are a sizable voting bloc in the key battleground state.
Nearly 26,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the war began, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
The Biden campaign did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
