Will Kamala Harris stop the genocide?

Alameen Templeton

Will Kamala Harris stop the genocide? As a Muslim considering the US presidential elections and the increasingly bumpy ride lining up ahead to November, no other issue is important to me.

The best answer I can come up with as I trawl internet sites is “maybe”.

That’s better than the absolutism of the “no!” that follows a similar question about either Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

Or is it?

Harris is big on the “woke” side of the Democratic ticket. She’s always hugging gay people, she officiated at the first, official gay wedding in the US, she cares about pregnant women’s right to have an abortion.

That will hardly get Muslim voters in America lining up to support her. But, she ticks all the right boxes on the “healy-feely” issues that enliven most Democrat supporters and enrage Trump goons.

But a significant percentage of young Democrats are outraged about Gaza too. That’s also “healy-feely”, sooooo … does that mean Harris is naturally inclined to empathise with issues that appeal to common compassion? Maybe, there’s a chink in the door to her heart that would open wide to the Palestinians’ plight once she enters the Oval Office?

Balanced against that has been Harris’s rock-solid backing of all America’s sabre-rattling since taking up office as vice-president. She’s been drumming up support for more weapons to Ukraine, she’s cracked the whip in drawing wavering Nato members in Europe into line and she’s hovered in nodding assent behind every statement Biden has made during his administration, be it on Gaza or the president’s decline into senility.

Many mainstream news sites say Harris is “tiptoeing” around the Gaza genocide and any issues affecting Israel.

But is that because she harbours hesitancy about the US role in the genocide or because she doesn’t want to scare off younger Democrat voters who have made it clear they wouldn’t be voting Biden because of his unflinching support for the Gaza genocide?

She’s stirred the same brush with Biden; she just doesn’t want to get tarred by it like he has as the top dog in the fight.

Zionists are also asking these questions. The Times of Israel is giving her a soft pass at the moment, running a story on her deep connections to Judaism and Israel as it wrings its hands over the possibilities.

She’s visited Israel three times, the last in 2017. She’s visited the silent “wailing wall” in Al Quds where she clipped a kippah to her husband, Doug Emhoff’s, head and got the pic.

“The senator knew what to expect at a moment of Jewish significance,” ToI gushes this week.

“Over the course of her life and career, she has been surrounded by Jews, from her schoolmates to her colleagues to her closest family members. That background has given Harris, 59, an easy familiarity with Jewish spaces, say those who have interacted with her. She has also encouraged Emhoff to embrace his Jewish identity as the second gentleman; for the first time, mezuzahs have been installed at the vice presidential residence, and Emhoff has taken a leading role in the administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism,” it adds.

Okay, so she’s ticking boxes again, but like us and others wary of the outcomes of Western elections, ToI and other Zionists want to know where her heart really lies.

Does she have the necessary killer instinct?

“But Harris has also stirred concerns among some pro-Israel Jews. She has staked out positions on Israel’s war with Hamas, and the student protests against it, that are to Biden’s left and are sympathetic to some of the war’s strongest critics,” ToI cautions.

It notes “when it comes to Israel, her detractors on the right see her as insufficiently supportive of the military campaign against the Hamas terror group and closer to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which has become increasingly critical of Israel”.

Former US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman told The Jerusalem Post Biden was “miles ahead of Harris in terms of support for Israel”, adding “she is on the fringes of the progressive wing of the party, which sympathises more with the Palestinian cause”.

Lily Greenberg Call was the first Jewish staffer to quit the Biden administration over the genocide. She’s hopeful Harris would scale back Biden’s pro-Israel policy”, the ToI opines.

“She was the first person in the administration to use the word ceasefire,” Greenberg Call said in an interview. “I am hopeful, trying not to be too optimistic, because she does have ties to AIPAC, but she is in a better position to listen to a majority of Democratic voters who want a lasting ceasefire/hostage exchange. I also think she’s serious about fighting authoritarianism at home. She needs to fight it abroad. We can’t be funding it in Israel while trying to fight it here.”

But, her first act as senator in 2017 was to deliver a speech to Aipac “where she said her first act as a senator was introducing a resolution that condemned a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel”.

We’re told “Israeli officials worry that Harris has changed, pointing to her March speech, where she appeared to principally blame Israel for difficulties in delivering humanitarian aid to Gazans”. They fear “she is more susceptible than Biden to pressures from party progressives who are increasingly hostile to Israel”.

She wanted more crossings for aid into Gaza, and end to restrictions on aid and safety for aid personnel and their vehicles.

But that may have been Harris playing “good cop” to Biden’s bad in a bid to keep at least some younger Democrat voters on her side.

For me, Biden’s track record on staying on point for the military-industrial-media complex is the clincher. Before taking office, he roundly condemned Trump for “China-baiting” when he promised to put the lean on Beijing over its trade policies, slammed Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and called out Saudi prince Muhammad bin Salman as a murderer of Jamal Khashoggi.

After taking office, he toed the systemic line like he was glued to it.

He stepped up pressure on Beijing, escalating it from trade to military threats, he’s stayed very far away from the nuclear deal and he’s “kissed the hand” on the Bin Salman protests.

The ultimate decider is not what one thinks about Trump or Biden or Harris. It’s what faith one has in the system that gets them into the Oval Office.

Public promises are only for the voter; the ultimate incumbent will only keep promises for the system and that means more war, more killing and more dashed hopes.