Democratic Party strategist and Uncommitted Movement leader Walid Shaheed (center), with two persons holding placards saying "Vote Uncommitted" in the background. Photo composition: Ali al-Hadi Schmeiss/Al-Mayadeen English.
By Julia Kassem – Aug 24, 2024
Employing faux-radical theatrics and performative tactics, the Uncommitted Campaign sprung up prior to last November’s presidential primaries. According to the movement, their core demand and core movement strategy is to pressure the Democratic party candidate to a ceasefire by selecting “uncommitted” on their primary ballot. As the movement’s platform has said, “If we can demonstrate our political power and discontent through thousands of ‘Uncommitted’ votes in the Michigan Democratic primaries, then Biden would feel more at risk of losing Michigan in the general election, prompting a potential reassessment of his financing and backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
The Uncommitted movement, exposed as a counterinsurgent Democrat strategy, first emerged in Michigan, home to the largest Arab and Muslim community in America, before branching out into other cities and nine other states, mainly with a focus on those with high Muslim and Arab populations, like Wisconsin or Illinois. Paid for by the Listen to Michigan fund/Listen to Us PAC in Michigan, the Movement Voter Project ($430,000) and Arab Americans for Progress ($205,928) are its two top donors in Michigan.
Arab Americans for Progress is linked to Rashida Tlaib, Democratic Party member, sister of one of the co-chairs of Uncommitted and treasurer of the Listen to Us PAC, Leila Elabed. Arab Americans for Progress made multiple contributions to Listen to Michigan, but there isn’t much information otherwise on its own funding sources, which are undisclosed. Other states also have their own deep webs of funding consolidated by their respective electoral PACs. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the Uncommitted Campaign is funded by the DSA, a Democratic Party arm. In Maryland, it’s paid for by Listen to Maryland/Unity Lab PAC, launched in early 2024 prior to the primaries, backing Democrats despite its listing of nearly $15,000 “against Democrats” (their donors and PAC platform clearly support and operate within the Democratic party). In Oregon, it is supported by the Progressives for Democracy in America, a PAC close to Democrat former lawmaker Peter Defazio. In Washington, it is supported by the American Muslim Advancement Council (filed with the FEC in March 2024, around the time of the primary vote, without much clear info on the breakdown of its donors). In New Mexico, the Escucha a Nuevo Mexico PAC filed in May 2024, just before the primaries, also with little information on funders and donors.
Michigan Movement Voter Project is a mega organization whose explicit goal is “a blue wave from the bottom up”—so basically an astroturfed movement stating from the top its ultimate goal of driving support for the Democratic party. Listen to Michigan is already doing membership drives in an event as part of the upcoming Michigan Democratic Party Convention in Lansing where their first agenda item is to sign up potential voters, absorb them into the Democratic machine, and encourage people to forego putting material, tactical pressure to end the genocide and instead “collectively support pro-peace candidates”—as if the Democratic Party doesn’t have more of a track record of co-optation rather than reform.
The lead staffers of the MVP, many firmly established within a wide array of Democratic Party issue campaigns and PACs, also contributed to funding Listen to Michigan, not only from the organization itself, but from the smaller donors its staff was involved with that gave support to the Obama and Biden campaigns. One particularly large $75,000 dollar donation came from Rabbi Becky Silverstein, a transgender rabbi heading an LGBTQ+ Jewish organization. A good number of donors are richer, older liberal Jews, some from the IfNotNow movement while others head their own foundations.
Harris gave bloodthirsty affirmations that the US “will have the strongest and most lethal army” and “give Israel what it needs to defend itself… against the brutal terrorist organization Hamas, which committed massacres and mass rapes on October 7.” Yet despite this, Uncommitted Movement leaders openly endorsed Harris, whose Zionist and equally genocidal track record and policies are clear and have been throughout her career. The commitment of this movement is to “save the Democratic Party” and back it at all costs, rather than bring justice to the millions murdered in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the Donbass which that same party is responsible for slaughtering. Put simply, it is part and parcel of a counterinsurgent, fascistic containment strategy.
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Working alongside Soros-funded JVP Action, and within the Democratic party’s proverbially pro-Palestinian-branded members, it created a virtual space meant to contain the grievances of Arab Americans while continuing to benefit from their demographic as a key and easy voting base, while adopting, alongside other big-donor funded Jewish “pro-Palestinian” organizations such as JVP and IfNotNow, the language of “both sides” and that Israelis are also “victims of violence.” Toeing the line with their liberal Zionist supporters and funders, a leading Uncommitted co-chair on an IfNotNow livestream lamented the “cycle of violence that led to the abhorrent killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas.” Such a false narrative about Al-Aqsa Flood, a military operation that only targeted soldiers, as Zionist entity tanks and helicopters rashly killed their own settlers, serves to manufacture consent for the genocide against Palestinians and justify the occupation.
In terms of both rhetoric and aims, the Uncommitted Campaign is a perfect marriage of liberal Zionism and an astroturfed pro-Palestinian movement, just like Walid Shaheed’s own marriage to IfNotNow co-founder Emily Mayer.
On August 21 evening, Democratic Party delegates who were representatives of the Uncommitted Movement staged a sit-in to demand Palestinian-American Senator Ruwa Romman speak. In both Romman’s statements to Democracy Now and the movement’s public platforms, “strong support” for the “Israeli hostage’s families speaking from stage” was reiterated. She later released the speech she was going to give, a two-month effort in pandering to and self-censoring by the Democratic establishment, that ended with a commitment to “electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump.”
In this theatric, they accomplished three PR points for the Democratic party—moving the rhetorical goalpost away from demanding an end to the genocide, bolstering public support for electoralism by focusing their energy on the Uncommitted Movement, which ultimately backs Harris, instead of the growing scores of Americans and Arab-Americans alike swearing off either corporate party, and inseminating the pro-Palestinian rhetorical sphere with normalization rhetoric.
Walid Shahid and the Democratic establishment are waging a media spectacle to shift attention away from grassroots demands and pressure to end the genocide toward a baseline symbolic demand to speak (that would, in either way, preserve the Democrat’s image). On the verge of elections months from now, the Democratic Party will then facilitate the pressure on “Israel” to end the current bout of genocide, which then can be claimed as a theatric “win.”
This latest PR move is trying to move and re-engineer Arab youth and their allies. The last 10 months have shown a progression of courage and conscientiousness for the leftist pro-Palestine movement in the US as a whole, as demonstrated by open solidarity and support shown to the Palestinian Resistance and the Axis, the student encampments, and direct material action blocking boats, weapons factories, and airports producing and transporting instruments of genocide. The Resistance has treated the US pro-Palestinian movement with far more respect, issuing statements of support on Telegram channels and in speeches, with Sayyed Khamenei declaring the student encampments another arm of the Axis of Resistance. Contrast this with the utter disrespect, disgusting behavior, and silencing (one of the hundreds of examples—Harris shushing up speech disruptors with an “I’m speaking”) faced by pro-Palestinians if Harris is challenged just a bit.
Just last week, an assembly of groups including BDS Boston shut down an Elbit Systems center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after months of confrontational action and demonstrations against the Israeli weapons facility. Successfully able to overwhelm police and prevent cops from de-escalating and breaking up the demonstrations, these protesters demonstrated that there are options far beyond the electoralism containment that the Arab American petty bourgeoise keeps inclining toward. Ironically, these more militant forms of action—in contrast to the astroturfed electoral charades—are informed by the very Resistance that liberals in America either choose to ignore or demonize.
Perhaps it is God’s blessing that the DNC shut the door on allowing the Palestinian-American speaker to take the podium. This was the last message to Arabs still mentally bound to playing into a socially prescribed partisan role that they are every bit as disposable to the American elite as the hundreds of thousands of innocents slaughtered in Gaza.
This moment exposed the contradictions between the Democratic Party and the base it panders to and the utter humiliation and servitude of this base’s blind loyalty. The liberal establishment does not want to see Arabs and their allies, neither in the occupied Middle East nor on American streets, take charge to disrupt, conscientize, and interrupt the flow of genocidal capital, but rather wants to continue to see them perpetually begging, eagerly jumping for the intermittent scraps thrown their way.
In her most recent interview for RT, the wife of the late President Raisi, Dr. Jamileh Alamolhoda, admitted that there was no shortage of empathy for the people of Gaza, but rather a lack of courage to make sacrifices. The Uncommitted Campaign was designed by and for Arab millennial petit-bourgeois that cling to the illusion of comforts brought by careerism and social capital, where nothing in the way of material, worldly gains (the heavy price being only principles and dignity) is lost or sacrificed, but a career, a platform, and possibly an opportunity to be the next Democratic party token candidate to sign off on an intersectional-imperialist agenda is won.
