Why Did Kamala Harris Meet in Secret with the Mayor of Dearborn?

excalibur · Aug 20, 2024

More anti-Israel stuff, from Harris. The Dearborn Mayor is a known hater of Israel.

And people are going to vote for this hate.

For a few months now, I’ve argued, tongue-in-cheek, that the Biden administration’s policy and rhetoric regarding Israel, the Palestinians, and Hamas were guided by the GWD principle. “Gotta Win Dearborn.”
Apparently, it’s no longer quite so tongue-in-cheek.

During a campaign trip to Michigan earlier this month, Harris met with Abdullah Hammoud, the 34-year-old mayor of Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that has the largest number of Arab Americans of any city in the United States. The meeting was disclosed by a person who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person familiar with the meeting did not provide specific details but said the focus was on Harris’ potential policy, if elected, on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Hammoud declined to comment.

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First, it’s pretty odd for a presidential candidate to want to keep a meeting with a local Democratic mayor secret. Second, Harris has met with Palestinian-rights supporters and left them with, apparently, a misleading sense of her actual policy stances.

Layla Elabed, the co-chair of the Uncommitted National Movement, a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel group, met with Harris in Michigan shortly before the vice president went on stage for a rally and described the meeting this way:

You know, when I mentioned that our community members are losing tens of hundreds of their family members, she said, “It’s horrific.” And when I said, “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?” she said, “Yes, we’ll meet with you.”

Whether or not Harris intended to leave Elabed with the impression that she open to an arms embargo, she did so. Harris’s national-security adviser later went on Twitter and stated she “will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”

Just what are Harris’s views on this? How do we know she isn’t saying one thing in closed-door meetings with activists, and a completely different thing in her speeches?

And if Harris opposes an arms embargo on Israel, why do people walk away from conversations with her convinced she’s open to one?