WASHINGTON — A new national organization called the Black Muslim Leadership Council is hoping to pressure elected officials, including President Joe Biden, to call for a permanent cease-fire in the Middle East. Details of the group were shared first with NBC News.
But the organization is also making clear that many of its members are focused on U.S. domestic challenges and do not support abandoning the president at a time when a movement by another group of Muslims is pushing to do just that.
Salima Suswell, founder and chief executive of the Black Muslim Leadership Council, said the group will be focused both on the thousands of civilians killed in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas, and on domestic issues such as mobilizing voters in swing states and pushing lawmakers to lay out policies to improve the lives of Black Muslims living across the United States.
Biden is facing a backlash for his refusal to demand a permanent cease-fire in the war, and other Muslim groups are seeking to grow an effort they have dubbed “abandon Biden,” which calls for people not to support the president at the ballot box in uncompetitive primaries and potentially in the fall election.
“I am focused on building and definitely not abandoning,” Suswell said. “I believe that we need to continue to have open dialogue and conversations because this is how democracy works. And so, my duty first is to my community, and it is my job to fight for my community to ensure that the government is working for us. And so Biden, along with every other political leader at home and globally, needs to hear what we need as a community right now.”
She added, “While we’re heartbroken about the humanitarian crisis overseas, we want to be open and available to discussions to achieve the goal of freedom and justice not only for Palestinian people, but also for our communities domestically.”
Suswell, who also runs her own government affairs and community engagement consulting firm and worked for the Biden campaign in 2020 as a political adviser, stressed she is not ready to publicly say how she plans to vote in November. “At the present, I have not abandoned Biden,” she said. “But I am uncommitted.”
Suswell said the Black Muslim Leadership Council will focus much of its efforts on turning out voters in three swing states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. It will have both a political action wing that will be endorsing political candidates, as well as a nonprofit arm for nonpartisan activities such as voter turnout drives and election education classes. The group will also be open to backing a third-party presidential candidate or endorsing only down-ballot candidates and staying silent about the presidential election options.
Suswell said she and others hope the group’s formation will lead Biden and other political leaders to engage more with Black Muslim voters and hear about their concerns over issues such as affordable housing, disparities in black maternal health, economic opportunities and education policies for young people.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general and a vocal supporter of Biden’s, said in an interview that he has been meeting with members of the Black Muslim Leadership Council as they map out a way forward and that he supports their work.
“We don’t have the luxury of just caring about one thing. We have to care about a lot of things, and those things have got to be weighed out carefully,” said Ellison, the first African American and the first Muslim American elected to statewide office in Minnesota. “I feel like there are people who want to restore Jim Crow and that their representative is Donald Trump. And so for me, just saying ‘abandon Biden’ doesn’t work.”
Ellison said that many Black Muslims living around the U.S. have to contend with an array of challenges facing Black people as a whole including mass incarceration, unsafe communities, unfair policing and racial discrimination in society.
“This group is well-positioned to help reflect the interests of the larger civil rights community, and I’m talking about African Americans and other people of color,” Ellison said. “The larger Muslim community is decidedly prioritizing what’s happening in the Middle East. And the African American Muslim community can say, ‘Yes, that needs to be prioritized, but not exclusively.’”
Meanwhile, some members of the Black Muslim Leadership Council say Biden needs to take responsibility for the pushback he’s receiving from the “abandon Biden” campaign and better address the trauma motivating its supporters.
Mika’il Stewart-Saadiq, assistant imam of the Muslim Center Detroit and a member of the Black Muslim Leadership Council, said while he too doesn’t agree with the “abandon Biden” movement, the Biden administration needs to understand the impact it could have on imperiling his re-election bid.
“We can’t lay all the blame at these people’s feet,” Stewart-Saadiq said of supporters of the “abandon Biden” campaign. “The administration has to absorb some of that blame. They have to take ownership of this almost self-destructive movement because people are willing to say, ‘Hey, I’d rather punish Joe Biden and allow a path to victory for Donald Trump.’ That’s very emotional. That’s a very hurt sentiment that someone is willing to, as they say, risk it all.”
Like Suswell, Stewart-Saadiq said he is currently uncommitted to supporting any presidential candidate but plans to vote in November. “There’s a stark difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” he said. “Someone’s going to do this job. And right now, the Republicans are running away, kowtowing and acquiescing to the Trump MAGA beast. So this is why, in my opinion, this is a really dangerous time we’re in.”
Suswell said she has been working on forming the Black Muslim Leadership Council since 2020 and hopes to address the political and cultural challenges going into November’s election. The group plans to hold a press conference announcing its formation in early March and then launch its voter education and mobilization efforts soon after.
Idris Abdul-Zahir, head imam of the Masjidullah mosque in Philadelphia, plans to serve as board chair of the Black Muslim Leadership Council’s nonprofit arm. In that role, he will be working on the group’s nonpartisan efforts.
“We not only want to just get people registered and educated but also people actually out to the polls, making sure they’re actually voting and instilling that sense of duty in our people,” he said. “The Black Muslim voice, for several reasons, has kind of been drowned out over the years. And we want to, while respecting other backgrounds and other people, make sure that our folks, Black folks, Black Muslims, and Muslims in general as well, that our voice is a critical voice at that table.”
Yamiche Alcindor
Yamiche Alcindor is an NBC News Washington correspondent.
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