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Days before the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago, a university professor innocuously tweeted her excitement about the upcoming protests against the Gaza war outside the United Center, triggering a firestorm.
“Oh Kamala is NOT ready for Chicago. But don’t worry; we’re ready for her,” Eman Abdelhadi, an activist and professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, wrote.
Just minutes later, Kamala Harris supporters replied that they had reported her to the Feds.
“The @SecretService & @FBI have just entered the chat because this seems like a real threat against the Vice President of the United States,” wrote one.
“I reported it/her and flagged the FBI Secret Service and FBI Chicago field office don’t play with K-Hive,” wrote another in response, referencing the nickname Harris’s online supporters go by.
Abdelhadi, who is Palestinian, was shocked that her seemingly inoffensive tweet was being depicted as a violent threat.
“I think it’s very clear that if I weren’t Muslim, if I weren’t Palestinian, if I weren’t Arab, that none of this would have happened,” she told The Independent.
She also saw the jump to suspicion as a painful reminder of the way Muslim Americans have been treated by Americans for decades, especially after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
“I don’t think it’s an accident that they called the FBI. It was like ‘this is who’s supposed to deal with you people when you get rowdy,’” she added.
Nine days later, Abdelhadi got a phone call from the Chicago FBI office. The words “US Government” flashed up on caller ID. She was too afraid to answer.
“Good morning, I’m looking to speak with Professor Abdelhadi,” the man who identified himself as an FBI agent said on the voicemail. “Your name came across my desk and I had a couple of questions for you.”
Abdelhadi said listening to it transported her back to the aftermath of 9/11, when massive FBI surveillance programs targeted Muslim communities like hers across the country. Authorities raided her mother’s workplace and people in her community went to jail.
“I cried,” she said. “I was triggered, and I was surprised by that.”
“It just brought up so much for me, because the FBI was a regular presence in my community,” she said.” And even when they weren’t physically there, the threat and the knowledge that they were surveilling us was very real, it affected everything.”
Abdelhadi quickly found a lawyer and they called the FBI agent back. Her lawyer instructed her to remain quiet while he answered the questions for her. The agent asked if Abdelhadi planned to commit “any acts of violence,” and if she had “a history of drug abuse or access to a weapon,” to which her lawyer answered no.
The FBI did not respond to a request from The Independent for comment.
Abdelhadi saw her experience of pro-Harris supporters seeing her as a threat as emblematic of how Gaza protesters have been treated by the Democratic Party since the war began last year.
“It just speaks to the cruelty and callousness that the Democrats are treating this with,” she said. “What was really shocking about this, and what’s been shocking about the DNC, is seeing that same callousness and cruelty filter down even to the Democratic base.”
Some 69 per cent of Democrats disapprove of Israel’s war in Gaza, according to a Gallup poll published in July. But President Joe Biden has refused calls from within his own party to withhold weapons sales to Israel to pressure it to agree to a ceasefire, even as the death toll from the conflict has reached 40,000 and famine has spread across the territory.
When Biden announced that he would abandon his re-election campaign, the movement had expressed hope that Harris might usher in a shift in policy. Abdelhadi and others who protested at the DNC were trying to shift Harris on policy, but the convention has largely shunned those efforts.
Until Harris changes US policy and at least considers the prospect of limiting arms to Israel, Abdelhadi said she could not vote for her.
“I’ve made it very clear publicly, and I think many like me have made it clear, that we need for our votes to be earned,” Abdelhadi said. “I don’t want to see Trump win, but she hasn’t earned it.”
Roughly three dozen “uncommitted” delegates — who were sent to the DNC by voters in Democratic primaries in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza — had asked the Harris campaign to allow a Palestinian American to speak on stage during this week’s convention. That request was denied on Wednesday.
To add insult to injury, a viral video showed Democrats leaving the convention hall on Wednesday, passing by a group of protesters who were reading the names of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. Some of them covered their ears as they went by, others mocked the protesters.
“It’s a reminder of something that as a Muslim and Arab I’ve always known,” Abdelhadi said, “which is that my life doesn’t really matter to most of my countrymen, that I’m deeply disposable, and so is my community.”
