Don’t let Trump gaslight you on his Middle East policy

This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 31 episode of “The ReidOut.”

Election Day is almost here and Donald Trump is trying to gaslight the public with his disingenuous outreach to Arab and Muslim voters. But if anyone thinks that a second Trump administration would be good for Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Rudy Giuliani put that idea to rest during an ugly speech at the former president’s rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend.

“The Palestinians are taught to kill us at 2 years old,” the former New York City mayor told the crowd. “I’m sorry, I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at 2.”

Meanwhile, Trump has made it clear how he feels about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and how he’s handling a war that has killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

In June during the first presidential debate, Trump said President Joe Biden should let Israel “finish the job.” And recently, he claimed the president is “trying to hold” Netanyahu back.

But don’t just take Trump’s word for it: There’s also his terrible record on the Palestinians when he was president.

That record includes:

• Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem — bucking decades of precedent and international law saying East Jerusalem should be part of a Palestinian state.
• Cutting Palestinians out of negotiations over the Abraham Accords, his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s pet project.
• Abandoning the decades-old position that West Bank settlements are a barrier to a peace agreement.
• Eliminating restrictions on spending U.S. taxpayer dollars in those illegal settlements.
• Closing the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, and;
• Recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in Syria.

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Along with official Trump policy, it’s also worth mentioning that Kushner praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property.” Kushner also suggested Israel should remove any civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.

And while there have been some Muslim groups and leaders coming out in support of Trump, people are waking up to the fact that as much as they may dislike the Biden administration’s apparent unquestioning support for and arming of Israel — and the president’s seeming indifference to tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties — Trump would be far worse.

In September, Emgage Action, one of the nation’s largest Muslim American voter mobilization groups, endorsed Harris to prevent, in its words, “a return to Islamophobic and other harmful policies under a Trump administration.” Just a few weeks later, a group of Muslim faith leaders also endorsed Harris, and in Dearborn, Michigan — which has the highest Muslim population per capita in the country — several prominent Arab Americans gathered to endorse the vice president last weekend.

The Uncommitted Movement, created when Biden was the Democratic nominee, has stopped short of endorsing Harris, but it did come out strongly and clearly stating that a Trump administration would make the situation in Gaza even worse.

In a new op-ed in The Guardian, Muslim American writer Wajahat Ali argues that there’s no moral argument for allowing Trump to win in the name of opposing genocide. “There’s too much at stake,” he wrote. “And far too many communities, both in the United States and abroad, that will suffer if Trump is re-elected.”