Free Gaza and Free America
These are only competing priorities if you think there's a contradiction between being American and being Muslim
Bored during a really long drive yesterday, I happened on a podcast with a few American Muslim guys looking back on last November’s election. The debate soon pivoted to which Party would be a better vehicle for ending the war on Gaza: Did Zohran Mamdani’s victory suggest the Democratic Party could’ve been a vehicle for a better outcome? Or was America First still better, as one of the guests suggested?
But why were these the only choices on offer, I wanted to interject! Instead of asking questions within the paradigm we’ve been handed…. for God’s sake, and for America’s sake, and for our sake, please let’s make a new one.
It’s hard, yeah. But it’s neither as awful as living within the world the powers-that-be want to give us… and it’s certainly not as hard as we think.1
I didn’t vote for Harris because I still don’t believe there is a way to square that immoral circle. There’s no moral path to overlooking, condoning, or instrumentalizing war crimes. That didn’t and doesn’t mean voting for Republicans, though, who have their own set of enormities. Including that their party has become a cult of personality, a vehicle for secular idolatry—lacking space for substantive disagreement.
As
suggested in his recent piece, on Zohran Mamdani and the Decline of the Pro-Israel Voter, the Democratic Party is in the middle of a kind of existential crisis… or maybe an epic transformation… or maybe both.
That indicates that the paradigms we have on offer, the purported polarization we’re stuck with, is maybe not so sticky after all.
I didn’t vote for Harris or Trump because neither is what America needs or deserves. We should not be complicit in Israel’s eliminationist war. We should also not seek to erode America in some cockamamie simulacrum of patriotism. I love this country. Do you? I write, I record, I teach, because I want to be part of making this country better, for ourselves, for each other, for the wider world and for our future.
Our kids should understand that making America more prosperous, more democratic, and more secure is inseparable from helping our foreign policy reflect our shared values and genuine interests.
As Imam al-Ghazali said, a nation can survive disbelief, but a nation cannot survive injustice, which all of us should do to dwell on. You can’t save Gaza at the price of America and you can’t save America at the price of war crimes. A moral vision is either coherent or it’s corrupt; sure, we will all fail to live up to our values, but we only really and truly fail when we renounce the aspiration to even have values.
We don’t have to agree on how we get there, but I cannot believe that condoning the intentional massacre of civilians is any way to get there—nor is making a mockery of science, undermining democracy, monetizing the White House, removing checks and balances, or going to war with the world while lining the pockets of unpatriotic plutocrats. Yes, we cannot run the world (and even if we could, we should not).
But by definition, if we cannot run the world, we cannot live without the world. Just as we have basic moral obligations to our fellow Americans, we have basic moral obligations to the wider world. God smiles upon people who seek to do good, who show mercy, and who want to lift up and empower, not belittle and punish, and without God’s mercy, who would we be?
And what would become of us?
On the occasion of our Independence Day, let us sit with these self-evident truths.
When I told people I wouldn’t vote for Harris or for Trump, I was often told that we had to pick one. But in Mamdani’s candidacy, in America’s changing demographics, I see proof that we don’t have to live in other people’s binaries. We can stand for America without spurning the world, or facts, or democracy, or morality.
The two aren’t tensions. They’re not incompatible or impossible. What’s impossible is the absurdities on offer on either elite side of the spectrum, the idea that you can put America First by going to war with our institutions, empowering everyday Americans by bankrupting America now and in the future… or that you can stop Trump and authoritarianism by supporting war crimes and authoritarianism.
How did that make any sense to anyone?
Tomorrow is ‘Ashura, marking the day Sayyidna Husayn, may God be pleased with him, stood up to injustice. I think it’s fitting the occasion begins at sundown, before the fireworks take over night skies across America. As Americans, we have a lot to cheer. We also have a lot to build, repair, or rethink. We shouldn’t agree on every step. But we should agree on the need to move forward.
We must be clear what we oppose. And if we cannot find enough to support on either side, that hardly absolves us of what patriotism means and demands. On last week’s Avenue M podcast,
said that writers write the books they need to read. And I loved that. Americans have to build the country they want. If neither set of elites offers us that vision, well, let’s set to work on building it ourselves.
It will not be easy. We may very well fail. We also have evidence that we can succeed. More than that, though, it doesn’t matter. This is the right thing to do, the patriotic thing to do, the moral thing to do.
And that should be more than enough.
Happy 4th, everyone. May God bless America and help us to preserve our nation, its prosperity, and its values, in ways that are true to our history and that live up to our highest ideals. May we see past the false binaries. May we do more. May we find ways to build new ways of being, which refuse the old choices, the ones that led us down so many dead-ends. May we be open, courageous, and determined.
The AP high school halaqa’s been on hiatus this summer. The boys’ middle school halaqa resumes in early August.
We will have a lot to talk about.
One of the podcasts I’d listened to earlier on the drive was
’s shockingly nuanced and subtly and superbly critical interview of Peter Thiel, which effectively ended with Douthat wondering aloud if Thiel might not be incubating the Anti-Christ he’s so afraid of. You can find the podcast here.What’s perhaps most intriguing of all is the conclusion, with Thiel unable to understand the point Douthat was making… either because it is not in his interest to do so (what a drug power and privilege can be!)… or because Thiel is not capable of that level of reflexivity and nuance.
Mr. Douthat, you’ve earned yourself a subscriber.
‘’I didn’t vote for Harris or Trump because neither is what America needs or deserves.’’ And because you didn’t, we have what we have today. Do you think people in Gaza would be worse off today under Harris, or better? — if we just stick to the one criterion uppermost in your mind. Having thyroid cancer is bad, but there’s a huge and very real difference between that and a metastasized cancer that is everywhere.