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World Braces for Outcome of Trump-Harris Election
From Palestine to Ukraine to the southern U.S. border, people expressed fears of how a Donald Trump victory could adversely affect them.
Nov 05, 2024
People, governments, and rights groups around the world watched with bated breath as Americans headed to the polls Tuesday to elect a new president in a tight contest whose results are fraught with implications on a wide range of issues, from the climate emergency and migration to support for Ukraine and international trade.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is facing off against former Republican President Donald Trump in a knife-edge race whose outcome may not be known until after Election Day.
In the Middle East, there are fears that a second Trump administration could be even worse for Palestinians, more than 160,000 of whom have been killed, wounded, or left missing by Israel's U.S.-backed assaults on Gaza and the West Bank.
While Harris has promised that she won't change President Joe Biden's "unwavering" support for Israel—which includes approving tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid and diplomatic cover like multiple vetoes of United Nations cease-fire resolutions—Trump has encouraged Israel, which is on trial for alleged genocide at the International Court of Justice, to "finish what they started" and "get it over with fast."
Ammar Joudeh, a resident of the heavily bombed Jabalia refugee camp in obliterated northern Gaza,
toldAl Jazeera Monday: "If Trump wins, disaster has befallen us. Trump's presidency was disastrous for the Palestinian cause. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and normalization with Arab countries increased."
"If Trump wins, we'll be displaced to the Sinai Peninsula [in Egypt]," he added. "Israel has already enacted much of Trump's plan to displace us from northern Gaza. If Trump takes office again, he'll finish the plan."
Wafaa Abdel Rahman, who lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said that "as a Palestinian, the two options are worse than each other. It seems to us as Palestinians like choosing between the devil and Satan."
"If Trump wins, I believe that the war will be resolved in Israel's favor quickly and more violently," she added. "Trump policy is clear and known to us as Palestinians. However, Harris will complete what her successor started and adopt the same position as her party, and thus we will remain in a long-term war without a resolution. In both cases, the result is death for Gaza, but in the second case, it will be a slow and more painful death."
Meanwhile in Israel, recent polling shows Trump—who is so popular with Israel's right that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named a planned community in the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights after him—with over three times the support of Harris.
The big question in Iran is whether the winner of the U.S. election will pursue a path toward diplomacy or potential war. Tehran-based political analyst Diako Hosseini toldAl Jazeera on Tuesday that "pursuing diplomacy with Trump is much harder for Iran due to the assassination" of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, which was ordered by the former Republican president in January 2020.
"However, if a potential Harris administration is willing, Iran would not have any major obstacles for direct bilateral talks," he added. "Nevertheless, Iran is well and realistically aware that regardless of who takes over the White House as president, diplomacy with Washington is now considerably much more difficult than any other time."
Migrants and asylum-seekers have expressed alarm over Trump's plan for even tougher bans, border closures, and mass deportations than occurred during his first term. Trump has vowed to carry out "the largest deportation operation in American history" and reinstate first-term policies targeting asylum-seekers and people from Muslim-majority nations.
Flor Ramirez, a community navigator at the advocacy group Arise Chicago, toldSouth Side Weekly Monday that migrants are once again experiencing the "collective fear" they felt during Trump's first term.
"It was a fear that cut through our family. I had to talk to my bishop, to tell him that if I got deported, if I could please leave him a notarized letter that he would take care of my children, because my biggest fear at that time was that my children... would be separated," she said.
In Asia and Europe, the prospect of crippling tariffs imposed by Trump is stoking fear of negative economic implications, including a weakened euro.
"Tariffs will seriously dampen the [European Union's] economic growth," Zach Meyers, assistant director of the Center for European Reform, toldFortune on Sunday.
Ukrainians and their backers are also bracing for the possibility that a President Trump would end or dramatically cut aid to Ukraine, which is fighting to defend itself against a nearly three-year Russian invasion and the occupation. Harris supports continued aid to Ukraine. Trump says he will prioritize ending the war quickly—an objective he
claims he could achieve "in 24 hours."
Far-right Hungarian President Viktor Orbán and Trump, who are mutual admirers, said Sunday that Europe will have to rethink its support for Ukraine if the Republican wins, as the continent "will not be able to bear the burdens of the war alone." Orbán opposes military aid to Ukraine.
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—who is also a U.S. senator from Ohio—has proposed letting Russia keep the Ukrainian territory it has occupied and establishing a "heavily fortified" demilitarized buffer zone along the war's front line. Ukraine would be forced to accept neutrality under the plan.
Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin—who favored Trump in the 2016 contest against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—Harris' campaign said the proposed "Trump-Vance-Putin plan for Ukraine is a surrender plan."
"Trump won't say he wants Ukraine to win because he's rooting for Vladimir Putin," a Harris campaign spokesperson said in September."
While some Ukrainians say they want Trump to win because they believe he could help end a war of attrition that's claimed at least tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives, others fear the implications of a possible end or precipitous reduction of U.S. aid.
In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, one produce vendor with relatives living under Russian occupation, recently toldCBS News that "for us, it's a matter of survival."
"We are really strong. We will hold on," she said. "We hope America will keep helping us, and not abandon us."
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Trump and Vance Spread Hateful Lies About Migrants to Distract From Their Economic Destruction
The influx of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio is a success story, not a scandal.
Sep 12, 2024
When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.
Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.
Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base—and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.
Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.
It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing—and infrastructure built to support larger populations—can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.
It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”
One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.
Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.
“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”
In fact, it was earlier waves of migration—including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad—that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.
But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.
“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”
So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls—that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.
“According to interviews with a dozen local, county, and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride”—who are about as lovely as they sound.
“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.
Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else—like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Spingfield in the first place—all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.
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'Scandalous': G7 Nations Spend 62 Times More on Military Than Humanitarian Aid
"More must be invested in eradicating poverty and fostering peace and development, not fueling war and destruction," said one campaigner.
Jun 14, 2024
Despite historic levels of forced displacement due to armed conflict, Group of Seven member countries have increased their military expenditures to record highs while they slash spending on humanitarian aid for people affected by wars that these powerful nations often started or stoked, an analysis published Friday revealed.
According to Birmingham, England-based Islamic Relief Worldwide, military spending by G7 members Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—which wrapped up Friday in Puglia, Italy—rose to $1.2 trillion last year, the overwhelming bulk of that amount attributable to the U.S.' $886.3 billion Pentagon budget.
"Too many governments are putting far more resources towards acquiring weapons of war than helping those suffering the deadly impacts of conflict."
That's a 7.3% increase over 2022 levels, and 62 times what those countries spent on all humanitarian aid in response to wars and disasters.
"From Gaza to Sudan, Ukraine to Myanmar, we see millions of lives destroyed by war," Islamic Relief head of global advocacy Shahin Ashraf said in a statement. "The humanitarian needs today are greater than ever before, so it's scandalous that many wealthy G7 nations are cutting aid while spending more than ever before on weapons."
It's not just the G7. According to this year's Stockholm International Peace Research Institute annual analysis, global military spending increased 6.8% to a record $2.4 trillion in 2023.
"Too many governments are putting far more resources towards acquiring weapons of war than helping those suffering the deadly impacts of conflict," Ashraf asserted. "More must be invested in eradicating poverty and fostering peace and development, not fueling war and destruction."
Islamic Relief Worldwide said:
While some of the discussions at the G7 summit focus on restricting immigration into rich developed nations, most people displaced by conflict remain in war-torn countries and impoverished neighbouring countries. After more than a year of brutal war, Sudan is now the world's biggest displacement crisis with over 10 million people—about a quarter of the population—now forced from their homes. The vast majority of people fleeing the violence in Sudan remain in the country, with many receiving aid from local communities, youth groups, and mosques.
"As rich nations increasingly shut their borders and cut aid, in places like Sudan it is heartening to see the generosity of some of the world's poorest communities taking displaced people into their homes and sharing their food and water with them," said Ashraf. "But they need more international support, especially from the wealthiest countries."
Another analysis published ahead of the G7 summit by Oxfam International revealed that just 3% of the seven countries' 2023 military expenditures would be enough to "help end world hunger and solve the debt crisis in the Global South."
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