by UMAR A FAROOQ
Hassan Abdel Salam’s protest organising in West Bank led to imprisonment. Now he’s leading push against Harris in US presidential elections
Hassan Abdel Salam is a newcomer to grassroots American politics.
With a PhD in sociology and a career focused on exploring human rights within the realm of Islamic law, Salam was living the life of a typical Muslim scholar in American academia before the 2024 US presidential election cycle.
The fity-six-year-old Egyptian American was teaching at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and was a welcomed presence among students who described him as one of the “nicest and kind-hearted people I have ever been taught by”.
But with outrage over US support for the war on Gaza creating a huge rift between Muslim voters and the Democratic Party, Abdel Salam has found himself at the helm of a political campaign that could potentially cost Vice President Kamala Harris the presidency, because she has not agreed to an unconditional ceasefire to Israel’s war on Gaza or an arms embargo.
As one of the co-founders of the Abandon Harris campaign, which recently endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president, Abdel Salam has spent the last several months travelling from state to state trying to convince Muslim voters and other Americans enraged with the war on Gaza to both protest against the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel and chart a new political path outside of the two-party structure.
“We need to begin to look like independents that can swing either way, so that both parties bid for our approval, such that we begin the process of making the two parties move towards Muslim Americans,” he told MEE.
Salam never saw himself as an activist at the forefront of a pivotal moment in a US election, but his stint in Israeli detention thrust him into a struggle to stop American military support to Israel.
Israel’s Moscobiyeh prison
In 2022, Salam’s research on the strategies Palestinian youth activists were utilising to peacefully protest against the Israeli occupation of Palestine brought him to Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
He began working with activists, organising a peaceful protest inspired by the 2018 Great March of Return protests in Gaza and the 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Egypt which spurred President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation.
As soon as he stepped foot in Jerusalem and attempted to enter the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Abdel Salam said he witnessed firsthand the reality of the Israeli occupation and how it had affected the morale of Palestinians living there.
In the neighbourhood of Silwan, he saw Israeli forces demolish a Palestinian home as residents on the streets watched helplessly. He spoke to young Palestinians whose fathers were in Israeli prisons, and who say they had seen Israeli forces beat their mothers at military checkpoints.
“They’re often feeling a lot of contradictory emotions because they see the disaster all around them, and they want to do something, but they’re constantly being made impotent because they’re met by detention, attack, the possibility of injury,” Abdel Salam told MEE.
“Their homes are being demolished, which I saw with my own two eyes.”
The plan was to launch a protest at a single site in the Palestinian territories where Palestinians and peace activists could gather to call for the “liberation of Palestine”, as international media covered the demonstrations for a global audience.
That plan, however, soon fell apart. On 1 December 2022, Abdel Salam’s research assistant was arrested while travelling into the occupied West Bank from Jordan.
That day, when Abdel Salam went to Al-Aqsa to pray, he said he was immediately handcuffed, stripped of his clothes and taken into detention.
“There was one guy who really hated me. I’d seen him many times before. As I was approaching the gate around a little bit after 6pm, he really excitedly came at me while tripping over himself – sort of thrilled now – and he started scrolling down his phone,” Abdel Salam said.
“I could see there was a photo of me on it, and the intelligence or the government of Israel was calling for the capture of me and my research assistant. I hadn’t known by then that my research assistant was already captured.”
The American professor was detained and sent to Moscobiyeh prison in West Jerusalem, which according to the prisoners’ rights organisation, Addameer, is known for torturing detainees.
“They blindfolded me in a claustrophobic experience and guided me as I humbly tiptoed to my dungeon cell – a poorly lit, windowless cell where I spent 23 days behind two metallic doors.”
“My company was this toilet hole, which was disgusting, and I engaged in 12 days of hunger strike.”
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