When the Democratic Party meets to endorse Joe Biden as its candidate for president next week, it will also adopt an official platform. But a small coalition of delegates is opposing the proposed platform because it doesn’t call for an end to military aid to Israel and sanctions against Iran. The group of about 100, called the Muslim Delegates and Allies Coalition, is also calling for an end to qualified immunity, no-fly lists, the Patriot Act and other measures. It is one of multiple groups making similar foreign policy demands of the party. Another, led by California delegates, gathered 223 signatures for its petition to end military aid to Israel.
The party’s proposed platform rejects “the targeting of Muslim, Arab, and other racial and ethnic communities based on their faith and backgrounds at home and abroad.” That’s a plank we wholeheartedly support.
But the dissenting delegates want the party to go further. They interpret America’s alliance with Israel and sanctions against Iran as motivated by racial and religious bigotry. The group says they are focused on moving the party “away from establishment foreign policy and racist national security measures.”
With President Donald Trump trailing in polls, there is, no doubt, an impulse within the Democratic Party to press an advantage. And here we’d offer caution.
On Israel, as the proposed platform reads, “a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States.” We agree.
And the fact is that Iran is an enemy of religious freedom and an incubator of terrorism with aspirations to develop nuclear weapons, something that would threaten not only American lives but the lives of millions of peace-loving people around the world, Muslim and otherwise.
These delegates are confusing correlation with causation. America has sanctioned Iran. Iran is a Muslim-majority country. Those two truths do not add up to the falsehood that America has sanctioned Iran because it is a Muslim-majority nation. We admit that this distinction is harder to draw in the age of Trump. But that doesn’t mean that every sanction against every Muslim-majority nation is driven by prejudice.
One of the delegates, a suburban Dallas realtor named Emad Salem who is also on the executive committee of the Texas Democratic Party, told us he supports the coalition’s foreign policy agenda because sanctions against Iran are more likely to hurt everyday Iranian citizens than Iranian leadership. When we asked if that could lead to pressure for reform from the citizenry, he correctly pointed out that the Iranian government won’t heed the will of its people. And there’s the sticky wicket when it comes to undemocratic global powers. The way to deal with a dangerous regime is not to appease it at the expense of global security on behalf of the very people it oppresses. It’s to limit it with as many disincentives to continue its pogrom as possible.
We hope this small group of delegates will lose the debate and the platform will be adopted without calls to dramatically change America’s longstanding doctrine of promoting peace and democracy around the globe.
— Dallas Morning News
