 I'd also like to thank Amherst Media for hosting our event tonight. My name is Mehlaqa Somdani. I am Director of Critical Connections, an organization here in Massachusetts that builds community and awareness around issues affecting American Muslims and Muslims around the world. So on behalf of Critical Connections, I'd like to welcome you all to tonight's Town Hall with Mr. Farooq Mita. Farooq is the Biden campaign's Senior Advisor for Muslim Engagement, and we are so grateful that he took time out to be with us tonight. And we really hope that this will be an opportunity for Muslim community members and also our allies who are joining us to really engage with Farooq on domestic and foreign policy issues that directly impact our communities. We also hope to talk about the importance of the Muslim vote in the upcoming election, given that we are currently in an unprecedented health crisis, record unemployment, ongoing structural and systemic racism, Islamophobia, and of course, rising white supremacist violence. So we should note here that we are a non-profit organization, and when we invited Farooq, we also had reached out to the Trump campaign and invited them to join the discussion and share the views about American Muslims and the Trump campaign's agenda and vision for American Muslims, but very surprisingly, we did not hear back from them. Perhaps if we had heard back from them, I would have felt very much like Chris Wallace tonight. But anyway, before we turn to Farooq, I would like to introduce my dear friend and colleague Tahira Amadal Wadood. Many of you know her. She's a nationally renowned activist. She's an attorney. She is a former congressional candidate from Massachusetts First District. So Tahira, I'm going to turn this over to you because Tahira is going to be our co-modulator for the event today. And I'm going to turn it over to you so you can describe the structure of the program, our format tonight. But I really first want to ask you a question that's been on everybody's mind since last evening. And that is what do you think about the use of the word inshallah by Vice President Biden during last night's debate? You know, there's been so much excitement and controversy surrounding the use of that term by him. Some people have dubbed it as a historic moment where a presidential candidate has actually used that word that we Muslims use all the time. Others have found it, you know, somewhat offensive or that it was an incorrect use of the term. Of course, we're going to ask Farooq that same questions, but I'd love to hear your perspective on that first. Well, greetings to everyone. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. It is a pleasure to be in community with everyone today. Thank you to my co-moderator and executive director of Critical Connections, Mehlaka, for putting this program together. So let's talk about the important thing for a minute. We're going to talk about the use of the term inshallah. And so for our viewers who don't know, it's an Arabic expression that means odd-willing or if odd-wills. It is a special term for Muslims. Usually you invoke it when you're making plans and you wish to have the blessing of God guide what your plan is. And so you would say, I will see you for lunch tomorrow inshallah, meaning if God wills. So last night, during the presidential debate, Vice President Biden used the expression as a way to challenge President Trump on whether or not he was going to get the tax returns. And Vice President Biden said, when am I going to see them? Are you going to give it to us inshallah? And Muslim Twitter and Muslim WhatsApp went wild. Some people were amused. Some people were impressed. Other people wondered if that was the correct way to use it, whether it was respectful to Muslims. Either way, that's a conversation that we can have today and we can have it into the future. But the most important thing that we're thinking about this evening is whether this presidential candidate, Vice President Biden, has created a substantive, meaningful platform for Muslims to give, to share, and to be able to benefit from the power and influence of the seat in which he seeks. And so tonight gives us the opportunity to test the waters on that. So I turn it back over to my co-moderator and let us begin. Great. Thank you so much, Sahara. And I'd also like to say to everybody who's watching, who's everybody who's joining us, either through Zoom or through Facebook, you know, as we actually have a list of questions for Farooq and we're going to ask them, but we really want this to be as interactive a session as possible. And we would love for you to, as we're asking questions, if you have follow-up questions around those related questions, those themes that we'll be touching on, please submit your questions through the chat over here. Tahira is going to be monitoring the chat and we'll be going back and forth between our questions and your questions. So please let's just make this as interactive as possible. So now, without further ado, I'm going to turn to Farooq. Farooq, again, welcome and thank you so much for being here. We'd love to, you know, hear about what is your influence on the violent campaign? Like, you know, is this creeping Sharia? What does this all mean? And so we'd love to hear about that, but also by way of introduction, it would be lovely if you could sort of talk a little bit about your own background and, you know, what actually makes you particularly suitable for this position that you're in as the liaison with the Muslim community. Yeah, no, great. Thank you so much for hosting this and everyone who's joining. It's great to be here tonight. We've got 30, I don't know, 34, 35 some days till the election. So it's going to be pretty crazy between now and then. And every day and night is literally doing events and encouraging people to vote. Just a little bit about myself. And I see some familiar faces and names. But I'm originally from Florida. I have been working in Muslim political engagement and empowerment probably since I was in college, which now was like 2000, 2000, 2001. So it's been a while. I remember when I was in at the University of South Florida in Tampa, close to where I grew up, I was basically just like a lot of other Muslim students pre-med, you know, like on the track to become a doctor. And 9-11 happened. And I started seeing what was happening in our country at that time. And we all know that Muslims at that time and Arab Americans specifically had a lot of issues with civil rights. And I noticed that we really didn't have a lot of participation or really a say in any of the political spheres from like the local level all the way to the national level. And there was things that were being said about us in our communities that we weren't even in the room to be part of the conversation. And I started thinking, you know, maybe there's something different that I could do with my career trajectory. And then I decided a little bit after that to go to law school. I started volunteering on campaigns. And then I started thinking that we don't really have institution or an organization that is actually doing this work just like other communities have. And that led me to meet, you know, I was kind of alone. What's interesting about growing up in that time was we didn't have any role models or any mentors of how to like make it in politics. People that grew up at my time in university, we just had to do it on our own. So I had this grand idea of how do we create more political institutions in the Muslim community. But I literally, it had nobody else to work with. And I ended up getting connected to a few other people who formed what today is called M gauge. And I'm one of the co founders of that organization. And I finished my law degree. I went to go live in the Middle East. I did a full bright fellowship in Amman Jordan. I came back went to start my own law practice. But in 2011 got appointed by President Obama to service in his administration. So I moved from Florida to DC. And I, you know, just in terms of my qualifications for this position, I've been involved in Muslim political empowerment and organizing. And in just the general Democratic Party politics for a really, really long time. I've worked on campaigns as staff, as a volunteer. You know, I worked for Barack Obama, I worked for Hillary Clinton's campaign. Now I'm working for Joe Biden's campaign, all different roles, different capacities. So I've been been at this for a bit. It's really like a long, it's a long arc for us to get where we where we want to go as a community. But I remember back in 2008, flying to Chicago, and meeting with the Obama campaigns leadership at the time and literally, like begging them just to talk to us and just to, if a woman's wearing hijab, please don't remove her for, and I love President Obama, I worked for him, but they literally took women wearing hijab and they removed them from behind the candidate. So to come from there to where we are now, I mean, clearly we're not where we want to be, but I think it's also clear that we're moving in the right direction as a community. On it, inshallah, it's kind of funny. You know, I had to do a little bit of a double take, but look, Joe Biden's been around. He's just in the last 90 days, he's done three events with Muslim Americans. He spoke at the Millie Muslim Vote Summit. We did a national Muslim American fundraiser with him in August, and he sent a video message to Isna just a few weeks ago. So he's been engaging with our communities quite regularly over the last few months. But then I thought, you know, how many, you know, he's been in the foreign relations committee, he's been vice president in the back of my mind. I was like, you know, how many Muslim leaders said inshallah to him and didn't do anything after they said it? And that's probably part of where the context came from. You know what I mean? But look, he's a man of faith. He understands our faith. He understands the vernacular. He's very culturally astute. So it's not surprising that he would say that and actually use it the way, you know, many of us use it, you know, like colloquially, not literally what it means, right? So that's kind of my take on it. Okay, excellent. Well, you know, it was interesting just to see how much excitement and controversy just that one use of that word generated, you know, within the Muslim community here. So, and then we could, you know, have a very long conversation about nuanced ways of using it and how normally people use it. But we really want to sort of move on to some of the substantive issues as well. And one of the things Farouk that you might have felt was that, you know, was a challenge around sort of engaging with the Muslim community because, you know, when the primaries happened, according to a survey done by CARE, the Council on American Islamic Relations, on Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders received 58.2% of the Muslim Democratic vote. And former Vice President Biden received 28.2%. So there was a huge gap. And part of that was perhaps because a large majority of American Muslim Democrats aligned themselves with Senator Sanders, very progressive values, you know, and his stance on health care, climate change, and other things in foreign policy. But it was also because they felt that Senator Sanders had really gone out of his way to court the Muslim vote. And I'm wondering what the Biden campaign has done to sort of, you know, reclaim some of that space or earn the Muslim vote. So if you could talk a little bit about that. And I think Bahra has a question from the audience. A similar question. Sahar, we can't hear you. Yes. So Annie from Pennsylvania wanted to know generally the same thing. What are you working on in order to reach out to Senator Sanders, younger, quite voluminous followers? And she says, how can I convince my 19-year-old Bernie supporting college student that Biden has his back? Sure. So there's lots of unpack here. Look, there's no question. And I'm going to speak as a Muslim American that Bernie Sanders set the bar very high in terms of his engagement of our communities. And he should be commended for that. No question. And our campaign has been actively engaged for the last, I would say seven, probably deeply for the last seven months, although we did do some events, you know, in the early primary states, you know, in Iowa, you know, Joe Biden went to Dearborn, Michigan in July of 2019 and sat down and had lunch with Muslim leaders in a restaurant called Broome, actually, which is like a local burger joint. So we've been doing things. I would say since I came on board, it's ramped up significantly. We've done, I actually stopped counting at this point. I used to go into these events and say, oh, I've done 50 events and 60 events. I mean, now it's like, we've done well over 100 events, probably, you know, in the 120 range across the country with Muslim Americans. We've done events with me, with different surrogates, with our senior policy people. You know, Tony Blinken as an example, who's one of our senior foreign policy advisors has done a lot of events with Muslim communities on foreign policy issues that we care about. The vice president has done, you know, three events that I just mentioned earlier. That's historic, by the way. I can't think of any other time when a Democratic or Republican nominee for president has gone and spoken directly to Muslims at a Muslim institution, not as a fundraiser, because that happens all the time, and has literally asked Muslims for their votes and their partnership. And by the way, if you notice when Joe Biden speaks to Muslims, he's not speaking to Muslims through a security lens. And if you recall previous presidential campaigns, when they've talked to Muslims, it's been often through us this lens of, oh, well, we need to work with them because they know where all the bad guys are. So we have to have them on our side. You have not, you don't see that on our website. You don't see it in any of Joe Biden's remarks, because he understands that this community is diverse. I'd probably better to say communities are diverse, and that, you know, we can contribute and do contribute to this country every day in different ways. We've also had two events with Jill Biden, who hopefully will be our first lady. We did two Eid events with her, but we were lucky to have her for both Eid al-Adha as well. So that was very nice. So we've done a lot of engagement, I would say. But that engagement has not been just engagement for the sake of engagement. We've had like really substantive policy conversations. One of my colleagues on the campaign that I just did a meeting with Yemeni Americans in Michigan to talk specifically about what's happening right now with the conflict and humanitarian disaster in Yemen. We've met with Kashmiri Americans. We've met with Palestinian Americans. We've met with Lebanese Americans. We've met with Indian Muslim Americans. We've met with every, we've met with a whole weekly, I don't know if it's weekly or bi-weekly, but we have a whole program with African American Muslim leaders that we do as well. So the engagement on substantive policy has been robust, and that has led to a Muslim American agenda on our website. It's led to an Arab American agenda on our website, which I don't think any campaign has ever done before, which is real tangible policy commitments to these communities. On the question about Senator Sanders and his supporters, I think he might have gotten more in the primaries. I've seen data that is like two thirds or more of Muslim votes. There's a few things that we're doing here. I think campaign-wide Joe Biden has believed that and continues to believe that we need to unify the party. He established very quickly, for those of you who don't know, unity task forces that were made up of people from our campaign and people from the Sanders campaign to get together and make recommendations on health care, on climate change, on criminal justice reform, on immigration, and I always forget the two other issues. I think one was, I forgot anyways, there's six topics that we created these unity task forces around. And we had Muslims on them. Abdul El Sayed was on one, for example. He's been a great partner to me and to the campaign and reaching out to Muslim progresses, but just progressives in general. We've done a lot of meetings with progressive groups. We do them all the time. I've done several engagements with the Muslims for Bernie groups. So we've done a lot of engagement to win over not just them, but the big broad tent of the Democratic Party. And I'll just close by saying that I want to talk more about our domestic policy agenda when we get to it. But I think to the question from Pennsylvania, if we look at Joe Biden's platform, it's the most progressive platform the Democratic Party has had and ever, or maybe since FDR, but it's an extremely, I guess, impactful platform that would actually improve the lives of our next generation. So I can talk more about that now or later. I'll leave it to you. Yeah, we'll absolutely get to that. Farooq, I also wanted to sort of talk about this poll that was done by various Muslim organizations in partnership with Indivisible. And it was conducted through from January 2020, all the way through June. And it turned out the results of the poll showed that civil rights and constitutional rights were of top most concern for American Muslims. So in relation to that, I would like to sort of ask you a question about some of the civil rights concerns that Muslim communities had had. And I'm wondering what would a Biden administration and how would a Biden administration approach surveillance programs and Obama era programs such as countering violent extremism in which federal agencies recruited community leaders, social workers, educators to identify and monitor Muslim communities and identify people who were on the path to radicalization. What that ended up doing was costing the entire community under suspicion. So this was an Obama era program. And I'm just wondering what would a Biden administration do for that. And I believe, Thaira, we have a question from the audience somewhat related to that as well. Yeah. So question from the audience is in the eight years of the Obama Biden leadership, what specific actions or initiatives were initiated that we would be considered positive for the Muslim community, locally or internationally? And if we could sort of stick to the local first because we'll get to foreign policy issues later as well. That question was about from the Obama Biden administration. Yes. Okay. I can tell. Well, let me start there, I guess, which is, first of all, when Obama won in 2008, we had no bench in our communities. And through that administration over a period of eight years, there was dozens, if not hundreds of Muslim Americans that were appointed, myself included, into jobs in the Obama administration. So I think the ability to bring Muslims in and have a voice on policy is extremely important. And that administration gave us a chance to hopefully build if we are to win this election, inshallah. So that's kind of one thing. There's other things. I mean, Barack Obama eliminated the NCRS program, which is another form of like special registration. I think there's also the idea that of the Affordable Care Act and other kitchen table issues that Muslims care about on the domestic side that helped a lot of people. I didn't realize until I started this position, and it's probably something I should know, given my other work, but I'll admit that I didn't know it, that a third of Muslims, and this is from ISPU data, a third of Muslims of at or below the poverty line. So if you look at the efforts that Obama did on healthcare, on access to education, on the economy more broadly, all of those things benefited Muslim American communities to the question of the civil rights issues. And if I'd missed something, feel free to remind me because I'm trying to keep up with these are all like a lot to unpack in these questions. You know, the first step I think is to, for any candidate and especially a presidential candidate to understand and respect the fact that the relationships with Muslim and Arab American communities have generally been securitized relationships. And if you look at our Muslim agenda on our website, we're very clear that, you know, this campaign and Joe Biden view that and understand it and are looking to re-engage from a different perspective, right? If you look at the way this community, our communities and others are viewed, other black and brown communities are viewed from this campaign and from Joe Biden, we are viewed as communities that need to be protected, which is the complete opposite of what was there previously from not just the Obama administration, but the Bush administration, and we can go probably even further back than that. You talked about CVE, one of the number one issues that come up or has was coming up in events that I've done like this across the country was is Joe Biden willing to end the CVE program? And the answer is yes. If you go to our Arab American agenda, you'll see that Trump actually, his administration renamed this program the TV program. Terrorism, I forgot what it stands for. I think it's targeting violence, terrorism prevention projects. There you go. So we've committed to ending that program. We've committed to working with historically targeted communities, Muslims and Arabs and others, and really making sure that we're consulting with them and we're taking a fresh look at all these programs and ending that one. But there's others, you know, there's groups like Muslim advocates that are constantly looking at these things. And we want to partner with the communities, not just Muslims, but others, and take a fresh look at everything and see what's been working, what hasn't been working, why hasn't it been working? You know, how can we not view these communities through a certain security lens that has been historically done? I got to be honest with you, and I'm going to kind of throw something back to the viewers. I think we've gotten very little credit for this, for the campaign, like zero. You know, we launched this and announced it back on our Arab American page in August, and like, I didn't see anybody going out and saying, oh, wow, they're actually committing to this. What I hear, and I don't want to come across as defensive, what I hear often is the Biden campaign is not doing anything. They're not doing enough. They're not committing to anything. They're not promising anything. But if you go and look, it's there. There are really strong commitments to our communities on issues that we care about. Now, we're not going to get everything, and that's politics. But I think that there are some things that we can work off of, and I hope that the viewers here will take this back to your communities, especially those of you who are voting and about to vote. Like, these are real tangible things that we can bring into fruition. Is it perfect? No. But I think that there's some things that our communities have been able to communicate to the campaign, and they've listened and they've responded, and they're always willing to listen. In many cases, they've responded. We can talk more about that as well. Farouk, I would like to say that when you said that we didn't get enough credit for it, I had been checking the Biden campaign's Muslim engagement page very regularly, and this thing about CVE, the announcement about CVE really was in the Arab-American Biden agenda, and so it was sort of, I missed it because I was looking again, and it's good to know that that's another page that people should be looking at very, checking in regularly just to see what the updates are, and we got a yay for ending CVE from one of the audience members. Dara, I know that you have another audience question, perhaps from Zevina. Yes, thank you, and the previous question that I read, I just want to give credit to our viewer, Dr. Hazrat Ji, who mentioned the positive policies from the Biden Obama holdover. Let's see, we have Zarina, who asks, Farouk, there are several in our community who are skeptical about Kamala Harris and her stances on India. She also suggests that it would be good for her to meet with Muslims. Can we talk a little bit about that each year? Thank you, Zarina. And just related to that, just somebody sent a question privately, is that it's about, the question goes, today the court acquitted all 32 top BJP leaders accused in the demolition of the Babri Masjid, despite strong photographic and other evidence proving their guilt. This is another sign of the strongly fascist anti-Muslim policy of the government of India, which now seems to permeate everything, including the Supreme Court. What can the American Muslims who have families in India, as well as Indian Muslims, look forward to with respect to the way that the Biden administration can help to influence the safety and security of Muslim lives and protection of their culture and religious practice in India? Sure. So I'll start with the Joe Biden, the Biden-Harris campaign position. Look, I think one thing that we have seen under the Trump administration is walking away from basic fundamental values of our country on human rights and democracy. And the Vice President has been clear that as president, he will restore an emphasis on those areas of our foreign policy. It's not a secret that leaders of other countries feel emboldened by what's happening here at home. And we literally have our own fascist dictator-like person here who turns a blind eye to human rights abuses. I mean, he's enabled what's happening to the Uighurs in China. We saw a report just a couple of months ago. He was in Delhi at the time of protests and was silent, despite mob violence. So Joe Biden has basically said that I will restore the focus on human rights and democracy. I will have the tough conversations with leaders about these issues, both adversaries and allies. And I will make sure that we have a strong state department that has White House support to have robust diplomatic engagements. Multilateralism will return. Well, whereas you see right now, America is in retreat. I mean, hell, we pulled out of the World Health Organization. I mean, forget about the Paris Treaty in the Iran nuclear deal. We pulled out of the World Health Organization. So it's a completely different posture. Now, back to India, and I'll touch on Kashmir as well. If you go to our website, you'll see that we have a very clear position that he's very concerned about what's happening in both places. He has said that these actions are against India's tradition as a secular democratic society. And he's very concerned about the CAA, about the NRC in Assam. He's talked about restoring the rights of the people of Kashmir, of not throttling the internet, not stopping peaceful protesting, and really has urged India to maintain true to its democratic values. Now, Joe Biden is the kind of guy who wants to have these conversations as president, and he's committed to doing that. And it's not just me saying it. I mean, he's mentioned Kashmir in a couple of his engagements. He's our senior foreign policy folks have talked about these issues in other venues as well. And that's the campaign's policy that is the Biden-Harris position. Look, on Kamala Harris, I think it's, and look, I'm just going to be honest, right? Like, I think we need to be very careful about, as a community, about making assumptions about people because of where they come from. People do that to us all the time. And look, I think that we will hopefully get a chance to meet with her as a community and talk. There's a few challenges in the schedule. Like, you know, we're 30 days away, but now we have a Supreme Court nomination, and she's on the Senate Judiciary Committee. So who knows what scheduling is going to look like? But that's something that's important to me to try to get done between now and the election day. I think, Ptahari, you also had a question from Martin, something similar and related. Yes, similar. I see, I see Martin Benz. He just mentions that Farooq, he checked out Joe Biden's website. It has a good campaign overview of issues of interest to Muslims. It notes that Joe is disappointed in the measures that the government of India has taken. And Martin just reminds us that disappointment is not a condemnation of Modi's policies. And he just wants to make sure that we're taking it seriously and not, and worries that Kamala will try to soften Joe's interactions with Modi. And you spoke to that a bit. But I also think it's fair also to go ahead and stay on the records that we do have engaged and interested people who are going to hold these candidates and presidents and future presidents accountable. And so I convey that message to Martin and thank you for that. Yeah, I can add one more quick thing, by the way, which is that if there's more language, if you go to, we've answered, we often answer questionnaires for different groups for endorsements and things like that. And there is an answer to that question, which has a little bit more detail. Because when you're on the Muslim section of our website, there's so many things to talk about that, like, it's hard to give, you know, paragraphs to each thing or else it would just keep going on and on. If you go to EngagePAC's website, they've released their questionnaire that the campaign filled out earlier this year. And there's more language on these topics there as well. Thank you. Farooq, thank you so much. You know, there was also this question around Engage's connections to, sort of, Israeli lobby groups. And so, Thaher, do you want to read that out since we're on that topic? Do you see it? I actually... I have it all. Yeah. It's, should I go ahead? Okay. It says, Ilham is asking, kindly comment on the controversy about Engage supporting Israel, which will lead to untrusting Engage and therefore not voting for Biden. So, I mean, I know there is a huge controversy around, but if you could just talk about that very briefly, that would be really wonderful. And while we're on that topic, it would be really great to hear and you've talked very vociferously about Indian Muslims and also Uyghurs in China and the Rohingya. If you could also speak about what the Biden administration's approach would be to the Palestinian question and, you know, taking concrete steps to end the occupation and about Palestinian statehood. Yeah, sure. I want to add one more thing to the previous question, by the way, which is that we've actually had many meetings and engagements with Indian Muslims and Kashmiri Americans as well. So, there's definitely like, this campaign is definitely taking what's happening there and in other places around the world very seriously. And we recognize that there is a lot of work to be done given the failures of this administration of restoring America's position on the global stage. So, all these issues are going to be very important, including the war in Yemen, which I mentioned earlier, which I just had a meeting about. I want to be a little bit careful about speaking too much about Engage because I'm here in my campaign capacity. I don't want to skirt the question either. Look, there's a lot of misinformation out there right now. And I think that a lot of this misinformation is specifically going to lead to suppressing Muslim votes. And I highly encourage people to not take at face value what is read. I mean, God, one of these articles said that I'm a member of APAC, which is just ludicrous, you know. So, I just think that there's a lot of misinformation out there. And I think that if people dig into the facts of me and my history of Engage and their advocacy for Palestinians and the rights of Palestinians, I think that they will see the truth. So, I'll leave it there unless people feel like I need to say more. But I don't want to get too deep into that just because of the context. But just look into the facts and don't believe some of these really, you know, rubbish publications that just will write anything without fact checking. But more broadly on the Palestinian and the Israeli Palestinian conflict, I will say that this administration has been a travesty and has been very detrimental to Palestinians. You know, Donald Trump cut humanitarian and economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority. He moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He recognized annexation of the Golanites. He was about to recognize annexation of the West Bank. What else did he do? He shut down the PLO office in Washington. And I'm probably leaving other things out that he's done. But he's basically given a blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu on anything that he has wanted to do. And what Joe Biden has said is that, look, I strongly believe in a two-state solution. And I know that is not necessarily the view of all Muslims, Arab Americans, or Palestinian Americans. There's a debate around a two-state solution or a different solution. But Joe Biden's view is that he believes strongly in a two-state solution. So when I tell you what he wants to do, it's through the frame that he believes that there should be a two-state solution. And he wants to bring both sides back to the negotiating table. And he wants to use his credibility with both sides to bring people together and to try to get to an end result that would lead to the rights of the Palestinians to have a state of their own living in security, in freedom, and in prosperity. And if you look at the Democratic platform, that language, I may have missed a word, but that language is in there for the first time when we talk about the rights of the Palestinian people to have a state of their own. And he's committed to doing that. I will also say that he's committed to reversing many of Trump's actions. He wants to reopen the PLO work to reopen the PLO consulate in Washington. He wants to reopen the US consulate in East Jerusalem, which this president closed. I think that's the one that I left out. He wants to restore economic and humanitarian aid. He wants to work to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That's something that this president hasn't even talked about. So I understand that people in our communities want him to go further and I get it. But I also think that we need to get back to, we need to hit the reset button to some extent and we need to undo the harm that's been done and re-engage the diplomatic efforts that this administration has completely left the Palestinians out of. And you've seen that over the last couple of months especially. Thank you so much for that. And we do hope that at some point, I mean, yes, and this is, I mean, we do have to move on to other issues, but the Palestinian question is a very important one for the Muslim community. And I think across democratic and Republican administrations, the issue has been that the US has never been an honest broker in the conflict. And so, you know, we would want there to be more of a more of that stance. But I think we're going to shift. If I can add one more thing, sorry to cut you off, but there, you know, I think there's another important piece here, which is that we don't have, I mean, made me one appointee in the Trump administration from our communities. Just one. You will probably see zero. So I think it's really important to think through that. How do we make a long-term impact on many of these issues? And you can't do it if you're not there. And Joe Biden's the first candidate for president, first general election candidate for president that I have seen who says that I want to partner with you, Muslim Americans. And I want to include you in my administration. And he said that to Muslims. He has said that to Arabs. And he has said Arab Americans. And he has said that to Palestinian Americans specifically. And we have Palestinian Americans that are involved in different parts of our campaign. And I think that's something that we should be proud of because we need Palestinian American voices to be in our campaign, in our administration. And we're committed to that diversity from all of our diverse communities. And we also know that some very prominent Palestinian Americans are right now at the forefront of getting out the vote. You know, and that is where the focus is right now. I, we just do want to shift gears just a little bit and turn to the economy. And I know that that has a question from the audience. Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about some domestic policy. We want to have a message from the audience, but I'll kind of characterize the question. So what do you say to the idea that under President Trump, the economy was booming and is recovering fast in the state of this pandemic? What do you say to the idea that Republicans are better for small businesses and that conservative ideals are better in general, in terms of not only the economy, but on issues of morality in terms of God and religion. And so how do we talk about the reality that one Muslims are not monolithic and that and that there there are these these ideas in the minds of the voters? Yeah. And Farooq, I did, we did promise you a very diverse Muslim audience. So we have people from all from, you know, different parties who are currently, you know, watching and listening at this point. But we would like to sort of stick to the economic aspect of that question. You know, especially small business owners, about 30 million small business owners in the U.S. right now. And there was a poll done that by CNBC in, I believe, January or February. And they found that 64 percent of small business owners were approved of the job that Trump was doing. This was before COVID, of course. But, you know, I know of Muslim friends who hate the rhetoric and hate some of the immigration policies that Trump talks about, but have small businesses and like the low regulation and, you know, the low taxes on their small businesses, how would you respond to them? Yeah. I mean, look, I'm a small business owner too. And my family is small business owners. There's a few things that I would say. One is, you know, we when the Obama Biden administration took over, we inherited one of the worst economic crises since the Great Depression. And people forget that sometimes I think that we had to literally whatever we have now and what we had before COVID was something that, whatever, 89, I don't even know the number of record. It was a record of the number of months that we had of positive job creation in this country. That was started by the recovery of the Obama Biden recovery, where we saved the auto industry, where Joe Biden administered the funds that came into the stimulus package. I forgot what it was called the recovery act of that time. So he's got the experience and he's done the work to build an economy that is struggling. I think TARP was before the recovery act. I saw somebody type in TARP. So that's one piece of it. So what Donald Trump took over was what he inherited from us, from the Obama Biden economy. Now, okay, fine. It was going well, but it was going well, I believe, for the top 1%. And that's who primarily benefited from the Trump tax cuts. And if you look at our communities, yes, we have many affluent people in our communities. But as I said earlier, we also have a third of our communities that live at or below the poverty line. And the US average is 24%. So Muslims are disproportionately living in poverty, more than other communities. And many of us don't realize that because we don't live in those situations. But that's a fact that we have to think about now. If we look at COVID, the fact of the matter is that there is, you cannot solve the economic crisis without solving the healthcare crisis. And if you look at a state like Florida where we have thousands of small business owners who are really struggling, many of them who have closed their doors, many of them who are in the tourism and hospitality sector, all of that is close to dead right now because of COVID. So if we can't fix the healthcare crisis, we're not going to fix the economic crisis. And if you look at the way this president has navigated the waters, he's never had a plan. Joe Biden has had a plan from the get-go on how do we contain the virus? How do we ramp up PPE manufacturing? How do we use the powers of the federal government to put an end to this and to safely reopen our economy? He's got a plan for how do we give small companies funds and grants for restarting costs. This president hasn't even talked about that. He's got a plan for how we make a historic investment in R&D so we can create the industries of the future and bring back advanced manufacturing technologies into this country. How do we rebuild our infrastructure? How do we build a green economy that retrofits our buildings, that builds 50,000 charging stations across the country and creates really good paying jobs? The beneficiaries of that are small companies. This Donald Trump doesn't have a plan and that's not a Republican talking point or a Democratic talking point. He just doesn't have a plan. He hasn't had a plan for COVID. Even the PPP loans and for those of you who don't know, those are the forgivable loans that the government gave out at the beginning of the crisis. Black and brown communities were disproportionately unable to get those loans because they didn't understand how to get, how to do the paperwork. There was issues with not having banking relationships and we don't realize some of us who live privileged lives and I'll include myself in that don't understand the difficulty that small, small business owners had to go through to try to get that money and many of them couldn't get it and many of them who ended up getting it couldn't get it for months because they just didn't have the ability to get it and why? Because the small business administration has been gutted by this administration. The small business development centers, the women on business development centers, the minority business development centers have all been decimated by this administration. They've literally cut their budgets and when it came time to pull off a historic level program, they couldn't do it because they didn't have the people. They didn't make the investments. They thought that these agencies are useless. They don't do anything. We are basically saying that we want to rebuild the federal government in a way that helps bring equity into small businesses and create more black and brown entrepreneurs, have more training, have more access to capital, provide more grants, loans for people who don't have access to the credit. There's a whole 20-page document on our website about how we're going to do all this stuff. Donald Trump's plan was let's cut taxes for the wealthy and let's see what happens. Yeah, we had growth but that growth was inherited and now it's been squandered and we don't have a V-shaped recovery. Yes, the economies have reopened in many states and we have people going back to work but let's see what happens over the next couple of months. I mean there are businesses that are laying people off now. I think Disney just said they're laying off like, I don't want to be misquoted, but the airline sector, the tourism sector is because we haven't gotten the public health crisis under control and if we don't get that done, we can't have the proper recovery that we need and we not only have to get back to where we were but we have to build back better and that's what Joe Biden's economic plan is. How do we build back better and that means going back to what I was saying earlier, how do we buy more American? How do we utilize the federal government and investment to spark R&D into sectors that our economy is going to need built here to be more competitive across the globe into the future? We started doing those things in the Obama administration in the last couple of years and these guys have completely dropped the ball on it. I hope I know I kind of moved around a little bit. If I need to clarify anything, I'm happy to do that. Great, thank you Faruk and we also have some questions around healthcare and we'll come to that as well, but I did want to sort of focus on the African American Muslim community. The African American community makes up about 20 or slightly more percent of the Muslim community here in the US and a lot of what our immigrant communities have been able to achieve is because of the activism, because of the efforts, because of the struggles of our African American Muslim siblings who came here 400 years ago as slaves. They were the first Muslims to set foot on US soil, but the other ones were experiencing layer upon layer of oppression, not just because of religious discrimination but also racial injustice and we're seeing what's happening in the country around systemic and structural racism. In addition to that, because of COVID we've also read report after report about how our Black communities are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 and have suffered disproportionately because of it. Could you specifically talk about Faruk, what will the Biden administration, what will a Biden administration do specifically for Black Muslims? Yeah, that's a great question and an important first I want to say that as the Muslim engagement lead for this campaign, like I've prioritized making sure that all of our communities are represented across race, across ethnicity, across gender and even across religious tradition. Our umma in this country is really really diverse and we need to make sure that not just in our campaign but if we win, God willing that we continue to have diverse Muslim voices involved and my kitchen cabinet of advisors is made up of every group you can think of, well maybe not every single one, but as many that I could find to recruit to bring in to help me with the Muslim engagement program and if you saw Joe Biden's message at the Million Muslim Vote Summit and also his video message is that he specifically mentioned Black Muslims and I think that's important and because he, I think the first part of finding a solution is to recognize there is a problem and he's been very clear about and I think somebody asked about was he clear at denouncing white nationalism. Yes, he's been very clear about that and he was clear that the reason he got into this race was because of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia back when Donald Trump said there's good people on both sides and Joe Biden has been very clear in the fact that there is systematic racism and inequality in this country that needs to be addressed and he's got a whole host of plans on how to address them and I'll just go through some of them. I'm happy to talk through some more if we can but I wanna, I could go on and on about this for probably the rest of the time we have but he's talked about a few things. One is, is how do we improve our healthcare system? He wants to expand on Obamacare and make sure that there's a public option that will help give people affordable and in many cases free for those who qualify for Medicaid access to healthcare which is a major issue for many minority communities including African Americans and Black Muslims I would say is a part of that. Second, he's talked about education. He has said that he will provide debt-free university education for anybody who's making $125,000 or less and free community college for anyone. He's talked about how do we triple funding for Title I schools which are in some of our most underserved communities and make sure that we're paying our teachers better, make sure there's no, there's no, what's the right word, disparity between courses and the type of education within a zip code for example so that someone's race or income level doesn't impact their ability to get a quality education. He's got a robust plan on criminal justice reform where he said that he wants to end private prisons. He wants to decriminalize cannabis and expunge previous cannabis-related records. He wants to focus on rehabilitation over incarceration. Joe Biden has said that nobody should go to prison on a drug-related use offense alone which is a major problem right now because he's got a robust plan on criminal justice reform. He's talked about police reform given what's happened with Amad Arbery, George Floyd and countless others over the last several months and way even over the last, I mean for decades and he has recognized the fact that we need to have a change. We need equality. We need to hold people accountable. We need a model use force of standard. We need to ban choke holds. We need to, there's several other proposals that he has about how we can have independent investigations into these matters. What role can his Department of Justice play in making sure that we're properly prosecuting hate crimes, making sure that people that are charged with hate crimes can't purchase a gun? I mean it goes on and on but every aspect of his agenda ties in racial equity for Black and Brown communities which of course includes Muslims and Black Muslims. If you go to our website you'll see a whole plan on how to bring racial equity into our economy just as one small example that's something that I worked on in government. We, for federal procurement purposes, he has said that he wants to increase the goal for disadvantaged business contracting from 5% to 15% which is tripling the amount of money that would go to minority owned small businesses from the federal government. He's talked about expanding the Minority Business Development Agency so we can provide more training, access to capital and grants to small businesses that are owned by minorities. So there's a lot, I mean I could go on and on but this is something that's very near and dear to his heart and something that he's taken very seriously in terms of addressing in every part of his plan from education to voting rights to increasing the minimum wage to criminal justice reform and on and on. Question for you. Since you mentioned the healthcare, let's talk about a question from my friend Dr. Talal Khan. This is a conversation that he and I began two years ago when I ran for office and it's essentially that as a position he finds that Obamacare could be pretty burdensome administratively. It's increased 20-fold causing record rise in physician burnouts and suicides and he's asking what is your plan to respond to that and as I said he and I had this conversation for a couple of years because he's in the field and has a strong position that there is still work to be done on improving it. So can we talk about that a bit? Yeah, I mean I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on all the nuances of Obamacare so I might not get into all the weeds but I won't get into all the weeds but I will say that you know for the Obama-Biden administration Obamacare was a starting point and I think the vice president recognizes that he wants to build on Obamacare yes but he wants to improve it. I think he's willing to sit down with the various stakeholders across different communities that have an impact whether it's physicians or insurance companies or others to figure out how can we make it better and I think that definitely needs to be part of the conversation and he's fully supportive of that. Thank you. And I will say just like with just working on this campaign that this the people that I work with they are great listeners and this engagement not just with Muslim communities but a whole bunch of other communities we really I've seen people and I will speak for the people that I work with that I've seen them go above and beyond to really hear people and to try to see how can we make things better and I think that applies to health care and many other things that we have to work on. If you had one statement to make to someone who was on the fence today after walking that first debate just days before the election or a month and a half before the election if you had one statement to make to a person who's still wondering should they vote and should they vote for your candidate what would that statement be? That's a good question. It's an important question. And I borrowed it from the chat room. I saw it. I saw it. I'm gonna give credit to my friend. Look when Joe Biden got into this race he said that we are in the fight for the battle of the soul of this country. You know some people are like oh that's cheesy like whatever what does that mean but I think we've seen over the last year or even the last four years of what that really means you know the presidency and the democratic principles that this country stands for are at stake and when we vote in this election this goes beyond party right like I think this is really about what do we want the presidency to represent and what do we want our country to represent both to our citizens and on the global stage and this country has been a model for democracy for inclusion for a model of how we can bring unless you're a Native American immigrants together from all across the world to really advance social justice to be inclusive of how we can lift each other up not tear each other down in a real model country of how democracy is supposed to work. We're not that today and another four years of Trump I think will significantly hinder and continue to deteriorate the political climate that we have in this country that is not helping us get things done not only is it tearing this country apart we are falling behind the curve to our competitors and we need somebody in office as president who can unite the country who can heal the country who can tell people shoot people straight and really have empathy for what the average person is dealing with one thing that Joe Biden that resonated with me last night in the debate was when the vice president looked into the camera and said that I care about you you know there's a guy that I that I met on the campaign who's a Palestinian American in in Dearborn, Michigan and he owns a coffee shop and he and Joe Biden called him and that's how I met him because I got wind that the vice president back in May called this guy and he had COVID and he spoke to this gentleman who's Muslim for about 20 minutes and he literally just gave him a shoulder to lean on and he asked him like what are you going through how can I help you tell me about how you feel how is your family dealing with this. Donald Trump doesn't do that and this is not a Republican or a Democratic thing I wasn't a fan of George W Bush at all actually but he wasn't this and I think we really need to think through what is it that we want this country to be what kind of a president do we want our youth to look up to and then make our vote based on that. I also wanted to sort of you know yesterday during the debate I think one of the most just distressing moments for a lot of people was when President Trump was asked to denounce or condemn white supremacy and white supremacist organizations and he failed to do that because completely refused and as you know over the past a few years anti-Semitism has been growing unbelievable things. Islamophobia absolutely, violence against our African American community has also skyrocketed so what plans does you know the Biden campaign have about white supremacist violence that's growing and these groups that are you know have been given so much airtime now have been given direct support from the current sitting president what would a Biden administration do to sort of counter some of the strength that they've gathered over the past few years. Yeah I think a few things one is just what he did last night which is denouncing it I mean plain and simple like he like this president can't do the most basic thing and I think that he has fanned the flames of hate in this country. Now as far as what Joe Biden would do A is he would prioritize this as an issue that we have to address and if you look at the data the data does not show that Muslims or Jews or African Americans or others are a threat the data shows that white nationalism is a threat and what Joe Biden will do to address whatever threats that we have in our country is going to go by what the data says so that's number one. Number two is we have to then protect the communities that are being attacked for lack of a better word right now and I think he's committed to doing that and you'll see some of that language on our Arab American page and other parts of our website third is he's got a very strong plan to address hate crimes they're under reported and and he's got a whole honestly I don't remember all the details of it but he's got a whole plan on how we will better address hate crimes whole people accountable report them better he's got a whole plan on gun violence part of that is if you're charged with a hate crime you shouldn't be able to buy a weapon so it's something that he's talked about since the day that he got into the race and he's got you know a lot of detailed plans about how he will deal with it but he weaves different things together from how will his DOJ operate to how will his gun violence policy fit into this how will the White House prioritize and how will his DHS look to make sure that we're not that we're following the data on how to go after the real threats to this country great thank you so much um that I think we have another question uh yes the chat room is quite on fire today so let's see um we have Lil Fika Durrani who asked how would Biden win over um Trump supporters to bring this country together if he does win and we are in such a divided and polarized condition you know what he's talked about on that front is his time in the U.S. Senate and even his time as vice president what one of his strengths as vice president was his ability to work with the Senate where he served for for many many years and he has the relationships with many Republicans and he has said himself that I believe that if I'm the president many Republicans will uh want to get things done and I'm willing to work with them now you know with that yeah I don't know I don't know that from my personal information at all but I think that he will be a president for everyone and he said this today and he said it last night that we need a president who will work with everybody no matter who they are what party they are and really work to bring people together and use the convening power of the White House to bring groups together to really address what the real problems are and find solutions to them just a quick question it's opportunity to for you to give the campaign another shout out but I am getting questions about can you be specific about where we can find the plan so your policy proposals the outlines that you're talking about today can you tell us where people can find more information yeah and maybe somebody can plop it into the chat if you go to joebiden.com for the muslim specific plan you can go to joebiden.com slash muslim america uh but there's also if you go to joebiden.com you'll see a section called joe's vision if you click on joe's vision there's a detailed plan for everything that we've talked about and more thank you um faruk there we yeah we do have a lot of questions coming up um there is another question um oh it was a related question about white supremacist groups by dr hasrid you who asked whether you know in a Biden administration would they be uh put on a terror terrorist list with all these implications and ramifications um some of the white supremacist organizations that we're talking about I can't answer that question I just don't know the answer to that because I don't know what that I don't know what that involves um in terms of the process and criteria or so I can't I'm not going to say no but I'm not going to say yes either I just I don't know okay so we have another question this is about um last night's debate raheela rahman asks biden's in last night's debate biden stated that he is not a proponent of the green new deal what is his plan to deal with climate change and how does it differ from the green new deal um so he has said that the green new deal is a good framework but he has his own plan uh which is a I believe I'm gonna probably misquote this I want to say it's a two trillion dollar plan if I'm not mistaken to invest in in addressing our climate change problem and his plan would get the us to net zero emissions by 2035 and it would make a significant investment in how do we create jobs and and and make our economy green how do we reconfigure our infrastructure how do we you know build charging stations and have a network that can make our vehicles electric he wants to get back into the players climate accord he's got a really robust plan on climate change to be honest I don't know I can't recall I haven't read about the new green new deal and quite sometimes I can't speak to the exact differences between the two okay thank you I think that has a question from another another audience member yes sad osmani is asking uh us to think about the fact that we're witnessing the president having begun the process of undermining the election process and hinting uh to the rigging of the voting process for 2020 what measures is the democratic party taking to counter act these claims and what measures will the party be taking to ensure a fair voting uh experience and that the outcome is not undermined yeah I mean we're taking this very seriously we've got a very robust voter protection program of attorneys across the country and actually we've got like a lot of people even from the Muslim community who were signed up to be part of that uh and and I think we're we're going to be you know we're just going to be monitoring the situation and making sure that every vote is counted and doing what we can uh through our voter protection efforts but it's something that DNC is taking very seriously and we put a lot of resources into this I think the other um I think the other piece of this is um making sure that people go to iwillvote.com and you might have heard the vice president mention this on the debate last night but we want to make sure that people have a plan to vote uh from now well even from like a month ago uh you know are you going to vote absentee are you going to vote early are you going to vote election day iwillvote.com has all of the resources that will give you all the information you need to develop the plan to vote I think that's really really important right now because uh because of COVID and other things we just need to make sure that we're not waiting to figure out through what mechanism we're going to vote or making sure we're requesting our absentee ballots on time if we're voting absentee some states like florida have two weeks of early voting which gives people a great opportunity to go vote early if you look at the polling and obviously polling is just polling but you'll see the democratic voters are seem to be more leaning towards voting early or absentee so hopefully that idea of having a plan is settling in and by the way like these guys you know trump is trying to undermine and saying that there's all this voter fraud and this and that there's just no data to support that Farooq I you know according to a poll that was done by ISPU in the 2016 election 60 only 61 percent of eligible Muslim voters voted in that election and only 68 percent were registered to vote right those things that sort of changed dramatically in 2018 but could you describe some of the you know measures that the campaign is taking that other organizations are taking to sort of bring out the muslim vote which has been you know has not reached its potential at all and how are you especially targeting muslims in swing states yeah so you know we're blessed I think or I guess blessed I would is the right word that we have a lot of muslims on our staff in the battleground state so our coalition just as an example we have a deputy coalitions director who is muslim american arab american and michigan we've got our coalition's director who is an african-american muslim sister in pennsylvania uh and same an african-american muslim sister who's our coalition's director in Ohio and we've got a deputy coalition's director who's uh in texas who's muslim american as well so we've got people and even in florida we have organizing directors that are most from our community so we have people that are working in the battleground states and many other places to turn out just the general vote but also the muslim vote specifically we're doing a lot of events you know we're doing events with celebrities with surrogates we're having continuing to have policy discussions but we're call having a call to action at the end of each of these so people are phone banking and mobilizing and organizing there's also the million muslim votes effort that's led by mgaige but also has partnerships with other muslim organizations and they've been doing a lot of work to specifically target muslim voters through texting and phone banking and i think last i heard they sent out like a million text messages already uh so i think that the community our all of our communities are going to be excited i'm hoping for uh inshallah record turnout inshallah i think there is another question from the audience at rabia perhaps yes so she asks uh what can muslim americans do now to ensure that biden gets elected and she also asked specifically in addition to voting what else can be done um outreach to colleges msa younger voters disenfranchised voters are there things that volunteers can do to make a difference in the the next 34 days yeah um i think first of all if you have friends or family or colleagues or anything in michigan pennsylvania wisconsin florida ohio we need to make sure that and texas actually and georgia i think all these states are in play and north carolina like make sure that we're getting them to vote i think that's really important i think the other thing and i'll kind of go back to something i said earlier is i think there's just there is still i see especially in our communities um and feel free to disagree with me i'm open to the debate and the discussion but i feel like there is still a lack of information on where biden stands on just his general platform but also on his platform that's specific to muslim americans and even arab americans if you go to our arab american page i just want to talk about this for a minute you'll see the cve language you'll also see that we have committed to coming up with a process uh to help people get up the no fly list if their name should not be on there that's another thing that i got when i went to michigan earlier in the year and we are very quickly made a commitment to that for those of you who are on this call and you may be arab american and you may be a business owner we've actually committed on that same platform to make the investment to determine if arab american or middle eastern american to be more specific or i guess more broad if middle eastern americans should be considered to be disadvantaged socially disadvantaged for the purposes of federal government contracting that is a major issue that was coming up to me from specifically arab americans and we couldn't make the full commitment because there's not enough data and there's like a strict scrutiny legal standard that must be met but we have committed to investing in a study that will hopefully make the recommendation a recommendation on that that's like a that's a big deal i mean because if you look at the the the dollars that flow through government procurement at the federal level the state level and the local level it is a lot of money and the state and local governments follow the lead of what the federal government says and if you look at the list of communities that are considered to be socially disadvantaged the glaring distinction is that middle eastern americans are not listed every other group is like i can even find another one that i could think of that wasn't listed so we've made that commitment we've made a commitment to make sure there's a mena category on the us census which is something the arab american community pushed really hard for which we almost got done in the obama administration but uh this administration didn't fully implement it so there's a lot of things like that joe biden is committed on day one to ending the war in yemen and i know that we have a lot of foreign policy concerns maybe this is more near and dear to my heart because my wife is yemeny american and we have family in yemen but he is committed to ending the war in yemen and you ending the u.s support increasing humanitarian aid and you all have seen what's happening over there right now just a few weeks ago our campaign called what's happening to the Uighurs genocide which has its own legal consequences there are things that we have been saying and doing they're just not getting out there and i think these are things that muslims can and should be getting excited about ending the muslim band on day one well all the democrats say that is what i get but at the end of the day we have a binary choice here we have donald trump and we have joe biden we have one person who wants to expand the muslim band and put even tanzania which is my native country on the list which god knows why and you have another guy who's saying that he wants to end the muslim band on day one so people sometimes say to me well we're not excited i think that there's a lot to be excited about i think if nothing else the ability of our communities to be able to defeat a candidate who wins by scapegoating us and on our backs is reason enough to get excited for this election farouk you did mention you know yemen and you know calling the gen the what's happening the treatment of Uighurs a genocide which is you know huge um and there was a previous question that we missed and it was about the the occupation of kashmir and if you could just very briefly touch on that because i know that you have sort of mentioned that earlier and it's others also on the joe biden vision page from american muslims but if you could just sort of touch on that and then we'll just quickly get back to the whole voting thing because there is another website that i did want to mention yeah and we i mean joe biden has talked about uh and it's on our website about restoring the rights of the kashmiris making sure that we're not that not we but the indian government is not uh suppressing i'm not sure the right what exact word has been suppressing uh peaceful protesting is not uh slowing down the internet uh and he's he's said himself actually that he will have conversations about these issues and and make sure that they're addressed um okay so about we're nearing the end of our time now um and i did want to sort of mention one other website and that is my muslimvote.org and i'll just sort of type that in as i speak because that also has a wonderful um lots of different resources about one to find out if you're registered to vote um how you can get a mail-in ballot if you haven't already requested one and it also has a wonderful resource and toolkit section for muslim communities in terms of how um you know we can get out the vote how we can sort of mobilize start vote a mobilization um campaigns within our own communities within our mosques within our community spaces um what the you know the friday sermons should look like so um anybody who's watching and who's sort of part of you know those our community leaders i would really encourage you to go to my muslimvote.org as well because they have really wonderful um uh resources thank you yabbar paif for doing that and paru has also actually put down his own email in the chat so if anybody wants to sort of um you'll get lots of emails today faruk that would be really really wonderful um so with that i think we're um uh you know we would like to sort of end but i'm going to ask faruk if you have any final parts before we turn it over to tahrara for closing remarks no i just want to thank you all for being here and for participating and and thank you for uh critical connections for putting this on and this has been great oh and faruk just one sorry one very tiny question that was meant for you somebody asked anonymously um if we do have a biden presidency what will your role in that be what kind of an appointment will you have and now that we have your email we'll have a lot of access to it right of course uh look i i don't want to be presumptuous i mean look i think my goal is to make sure that we have plenty qualified muslim americans in a biden administration whether that includes me or doesn't include me i think what's more important is that the community benefits from from all of this and that we have people in policy making roles and the vice president is committed to that i don't know it's a political answer but i you know i yeah i really do mean that though like i think what's important is that it doesn't matter if i mean i could get hit by a bus tomorrow so i think what's important is that the community continues to advance in the space thank you so much for everything that you have done for the community and now i'll turn it over to yeah so i just want to on behalf of me and myself i really just want to thank everyone who participated this evening and gave us such a lively and vibrant conversation at points it was hard to keep up with the questions that were coming in but that just contributed to such a meaningful discussion over the past 90 minutes we're also very grateful to who spent this evening uh discussing these important policy issues these things that just consume a lot of our our hearts and minds as we go into what many hope will be a new chapter for our country in 34 days and we thank you and we thank the biden campaign for making you available and for giving all of us a platform to be able to express ourselves ask the tough questions and to have you answer them quite competently and we appreciate that so thank you faruq mehlica do you want me to continue to close out with uh okay and so again just for everybody as we say good night uh i thank you for joining i want to just ask for your continued interest in the programming offered by critical connections which is a 501c3 please go to the website criticalconnections.org you can sign up on the mailing list it's really important that you do sell so that we can stay in touch with you connect with us on social media and the the other thing is just really important and nonprofits all over the place community leaders activists all over the place regardless of your political affiliation and your party it's so utterly important that you vote that you be heard and not only that you vote but that you bring others to vote with you the people that we take for granted like our teenagers our high schoolers our college age students make sure that they are registered to vote deadlines are coming up but then the next couple of days make sure that those who you love are registered to vote make sure they have a plan this is not something that you're just going to wake up and say i'm going to go and vote if you're doing a mailing vote ballot make sure that that's um timely if you're going in person care up with someone else it's just really important and for those who have the wear a thaw and the capacity to do so please consider voting uh volunteering uh being at the uh the voting booth and you can join any organization nonpartisan organization your city hall just for the next 34 days give it all you got that's it thank you all so much i was hoping the trump guy was going to show up by the way but yes and you would have had another like i said press wallet situation we were also hoping for that but we want to surprise and say thank you so much for who can thank you for your leadership and everybody just check the chat room as you log out there are nice wishes there and information so thank you again