Nida Allam knew it was all over.
Allam, a recent college graduate and Muslim-American progressive activist, had come to Philadelphia this week to support Bernie Sanders’s final stand in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s party. She had served as a volunteer and then as a regional field director for Sanders’ presidential campaign this year, and was on the convention floor on Tuesday to watch Clinton officially become the first woman to be nominated for president by a major U.S. political party.
That evening, Hillary for America tweeted out a photo of Allam, donning her glasses and a hijab, seemingly overcome with emotion, with pro-Hillary signs being waved around her in every direction.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We made history,” the tweet reads.
The tweet, which strongly implies a Muslim-American female Hillary fan tearing up over the historic occasion, earned Team Hillary over 2,300 retweets and 7,200 likes.
Allam wasn’t amused.
“Guess you didn’t get the memo….. #StillSanders #ImanImmigrant #ISupportPalestinianRights,” she tweeted at the Clinton campaign.
“It was about an hour after Bernie Sanders had conceded and some of my friends started tweeting at me [about the Hillary for America tweet] and I was completely taken aback,” she told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “I was upset that [the campaign] didn’t take the time to verify their information.” (Allam believes that Clinton’s team were attempting to use her “ethnic background and…[show] I was weeping for Hillary.”)
“I’m a Democratic voter, I am going to vote for Clinton,” Allam said, distancing herself from the Bernie or Bust crew. “But I just didn’t like that they were using my face to show that she was getting the votes of Muslim-American women…Those are votes that she has to earn.”
The young activist, who is of Indian and Pakistani descent, believes that Clinton takes the Muslim-American vote “for granted,” and that she even holds unconstitutional views when it comes to the issue of Israel and Palestine.
“[Hillary] has said she wants a ban on the BDS movement, which I find very unconstitutional,” she said. “Americans have the right to protest…and the BDS movement is a peaceful protest.” (During this campaign, Clinton has not called for a ban, but has repeatedly condemned the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.)
Allam says she is “not an official part of the BDS movement” but that she does “try to refrain from buying products from Israel” as long as the occupation continues.
“Hillary needs to start using the word ‘apartheid’ and ‘illegal settlements’ because that’s what they are,” she said.
With the Sanders campaign now dead and gone, Allam says she is focusing her energies on helping progressive congressional candidates “at the grassroots level.” Beyond voting for Clinton, she has no plans to support her in the general election against Donald Trump.
“We are going to make sure that we continue speaking about how, though the campaign is over, the revolution isn’t,” she said.
The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
