Joe Biden has declined the Democratic Party nomination, and Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee. That’s a good thing, but if voters are hoping for a Democrat who is willing to address the Zionist genocide happening in Gaza, Harris is not it. In fact, there’s no such thing as a potential Democratic Party nominee for President that would oppose the genocide in Gaza because the party is controlled by neoliberals, and neoliberals hate Islam.
I should be a little bit more precise, though. Neoliberalism doesn’t have an opinion on any religion, but it does insist that every religion be subservient to the neoliberal (i.e., capitalist) order, and it hates any kind of organizing that opposes that order, including religious organizing. That’s part of why there are now some conservatives and fascists who are questioning the dominance of capital in society. It’s not that they want liberty in the same way the left does, but rather because they want a form of neofeudalism that has a far-right version of Christianity at its center. People call them “the American Taliban” for that very reason. Neoliberalism is inherently opposed to any order that puts capitalism in service to another ideology because that would end the dominance of the capitalist class over society.
Neoliberalism — like all right-wing ideologies — needs an outside threat that it can use as an excuse for its bad behavior. That threat is always exaggerated and fictionalized to the point of being a cartoonish version of the real threat, even though it is based on a kernel of truth. Once the soviet block had been effectively defeated, neoliberalism looked around for a new threat to focus on, and that threat was Islamic theocracy. It’s not like they’d been ignoring Islamic theocracy before that — it just wasn’t the focal point. In fact, they were willing to use Islamic theocracy to organize people against the Soviet Union and they called militant Muslims “freedom fighters” in that context. They gave them money and weapons to help defeat the soviets. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were both supported by the US.
In addition to neoliberalism’s need for an enemy to use as an excuse for bad behavior, there is also a more directly practical need for anti-Islamic propaganda — that is, to provide an excuse for Israel. Israel is more than just a cog in the right-wing Christian narrative that prevents them from having to deal with the inevitability of death. It is also, essentially, a huge western military base within striking distance of more than 67% of the world’s oil. That oil is the reason why neoliberalism’s bad behavior is seen as necessary by neoliberals. Joe Biden famously said that if Israel didn’t exist, the US would have to invent it; this is why.
Dominance of oil-producing nations isn’t just important for the direct reason of access to the oil. Secondarily, oil companies, which control US politics to the extent that they have veto power over essentially any legislation, are the ones who actually get access to the oil, and they need that access for their very existence. Third, but no less important, is the problem of the petrodollar. The Nixon administration decoupled the value of the US dollar from the value of gold and instead negotiated with OPEC (and the Saudis in particular) to make the US dollar the standard currency for buying and selling oil, which forces non-US nations to hold US dollars, and that props up the value of the US dollar and, in turn, the US economy. In short, Americans get a dramatic economic benefit from all those children and other innocent people the Zionists have been murdering since the Nakba (1948).
Neoliberals would frame their demand that all religions be subservient to the capitalist order quite differently. They would probably say that they want religious groups to embrace freedom, and what they offer certainly does include religious freedom. However, under capitalism, only the capitalist really has a true opportunity for a reasonable level of freedom. Everyone else is free to either provide a benefit to the capitalist class or die. If Islam is not willing to provide a benefit to the capitalist class, it must die — or, more precisely, that version of Islam must die and be replaced with an Islam that is subservient to capital.
The left’s support for Islam is complicated, but is based on the fact that Islam is being victimized by capitalism; i.e., it is more about the left being anti-capitalist than pro-Islam. However, the left also appreciates that there is a wide range of belief and action within Islam, and that all people should be free to retain their culture, practice their religion, own personal property, and exist. Genocide is wrong and should be opposed regardless of who the two sides of the genocide are. To truly respect freedom of the individual, you must respect the right of individuals to make choices that you think are wrong as long as they don’t hurt anyone. In fact, the left has a hard time registering a choice as “wrong” if it doesn’t harm other people; the right hates that and calls it “moral relativism”. The right wing spends a lot of time manufacturing harms that might hypothetically be caused by behaviors that they don’t like, but that both seem harmless on first glance and prove to be harmless upon closer inspection.