The first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was a star-studded event featuring elected officials and politicians from across the country, but the spotlight was on a delegate from Michigan protesting President Joe Biden’s support for Israel.

Liano Sharon, a self-described left-wing activist and democracy freak, is one of Michigan’s 138 delegates and a member of the Michigan Democratic Party. During Biden’s speech at the DNC on Monday night, Sharon held up a banner with a Palestinian flag painted on it that read: “STOP ARMAING ISRAEL.”

“We held up the banner. They ripped it out of our hands. We held up the banner during Biden’s speech because he is the one who makes the decision. He is the one who can do that now. We understand that Harris is the vice president: she does not make that decision. He makes it,” Sharon said in an interview with Al Jazeera after being escorted out.

“He needs to call (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, like Raegan did in the ’80s, and say, ‘Hey, this is going to stop now,’ and make sure it stays that way. And we understand that he can do that by imposing an arms embargo and not allowing Israel to continue to arm itself.”

Before he was escorted out, other convention attendees responded to his protest by loudly chanting “We love Joe” and holding up banners that obscured the sign.

A progressive who has been involved in human rights, environmental and anti-war activism since the early 1980s, Sharon is a lifelong advocate of grassroots democracy and says he has a passion for understanding the dynamics of social, cultural and economic systems and developing practical tools to build individual and collective agency and dismantle systems of oppression at every level.

“It’s so important to me because I’m Jewish,” Sharon told Al Jazeera after being escorted out of the arena. “And I’ve always been raised to believe that ‘never again’ means never again for anyone, anywhere, never again, period. And that’s not what’s happening right now.”

“What is happening now is that we continue to finance and support an ongoing genocide, the mass murder of children, and this must stop,” Sharon added.

Sharon indicated that his vote as a delegate would go to Democratic presidential candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris, but he wants Biden to act now to end the war between Israel and Hamas. Israel’s counterattack in Gaza following Hamas’s October 2023 attack has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians (according to local health authorities), devastated large parts of the territory and displaced more than 2.3 million people.

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