Hassan Abdel Salam is one of two founders of the Abandon Biden movement. He is also the Executive Director of the Civil Rights Alliance for America, which is the organization that is organizing and coordinating the Abandon Biden movement. While conducting academic research for almost one year on the occupation in Jerusalem in 2022, Hassan Abdel Salam publicly called for the liberation of Palestine. In December 2022, Hassan Abdel Salam was detained and tortured for 23 days by Israeli forces. For 12 days, alongside his research assistant, he engaged in a hunger strike. Hassan Abdel Salam has been a professor of strategy, movements, and human rights, for 12 years. He has taught courses and presented on genocide, torture, displacement, refugees, and discrimination.

Hassan Abdel Salam has been teaching students how to strategize to advance human rights for ostensibly powerless vulnerable groups. Drawing on his years of teaching human rights strategy, Hassan Abdel Salam imagined and continues to imagine the Abandon Biden movement as a vehicle to end genocide.

Hassan Abdel Salam has stepped down from his academic career, seeking to end America’s complicit enabling of genocide. Hassan Abdel Salam has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and three law degrees and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Hassan Abdel Salam completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College. He taught at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace, University of Melbourne in Australia, Wits University in South Africa, Davidson College, New York University, and at the University of Minnesota. Hassan Abdel Salam was a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School and a Visiting Scholar at Pennsylvania Law School.