CQ WEEKLY – IN FOCUS Sept. 25, 2006 – Page 2522
By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff
In this bitterly contested election year, candidates are romancing every voting bloc they can find, with one striking exception. Arab-American voters, who had turned out in impressive numbers for George W. Bush back in 2000, are now — less than two months from Election Day — that rarity in American politics: a constituency without a suitor.
Arab-Americans have long struggled to be heard in policy debates about the one big issue that unites them — American policy toward the Middle East — because of the strong ties between the United States and Israel.
But Arab-Americans say that since the 2001 terrorist attacks, their situation has eroded considerably. Few politicians, they say, are even willing to offer a sympathetic gesture, while the slights have been more open and more grievous.
Arab-Americans "are basically rejected by both parties," said Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
It’s a result, Khalidi says, of the association Americans draw between people of Arab descent and the radical Muslim terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center.
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Where Arab-Americans Live:
In reality, Arab-Americans are mostly Christian. The Census Bureau does not have solid data on the religious breakdown of the 3.5 million of them who live in the United States, but a 2002 survey by the polling firm Zogby International found that more than 60 percent identified themselves as Christians, while about a quarter said they practiceIslam. Of the estimated 4.7 million Muslims in the United States, more than 80 percent are not of Arab descent, mostly black Muslims or those from South Asia.
But Arab-American advocates understand that most Americans assume them to be Muslim — and they accept that they must defend Islam as well as their ethnic identities in the forum of post-Sept. 11 politics. "The belief is that Islamic culture and Arabic culture are tantamount to being the same thing," says Nidal Ibrahim, executive director of the Arab American Institute in Washington. "They are not, but the perception exists here." Politically, much has changed since the time when GOP strategists — chief among them the Washington anti-tax guru Grover Norquist — courted Arab-Americans as part of a plan to forge a permanent Republican majority. Norquist and others argued that socially conservative Arab-American voters were a natural fit with the GOP’s base and could help the party in battleground states, such as Michigan. Arab-Americans supported Bush because they thought he, like his father, would not reflexively support Israel.
Officials of both parties say they welcome Arab-American support and have, in fact, reached out to the constituency. In fact, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, is chairman of the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Committee, an umbrella organization of party leaders of European and Mediterranean descent that is affiliated with the Democratic National Committee.
But the ongoing fallout from Sept. 11, combined with U.S. policy in the Middle East — most obviously the Iraq War, but also Bush’s strong support for Israel — has soured Arab-Americans on the GOP. And the Democrats’ vocal criticism of the deal last spring to lease U.S. seaport operations to a company from the Persian Gulf hurt relations with Arab-Americans.
Home-Grown Worries
It’s not only that Arab-Americans aren’t getting their way in policy debates. They have long faced that problem. But they find it difficult to make political friends with those who openly question their loyalty as Americans.
For instance, at a hearing earlier this month of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Chairman Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, closely questioned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on what he was doing to deal with the threat of home-grown Islamist terrorism. Chertoff promised he would step up DHS efforts to "pay attention to what causes radicalization" in American Muslim communities.
Arab-Americans hear ominous undertones in such talk, and, as a consequence, civil liberties and racial profiling have rocketed to the top of their agenda of domestic concerns. It worried them that in August after a bomb plot was uncovered in London, Rep. Peter T. King, the New York Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, in effect called for racial profiling, asking airport screeners to give greater scrutiny to passengers who looked Middle Eastern. "That was really frustrating to see, five years after 9/11," said Christine Gleichert, a lobbyist with the American-Arab Anti-DiscriminationCommittee. "We don’t support terrorism of any type. This community defines terrorism the same way anyone else does."
Arab-American activists say these slights might be politically short-sighted because Arab-American votes — or the failure to produce them — could prove decisive in any number of congressional races this November. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Michigan have Arab-American populations that range from 185,000 in Ohio to nearly 500,000 in Michigan, according to the Arab American Institute, and all have tight U.S. Senate races.
Republican campaign officials say they have an active grass-roots campaign for Arab-American support. "We’re honored for their support, and continue to work hard to maintain that support," said Tara Wall, director of outreach communications at the Republican National Committee. In races where Arab-Americans could make a difference, census data indicates that more than 4,000 live in Florida’s 22nd District, where Republican E. Clay Shaw Jr. is facing state Senate Minority Leader Ron Klein, and nearly 2,000 live in Pennsylvania’s 6th District, where Republican Jim Gerlach is up against his 2004 near-miss challenger, Lois Murphy.
Motivating Members
Getting Arab-Americans to participate in such contests is another matter. They have well-established Washington advocacy groups, led by the Arab American Institute and American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, as well as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which represents many Arab-American Muslims. But since 2001, these groups have faced twin challenges in motivating their members to get involved in the political process: Not only are politicians less eager to court them, but many of their members have simply withdrawn, put off by the guilt-by-association rhetoric of their critics.
King’s endorsement of racial profiling was the latest such provocation, but Arab-American advocates in Washington say they have been under assault since 2001 by conservative commentators who accuse them of propagating radical Islamic thought in America, and indeed, of seeking to turn America into an Islamic country.
A case in point is the candidacy of Keith Ellison, an American-born black Muslim who recently won a Democratic primary for a House seat in Minnesota. CAIR leaders have backed his candidacy for the symbolic weight it would carry for Muslim Americans of all ethnicities. CAIR executive director Nihad Awad has personally donated to the campaign and has spoken at an Ellison fundraiser.
The backlash has been quick and severe. Conservative writer Joel Mowbray argued in a pre-primary column that Ellison should apologize, because, he said, CAIR has refused in the past to denounce specific terrorist organizations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and because Awad was once affiliated with the Islamic Association of Palestine, which ceased operation two years ago amid charges that it preached anti-Semitism and served as a U.S. front for Hamas.
Corey Saylor, government affairs director for CAIR, says that the group does condemn Hamas and Hezbollah and added that it’s "unfortunate" that people such as Mowbray "try to exploit fear." But Mowbray is far from alone. Daniel Pipes, a prominent Neo-conservative who heads the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia think tank, has been among the most persistent critics, particularly in his assaults on CAIR. He says the group favors Islamic radicals attacking U.S. soldiers in Iraq and wants "Islam to be the law in this country." Last year, former CIA Director James Woolsey oversaw the drafting of a Freedom House paper that warned that mosques in the United States are fomenting hatred against America. Later that year, conservative author
Paul Sperry published a book titled "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."
Arab-American advocates hotly deny these charges, and underline their opposition to all kinds of terrorism. Gleichert, a former aide to Lebanese-American Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, a West Virginia Democrat, calls the work of Pipes and his allies "opportunistic and evil." But observers within the Arab-American community say the stigma of alleged terror support actively discourages wider participation in the political process. "You are slapped blind the minute you open your mouth," Khalidi contends.
Fallen Alliance
That’s a far cry from the early accords with the Bush 2000 campaign, yielding Bush a 46-38 plurality among Arab-American voters over Al Gore, according to the Arab American Institute. Ralph Nader, who is of Lebanese-American descent, polled 14 percent.
In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the president took care to defend mainstream Muslim believers, appearing at Washington’s Islamic Center and repeatedly stressing that he was not waging war against Islam. Since the Iraq War began, though, the relationship has fallen apart. Arab-Americans voted by a margin of more than 2 to 1 for Democrat John Kerry in 2004, and among Muslims, the figure was closer to 14 to 1, according to a survey by the Arab American Institute.
It’s not hard to see why. In addition to the conflict in Iraq, Bush’s characterizations of the role of Islam in the war on terrorism have become more confrontational. He recently resurrected the term "Islamo-fascism" in pronouncements on al Qaeda, a coinage that mainstream Muslim Americans strenuously reject. And earlier this month, Bush delivered a speech in which he said that al Qaeda sought to re-establish the ancient Islamic "caliphate." CAIR promptly issued a statement saying that Bush had given the terrorists "undeserved legitimacy" while ignoring "the vast majority of Muslims worldwide who reject terrorism." Democrats have not established a better relationship with Arab-Americans. They were among the leading critics of the Dubai ports deal, New York Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer even drawing an analogy between the Arab company and "skinheads." Later in the spring, Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, helped scuttle the candidacy of a well-respected Passaic County, N.J., businessman, Sami Merhi, a Lebanese-American who was running for county freeholder, on the grounds that he had shown sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers four years before.
And then there was Lebanon. After the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in July, Israel led a monthlong bombing campaign against much of the civilian infrastructure in southern Lebanon. Thousands of Arab-Americans mounted a grass-roots campaign to persuade the U.S. government to push for a cease-fire, but Congress instead voted nearly unanimously to express firm support for Israel’s invasion. The House declined even to add language to its resolution calling on Israel to minimize civilian casualties; the Senate did ask "all sides" in the conflict "to protect innocent civilian life."
"In the accumulation of grievances, it has been one on top of the other," said Zogby of the Arab American Institute. But with Lebanon, he said, "I was stunned at the sheer crassness and stupidity of the way people brushed off this tragedy." So where will Arab-Americans turn, come November 7? Zogby predicts that they will vote on a case-by-base basis, or they may ignore foreign policy and vote on concerns closer to home, such as education, taxes or crime.
Others aren’t even that optimistic. "People withdrew from the political process," said Khalil Jahshan, a Pepperdine University lecturer and longtime Arab-American activist in Washington. "The leaders weren’t able to motivate the community. Things froze after 9/11."