By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 24 2000 (IPS)

With two weeks left before the Nov. 7 elections, the several million muslim voters in the United States are deeply split along ancestral lines.

While African-American Muslims remain firmly in the Democratic column, immigrant Muslims from the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, South Asia, are leaning toward Texas Gov. George W. Bush, despite a previous history of voting for Democrats.

That could spell trouble for Vice President Al Gore, particularly because Arab-Americans voters are concentrated in three key “swing states” which could go either way: Michigan, New Jersey, and Illinois. A strong Arab-American vote for Bush could tip those states into his win column, giving him a rich harvest of the electoral college where all of a state’s electoral votes are cast for the candidate who wins the most votes in that state.

According to one poll announced last week, 40 percent of eligible Arab-American and Asia-American Muslims favour Bush and another 25 percent intend to vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, whose family originally hails from Lebanon. Only 24 percent said they will vote for Vice President Al Gore, with the rest registered as undecided.

At the same time, a plurality of respondents said that they favoured Democrats for Congress and agreed that the Democratic Party best represents the interests of Muslims in the United States.

After consulting with grassroots organisations, most of them representing immigrant communities, several national Muslim groups Monday formally endorsed Bush as president.

“Governor Bush took the initiative to meet with local and national representatives of the Muslim community,” said Agha Saeed, director of the American Muslim Political Co-ordinating Council – Political Action Committee (AMPCC- PAC), a consortium works with four major national Muslim organisations.

With one of the highest percentages of church-going people, the United States, whose constitution requires a strict division between church and state, has long been dominated by Christians. Of the religiously active population, about 56 percent belong to Protestant denominations, and about 37 percent are Roman Catholic. Less than two percent belong to Orthodox churches.

Both major Christian groups are thoroughly bipartisan, but, in presidential elections since World War Two, a small majority of Protestants generally have voted Republican in presidential elections, while a stronger majority of Catholics have voted for Democrats.

During the same period, US Jews, who make up about 2.2 percent of the population, have voted strongly Democratic – by well over 80 percent in the last two presidential elections.

With six million people, Muslim-Americans make up about the same percentage of the population as Jewish Americans. They, too, have tended to vote Democratic by significant margin.

Muslim-Americans are divided into three major groupings of roughly equal size: African-American converts, most of them Black Muslims living in urban communities throughout the United States; Arab-Americans Muslims; and Muslims from South Asia, especially Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India.

The political clout of all three groups has long been either ignored or taken for granted by both parties, according to political activists who note that, until four years ago, some candidates for national office were even reluctant to accept contributions from Muslim organisations for fear of being tarnished by the popular image of Muslims as “terrorists” or of alienating Jewish votes.

African-American Muslims, which have made the greatest strides in gaining elective office at the local level, vote much like the black communities in which they live and are therefore expected to vote overwhelmingly for Gore.

One poll taken last month by the Coalition for Good Government of the Muslim American Society found 84 percent of respondents in favour of Gore and only nine percent for Bush.

“Of course, what we see in the Middle East situation and elsewhere where Muslims are being persecuted is something we have to put to the forefront,” says Ali Khan, the Coalition’s president. “But we also worry about the crime rate, unemployment, education and literacy, and cleaning up our communities.”

Similar issues are a major concern to all Muslim communities, according to Ibrahim Hooper, head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which sponsored last week’s survey but which is also affiliated with the AMPCC.

But many in the Arab and South Asian communities here are very concerned with two specific law-enforcement issues, as well: the use of “secret evidence” in alleged terrorism cases, the vast majority of which have targeted Arab-Americans; and the special attention given to suspected Arabs by airport security personnel concerned about terrorism.

The fact that Bush himself brought up both issues during his first televised debate with Gore made a major difference to Arab-American voters in particular. They have borne the brunt of both airport-security profiling practices and “secret evidence” cases where the government has tried to deport suspected terrorists without affording them the right to see the evidence against them or cross-examine witnesses.

“Arab-Americans were jumping for joy” when Bush objected to these practices during the first debate,” according to James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), which has not endorsed either candidate. Bush also has addressed the same issues in a special video-tape prepared for Arab-American audiences.

But the biggest factor bringing Arab-American and South Asian- American Muslim votes to Bush, according to activists here, is the fact that Bush has been willing to meet and listen to these groups.

While Gore has spoken at events sponsored by the AAI, he has turned down meetings with other Muslim groups, including those which endorsed Bush Monday. They include the American Muslim Alliance, the American Muslim Council, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and CAIR. Bush’s attitude has been completely different.

“If the candidate is not willing to listen to us, we have a problem,” says Omar Ahmed, CAIR’s president. “We have approached the (Gore) campaign several times and (gotten) no response.”

“Accessibility has become the number one issue at this time,” adds Salam Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

To many Muslim leaders, Gore’s aloofness is perplexing and marks a possible throwback to 12 years ago when then-Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis actually rejected an endorsement of Arab-American leaders. They note that Clinton, who won a plurality of the Arab-American vote in 1996, not only has met with Arab-American and Muslim groups many times, but also recruited Muslims to prominent posts in his administration.

Moreover, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Gore’s running-mate and an Orthodox Jew, also has met with Muslim organisations during the campaign and is a co- sponsor of legislation to end the use of “secret evidence”.

Al-Marayati explicitly rejects the notion that Lieberman’s own close ties to Israel are responsible for the tilt toward Bush. “Frankly, we prefer having an Orthodox Jew to an atheist because at least we have identical moral values,” he says.

And, despite the vote for Bush, Muslim leaders say they still support Democratic Congressmen, including senior congressmen from Michigan, David Bonior and John Conyers, who represent constituencies with several hundreds thousand Arab-Americans and Muslims.

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