For Arab and Muslim Americans It Should Be Dole, Not Clinton

By A. Omar Turbi

This upcoming presidential election represents a unique opportunity for Arab- and Muslim-American voters. Casting aside apathy and forging ahead with a bloc vote for the Republican nominee, former Senator Robert Dole, could change the course of history in the Middle East.

The most contentious issue between Arab and Muslim Americans and Dole seems to be the fate of Jerusalem. Many Dole watchers will tell you that his commitment to Israel with respect to Jerusalem is very loose. Judging Dole on this issue alone would be unfair and totally misguided, especially because of the contrast between his record and that of his rival, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

The Israeli press describes Clinton as the staunchest supporter of the State of Israel in American history. As president, Clinton is most likely to follow a course that will radicalize the Middle East. He already has started down this road by signing the anti-terrorism bill.

We Arab and Muslim Americans have come a long way, but relative to Jewish immigrants, who have been part of America for over 150 years, we have only achieved significant numbers and political know-how in the past 20 to 30 years.

In 1974, as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, I worked with others to promote the Palestinian cause on campus. I recall that after we had organized a debate between Arab League Ambassador to the U.N. Clovis Maksoud and a Jewish professor, some of my fellow Arabs and Muslims on campus complained, “How dare you have an Arab and a Jew on the same stage?”

Twenty years later, Arab and Muslim Americans, now numbering nearly 10 million, about 4 percent of the U.S. population, are happy to work with Jewish peace activists. Further, Arab and Muslim Americans have become active in American mainstream politics, in the Republican, Democratic and Independent parties.

We also have begun to accept the concept of giving our votes to the best candidate regardless of party, rather than taking a stand for a party and then sticking with it, regardless of its candidate’s deals with us.

So now, having learned the value of political participation, Arab and Muslim Americans are wrestling with the problem of whom to support in presidential politics.

What would follow a second Clinton term could be even worse.

In spite of severe divisions among Arab and Muslim Americans due to the Gulf war, which most of us believed was actively promoted by President Bush, most of us finally cast our votes for Bush in 1992 because of his seeming determination to help solve the Palestine problem.

When Bush lost to Clinton, many of us said, “Well, next time we should be in both the Democratic and Republican camps.”

In fact, up to now Arab and Muslim votes have not been significant in numbers because of our own apathy, lack of experience and skepticism about the American electoral system. It has only been since we began studying the patterns of the highly organized “Jewish vote” that we’ve debated seriously about how to get our issues on the political radar of the 1996 candidates. Do we rally as a group behind one presidential candidate or another? Or should we be in both camps?

This time around, in my opinion, the choice between the two presidential candidates, President Bill Clinton and Senator Bob Dole, is not as difficult as in 1992. Clinton is solidly in the Israeli camp. He and Vice President Al Gore are infatuated with the largely Jewish-controlled media, and almost totally Jewish-controlled Hollywood. Their administration is filled to the brim not just with Jewish political appointees, but with Jewish appointees closely identified with the pro-Israel organizations and interests that produce the campaign contributions and bloc vote that have muffled our voices and interests.

I see Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor and many other Jewish appointees to highly visible positions. Less visible but holding key Middle East policymaking jobs are State Department peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross and his deputy, Aaron Miller. The CIA now is directed by John Deutch, a Clinton-Gore appointee with relatives living in Israel. Two of his three top deputies are Jewish. In the White House there is top political adviser Rahm Emmanuel, a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Israel Defense Forces volunteer. Clinton’s first White House Middle East adviser was Martin Indyk, a former AIPAC official who was granted U.S. citizenship two weeks after Clinton was sworn into office so that he could take that key position. Now, Indyk is our ambassador to Israel, the first Jewish appointee ever to hold that sensitive post. How about the Clinton-Gore appointments to the Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and Madeleine Albright, our ambassador to the United Nations who is always there to veto resolutions that seek to help the Palestinians or Lebanese, and to promote severe sanctions against the starving people of Iraq.

There is one Christian Arab American in the cabinet, but I can think of no other Arab American and no Muslims at all who have been appointed to such visible positions as Supreme Court justice or U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. For that matter, I can’t think of an Arab American or Muslim American appointed by the Clinton administration as ambassador to anywhere. And I can’t conceive of such an appointment to any position that would have substantive input into U.S. policymaking in the Middle East.

President Clinton often speaks of his concrete commitment to Israel, citing a Christian fundamentalist pastor to whom he was devoted and with whom Bill and Hillary Clinton traveled to Israel. The pastor told Clinton that God would never forgive him if he ever let Israel down. Every time Clinton has told the story in major speeches, it has ended with the applause line: “And I never will let Israel down.”

The Clinton administration has spun a protective American foreign policy cocoon around Israel in a manner that defies all logic. Israel’s behavior is accepted without criticism, including persistent violations of the human rights of the Palestinians, the savage bombing of innocent civilians in Lebanon, flagrant violations of binding United Nations resolutions and of international law, and the sale of sensitive U.S. military technology to China. The Clinton administration sees Israel as the “blind truth” that has to be protected with a body of lies.

It reminds me of the Cold War era, where both the West and the East would go to any lengths to prevail in their campaigns against the other’s ideology. The pro-Israel influence on American Middle East policy during the Clinton-Gore presidency has produced such an ideology. It is more callous and one-sided than the Middle East policies pursued by any previous American administration, bad as some of them have been.

With such biased sponsorship, the American-sponsored “peace process” between the Arabs and Israel no longer can be taken at face value, given the Clinton administration’s willingness to criticize one side, but never the other. This reluctance is pursued to the point of absurdity when President Clinton refuses to condemn, or even acknowledge, the transfer by our Israeli “ally” of secret U.S. aerospace technology to China, which in turn uses it to intimidate our Asian allies, and sometimes even for re-export to Middle East countries like Iran that we consider “pariah” nations and supporters of terrorism.

If there are many negative reasons why Muslim and Arab Americans might choose not to vote for Clinton, there are positive reasons for voting for Dole. In my opinion, our traditional family values, ethics and morality are more compatible with his conservative principles. Dole is a principled and decent family man with many highly qualified men and women around him. As president, he would be able to attract such outstanding men and women to serve with him.

By contrast, Clinton has no principles at all. He will do or say anything for expediency.

Over many years in the Senate Dole proved time and time again that he had no fear of standing up for American interests, even when they collided with those of Israel. He persisted even when he found himself standing almost alone because otherwise principled colleagues so feared the dreaded Israel lobby.

Dole has advocated linking foreign aid to Israel to the peace process and said even last year, when he already had started his presidential campaign, that as president he would “re-examine” Israel’s to-date-unshrinkable annual U.S. aid subsidy.

Dole also has opposed Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, something that Clinton never criticizes. Dole is remembered for his declaration that foreign aid to Israel is not an “entitlement” program, a statement that will deny him the pro-Israel vote no matter what he does now in the heat of the campaign.

In fact, Bob Dole has a keen interest in harmonizing the whole of the Middle East. He has advocated peace and security based on stability, in which all Americans will be welcome contributors in elevating the economic, political and social standards of all of the region’s peoples without exception. That is a goal worth uniting Arab and Muslim American votes behind Dole.

There are some within the Arab- and Muslim-American communities who believe that Clinton will be more forceful with Israel in his second term. This is a false analogy that has no valid historical precedent. To assume that also is to ignore totally the Gore factor as a presidential contender in the year 2000.

Among factor to consider is the declaration by Secretary of State Warren Christopher that he will relinquish his post at the end of the current Clinton term. Although Christopher has never really criticized Israel during his 25 trips to the Middle East to sell ideas that originate in Tel Aviv, he must have learned some things that would help Clinton to reconsider his vow to his fundamentalist pastor during a second term.

But Christopher won’t be there. His most likely replacements are either Albright or Richard Holbrooke, a former professional diplomat of Jewish extraction who never has expressed any serious criticism of Israel.

The Gore Factor

If a second Clinton term would be just like the unacceptable first term, what would follow could be even worse. At a town meeting with employees of a high-tech company in San Diego recently, Vice President Gore seized the opportunitiy to suggest his presidency in the year 2000. Gore loyalists already are deployed throughout the Clinton administration and in the Democratic party apparatus. There is little doubt he will get the Democratic nomination in the year 2000, and even Arab-American Democrats have ruled out Gore as “hopeless” on the Middle East.

Although Clinton’s policy on Bosnia has been more acceptable than his policy on Palestine, it would be a mistake for Muslim Americans to credit Clinton for ending the Bosnian war. If it had not been for the constant insistence by Dole on a unilateral U.S. lifting of the arms embargo that was preventing the Bosnian government from getting arms to defend its borders against the Serbs, Bosnia would have continued to bleed. In fact the ambivalence of Bill Clinton and his shortsightedness during the first two and a half years he was in office led to the massacres in the presumed safe havens in Sebrenica and Gorazde in the summer of 1995.

The July visit to Washington by newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu marked a low point in the Clinton administration’s flip-flop policy on the peace process. One of the top items on Netanyahu’s agenda during his two-hour-long meeting with President Clinton was Syria. The Israeli prime minister wanted the U.S. to impose sanctions aggressively on Syria, and tighten existing ones on Iran. I predict, if Clinton wins in 1996, that Al Gore will take up as his personal project a campaign for sanctions on Syria similar to those now in effect against Libya and Iran—all to support his bid for the presidency in the year 2000.

Arab- and Muslim-Americans voters must seize this historic opportunity, build political capital with the Republican Party and its presidential nominee, and exercise their electoral leverage as a voting bloc behind Dole. That bloc can be equivalent to, if not greater than, the bloc vote mounted by the U.S. Jewish community, which is less than 3 percent of America’s population.

In 1992 the Jewish community cast 92 percent of its vote for Clinton. In 1996 it is expected to give the Clinton-Gore ticket more than 90 percent.

If this year’s presidential race is extremely close, as virtually every political analyst predicts it will be, a voting bloc of Arab and Muslim Americans could provide the winning margin, particularly since it is concentrated in the largest states, including California. Then never again will we be marginalized in American politics.

The remarkable thing is that, unlike the pro-Israel bloc, we are not asking the U.S. to do anything against its own national interests. We ask only that the U.S. Middle East policy be made in Washington, not Tel Aviv. We call for strong support for human rights in Arab countries as well as in Israel. We seek the strengthening of democracy for all the peoples of the Middle East.

The current regimes of the Arab world have very little leverage in American politics and the Western world. Americans perceive most of them as inept, corrupt, and with little or no respect for their own citizens’ human rights. In many cases this perception is correct.

Just as I would expect a Dole administration to support better compliance with human rights for everyone living in Israel, I would expect the same standards to be applied to Arab and other countries of the Middle East. That, too, I believe, is in the long-term interest of Muslim and Arab Americans as well as all of the peoples of the region.