Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1998, pages 33-34

Elections 2000

A U.S. Election Strategy for Muslim Americans and Christian Arab Americans for the Year 2000

By Richard H. Curtiss

Forty-seven years ago when I was taking my first courses at the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, one of the speakers warned against trying to explain the differences between the Republican and Democratic parties. The reason, he said, is that there are no lasting, fundamental party differences. It’s a point for Muslim and Arab Americans to remember as they develop an election strategy.

A second truism is that all politics is local. For example, members of Congress from the New York metropolitan area invariably are pro-Israel. The New York metropolitan area also happens to have the largest Jewish population of any city in the world. Similarly, Democratic Representatives David Bonior and John Conyers, two of the most outspoken congressmen on Palestinian matters, represent districts in Detroit, a city which has huge Muslim- and Arab-American communities.

In short, politicians reflect the prevailing views in the district that elects them. Therefore, Muslim voters don’t have to please their representative in Congress to gain influence. He or she has to please them in order to be re-elected.

A third consideration is that American foreign policy is almost solely the result of American domestic politics. The most extreme example is in the Middle East, where ever since World War II U.S. policies have ignored long-term American strategic or national interests and instead have been shaped by an enormously powerful ethnic/ religious lobby.

In fact, in a poll among lobbyists for special interests conducted in December 1997 by Fortune magazine, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was voted the second most powerful lobby in the United States, trailing only the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).

So any electoral strategy for Muslim and Arab Americans must be based upon three considerations: First, don’t become irrevocably identified with one political party or another. Second, build support in Congress and eventually in the White House by working together to elect friendly candidates, from either party, through unified action. And, third, since the problem is to neutralize a domestic lobby that has distorted, even subverted, U.S. national interests, the goal should be to restore traditional American support for human rights, self-determination and fair play.

If Muslim and Arab Americans can become a domestic lobby for these American traditions, they will earn the gratitude of an overwhelming majority of their fellow Americans. In short, Muslims and Arab Americans do have the power to change American foreign policy, and very quickly if they work together to build on their strengths, and minimize their weaknesses.

Muslim and Arab Americans have the power to change American foreign policy, and very quickly.

Their biggest strength is in their numbers. Islam is not only the fastest growing religion in the world; it also is the fastest growing religion in the United States. There are an estimated 5 to 8 million Muslims in the United States, and perhaps another 1.5 to 2 million Christian Arab Americans, for a combined total of 6.5 to 10 million people, or 2.5 to 3.8 percent of the American population. And the Muslim numbers are growing very rapidly.

By contrast, although the U.S. Jewish community claims 5.5 million members, in fact by now it probably totals fewer than 5 million people. Of these, no more than 10 percent are Orthodox Jews, and this is the only segment of the U.S. Jewish community that is growing, because of its high birthrate.

According to this year’s annual survey by the World Jewish Congress Institute in Jerusalem, the other 90 percent of the U.S. Jewish community is diminishing. Its birthrate is below replacement level, and about 50 percent of American Jews, like Jews everywhere in the world outside Israel, are marrying spouses of different faiths. Of these intermarried couples, perhaps no more than 20 percent raise their children as Jews.

As a result, World Jewish Congress demographers predict the Jewish community in the United States, and in the rest of the world outside Israel, will be reduced to half its present size within one generation.

These comparisons do not imply that Muslim and Arab Americans will always be pitted against Jewish Americans. On the contrary, once the Israeli-Palestinian problem is solved to the satisfaction of both parties, the animosity presumably will vanish. And with it will vanish most of the problems of American Muslims in the United States.

If the Jewish community’s weakness is in its numbers, its strengths are in the media, financial power, and its superb organization. Some 52 Jewish groups belong to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and work together very effectively whenever Israeli interests are involved.

By contrast, just as the strength of the Muslim- and Arab-American communities is in their numbers, their weaknesses are in financial resources, media influence and organization. But because of their numbers, and the happy chance that their communities are situated in the states with the largest concentrations of electoral votes, they can even the playing field very quickly by concentrating on organizational unity.

Muslims already have major roof organizations for religious activity such as Warith Deen Mohammad’s American Muslim Mission, the Islamic Society of North America and the Islamic Circle of North America, to name only the largest.

There also are Islamic political organizations. These already include a lobbying group (the American Muslim Council—AMC), an anti-defamation group (the Council for American-Islamic Relations—CAIR), a grass-roots membership group (the American Muslim Alliance—AMA), and a number of other locally based groups seeking to expand and find their niche in the national political spectrum.

This year local chapters of these Islamic political groups worked with Islamic centers in major Muslim communities to hold “meet the candidates” sessions in preparation for the 1998 national elections. At such sessions all candidates for elective office are invited to introduce themselves to local Muslims and hear the Islamic community’s concerns.

Out of these local gatherings came agreed endorsements for Muslim voters. So long as the deliberations to formulate such bloc votes take place outside mosque and church buildings, they do not jeopardize the tax- exempt status of those religious institutions.

There were some notable victories from such joint actions in 1996. Pakistani Americans from all over the United States sent financial contributions to the South Dakota senatorial campaign of Tim Johnson to help him defeat incumbent Larry Pressler, author of the Pressler amendment that halted U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan. The money enabled Johnson to buy a lot of television time, and he won.

Even more inspiring was the unity shown by the large and diverse Muslim community in New Jersey in 1996. Muslims first made a unified endorsement of senatorial candidate Dick Zimmer. After he seemed less than grateful, in a miracle of organization, the Muslim community switched its endorsement to Zimmer’s rival, Robert Torricelli.

Torricelli won by a very narrow margin and has publicly acknowledged that without the support of New Jersey Muslims, he would not have been elected to the U.S. Senate. One result was that when members of the Clinton administration were preparing to bomb Iraq last February, in contrast to other senators from the Northeastern states, Torricelli urged restraint and strongly encouraged the visit to Baghdad of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In short, after New Jersey’s Muslim community swung an election by voting as a bloc, New Jersey’s senator suddenly became a reasonable human being on Middle Eastern matters.

Hard work by Muslim- and Arab-American leaders in getting their communities to register to vote and then to turn out in large numbers to cast their votes as a bloc will produce more such success stories. All this is just a dress rehearsal, however, for a bloc vote on a national scale in the presidential election in the year 2000. Whether that unified vote is cast for the winner or the loser is not so important as is the demonstration that American Muslims have the discipline and organization to vote as a bloc, and that they can persuade many Christian Arab Americans to join them. If they demonstrate this in the year 2000, it will set in motion the most significant foreign policy reorientation in American history.

There are pitfalls to avoid if such an effort is to succeed. In an attempt to organize a bloc Muslim presidential endorsement in 1996, leaders of five national Islamic political groups sought to meet with representatives of both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

Clinton declined to meet with them. Obviously he feared alienating his strong support among the Jewish community, which cast 88 percent of its votes for him, and also provided more than half of his campaign funding.

Dole campaign aides did meet with the Muslim leaders and agreed to all but one of their requests. By then, however, polls showed Dole was far behind. The Muslim leaders feared that if they endorsed an almost certain loser, their followers would lose faith in them. That was an opportunity lost, but at the same time it was a learning experience.

Reaching Agreement

Another problem is finding methods to reach agreement on which candidates to endorse. There are lessons in this regard to be learned from America’s organized Jewish community. There are Jewish individuals and organizations attached to both the Democratic and the Republican parties. These Jewish Republicans and Jewish Democrats are free to discuss the merits of candidates with their co-religionists, but the final decisions as to which candidates get the mainstream Jewish donations and votes are made by the Israel Lobby, AIPAC. Virtually all of the other national Jewish organizations simply fall into line.

The 1996 confusion among Muslim political organizations showed that no such necessary Islamic mechanism is as yet in place. Between now and the year 2000, the Islamic community must devise some means to make a national endorsement that will be accepted by all.

Perhaps the leaders of the Islamic political groups should act as advocates. But a council of three or five or seven elders representing the entire spectrum, Sunni, Shi’i, indigenous Muslims and immigrants and their descendents, in rough proportion to their actual numbers, should be set up in advance. The council could hear the arguments on behalf of the candidates, but then reach a consensus decision that would be publicized in all Islamic periodicals in America and announced in America’s 1,500 mosques on at least the final two Fridays before the national election.

In such announcements no one would be told that they must vote for the recommended candidate, or even that they must vote at all. But all would be informed that only by a show of the discipline and unity required to turn out a huge bloc vote will American Muslims ever attain serious influence in the American political system.

A final problem is to define the criteria around which the bloc vote is formed. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs already has carried articles by Muslim writers suggesting such criteria.

The fewer the criteria, however, the more likely an effective bloc vote can be achieved. Even having two foreign policy criteria is creating problems. For example, what do Ohio Muslims do about Rep. Dan Burton, a long-term proven friend of the Kashmiris, and an equally long-term proven friend of the Israelis?

One can make a strong case that the Palestine problem should be given priority in judging candidates for Congress because, once it is solved, the Islamic community’s other problems, both domestic and foreign, will be greatly alleviated by removal of the Israel lobby from the equation.

For example, although at present the Kashmir problem presents the world’s greatest danger of setting off a nuclear war, it is not the India lobby, but the India lobby’s current working alliance with the Israel lobby, that keeps the United States from throwing its weight behind self-determination for the Kashmiris. Until the Israel lobby is neutralized, there will be no independence for either Palestine or Kashmir.

Similarly, the current defamation of Muslim and Arab Americans in the United States does not spring from the American mainstream. It originates with and is kept alive by the friends of Israel in Hollywood, the media, academia and other aspects of U.S. life. Remove or neutralize the Israel irritant, and the other problems of Muslims in America will become manageable.

In my opinion, local councils representing the various Muslim traditions within each community should work together to reach agreed endorsements based largely on domestic criteria for candidates for city, county and state offices.

Similarly, the coordinating council of national Muslim political organizations, founded earlier this year, should decide the criteria for Senate and House candidates, to avoid the possibility of local Muslim councils in Toledo and Cleveland, for example, choosing different Ohio senatorial candidates and canceling each other out.

But when it comes to presidential candidates, I believe the coordinating council of heads of national Islamic political organizations should present its opinions to a national council of three, five or seven elders, representing the present ethnic and sectarian balance of the American Muslim community. It would be understood that the judgement of the elders would be final.

Traditionally Muslims have subordinated excessive individualism to reach consensus on the best course for the common good. If they can establish this tradition in the United States, and obtain the backing of Christian Arab Americans who share their interest in the Palestine problem, Muslims may soon be able to play a major role in molding American domestic and foreign policies. And that role would immensely benefit both America and the world.