Arab Americans and Muslim Americans: Not on Clinton's Political Radar

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Some diplomats suspect that one of the reasons the Clinton Administration does not want the [U.N. Security/ Council to demand that the Serbs accept the Vance Owen plan is because this might create a precedent that could be applied to Israel. ''

—Correspondent Paul Lewis, New York Times, April 1, 1993

I was talking to an Iraqi-American contractor about reconfiguring office space when I got the first phone call that the World Trade Center bombing seemed to be connected to Islamic militants. Only two minutes later the first radio station called for an opinion. I was on the air for most of the next four hours, but the brief exchanges in our office during those first two minutes stuck in my head.

"So it wasn't the Serbs," someone said.

"Thank God it wasn't Iraqis," the contractor said.

"Are they Palestinians?" someone else asked.

"Egyptian, apparently," someone said. "If it had been Palestinians, it would blow 20 years of image rehabilitation sky-high."

That's all I heard before I went on the air to explain, on six different talk shows, the grievances that could drive any unbalanced Muslim, from Morocco to Indonesia, to do something so futile, so vindictive, so insane. And, of course, in the ensuing days, it turned out that at least two of the suspects were Palestinians.

There probably isn't an Arab American in the United States who hasn't asked and answered for himself or herself four related questions.

First, who benefits? Answer: Anyone who wishes to derail the peace talks.

Second, doesn't that include Israelis who don't want an agreement before their occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is irreversible? Answer: Yes.

Third, could Islamic radicals who want an Islamic state in all of the former mandate of Palestine, or Palestinian leftist radicals who want a "democratic secular state" throughout the same territory, have done something so harmful to their cause just to torpedo the peace talks? Answer: Of course, since none of them care about the Muslim or Arab image in the West.

Fourth, is it feasible to suggest to non-Muslim Americans that, while funding for disaffected Muslim individuals could have come from Islamic radicals in Iran or political radicals in Iraq, Libya or Syria, encouragement also could have come from hard-line intelligence circles in Israel, at least to the extent of ensuring that something so beneficial to Israeli settlers and revisionists wasn't detected in time to stop it? Answer: Not unless the suggester is prepared to be ridiculed as a hopeless Israel-basher by fellow Americans.

So, few Muslim and Arab Americans will voice these almost universal thoughts publicly, although by now it's clear that during the Likud era the Israeli government allowed funding from the Iranian government and possibly from wealthy Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia and/or Arab states of the Gulf to reach Hamas militants in Gaza and the West Bank. Making sure that money got through to Palestinian Islamic militants made sense to Israel's Likud government, dedicated to keeping all of Palestine. It helped build up a group that seems both unreasonable and hostile to the West, and it undercut the increasingly moderate mainstream PLO and West Bank leadership.

No one seriously contests this. All that's in question now is whether Israel's Labor government can put back into the bottle the radical religious genies the Israeli intelligence establishment helped release. Likud, which approved the releasing, is betting the effort will bring down Labor, and that when Likud is back in power it can use the fundamentalists as an excuse for "transferring" and/or deferring forever self-determination for the Palestinians.

All of these things are talked about among journalists covering Israel, but very little is printed in the mainstream press. These things also are talked about among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, but not outside their own community.

But if these facts were injected into America's "mainstream" dialogue, they would have a profound effect. With precious little help from their own media, most Americans already have concluded that Israel is militarily brutal, politically corrupt and, economically, a socialistic shambles, dependent upon ever-increasing handouts from the U.S. taxpayer.

Private opinions within the American Jewish community may not be much different. But most American Jews have let the political shots be called by national Jewish organizations that put out the word that George Bush and James Baker were "unsympathetic to Israel," "didn't have any Jewish friends," and might even be "crypto anti-Semites." The result was that even though many Jews think the U.S. should use its aid to pull Israel back from the political abyss created by its extremist leaders (just as Bush and Baker were doing), they gave between 80 and 85 percent of their votes to Clinton. In unguarded moments, some Jewish journalists have guessed that, in fact, Bush received no more than 7 or 8 percent of Jewish votes and campaign contributions.

The results are obvious. Within six weeks after Clinton's election, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for whatever reason, derailed the peace talks by expelling, without charges or hearings, 400 Palestinian Muslim leaders. The Clinton administration took no forceful action to restart the talks, and protected Rabin's government from the sanctions that the United Nations would surely impose if the U.S. could not veto them. As the quotation from The New York Times at the beginning of this article suggests, the Clinton administration not only is reciprocating in the Middle East for Jewish election support, it may be avoiding steps elsewhere, like an internationally imposed solution in Bosnia, that could set a precedent for an imposed solution in Israel-Palestine.

Such total deference to the "Israel lobby" only underlines the political marginalization of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. Together they outnumber American Jews, and the gap is widening. But on President Clinton's finely calibrated political radar, they don't exist.

During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's March visit, Clinton was asked whether Rabin had agreed to take back the expelled 400 immediately and renounce future expulsions of Palestinians, as demanded by the United Nations Security Council and Arab-American and Muslim-American groups.

"We didn't discuss that," Clinton replied. Period. And period to any illusions that the groups in question had attained any influence in U.S. political life at the national level, or ever will until they get their varying acts together.

In the 1992 elections, both groups split their votes. Muslims probably voted along class lines, with wealthy Pakistani-American physicians and pharmacists seeing their interests quite differently than indigenous American Muslims in America's inner cities. It's not clear how many of them voted at all.

Arab Americans may have split their votes about evenly. Whatever their problems before Aug. 2, 1990, they were bitterly divided by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The invasion of a Muslim Arab country by another Muslim Arab country split Arabs and Muslims overseas right down the middle, pitting not just state against state but brother against brother.

In the U.S., the split among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans has been equally poisonous. To oversimplify the matter, many foreign-born members of the two communities tended to overlook who fired the first shots and concentrated instead on who killed the most people. Many American-born members of the two communities, admitting Saddam had made an incredible blunder, sought solace in theories that he had been "lured" or "trapped" by a glory-hungry U.S. administration manipulated into destroying the most powerful Arab army by Israel's friends in American high places.

Long after Saddam's defeat, the disruptive dispute, which shattered any possibility of effective bloc voting by U.S. Arabs or Muslims, has taken on a life of its own. One Arab American who praised Clinton appointees Martin Indyk and Samuel Lewis, both long-term supporters of Israeli Labor government policies, in an apparent attempt to develop rapport with the new administration, has been denounced by other Arab Americans who proclaim that in following such opportunistic tactics he doesn't speak for them. Some of the latter, however, are exactly the same left-leaning Arab Americans who adamantly refused to acknowledge what Bush was doing for the Palestinians because of what he had done to the Iraqis.

There are serious problems in America's Arab and Muslim communities. There are a few effective organizations, but there also are individuals who know what to say to be invited on television shows and be quoted in the mainstream press. In saying what the media wants to hear, however, some become abrasive clowns and most speak only for themselves. By inviting them to speak on behalf of communities that didn't elect them, the Israel-friendly media renders mainstream Arab Americans and Muslim Americans voiceless.

Some Basic Truths

To end this situation, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans must begin to agree among themselves on some basic truths. All agree publicly that terrorism against unarmed civilians, whether Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis or Americans, cannot be justified. But all must also speak out on the corollaries.

If there were no "Abu Nidal," the Mossad would have had to create one. But for years he lived in turn on the Iraqi, Syrian or Libyan dole, endlessly stalking and killing moderates within the PLO and among Arab governments. Today he still is living somewhere, on funds he has stolen, received for intra-Arab assassinations, or extorted from wealthy Arabs and, perhaps, Arab regimes for leaving them alone.

All Arab Americans and Muslim Americans denounce him, but not always his sponsoring regimes. Until they do, will anyone take seriously their denunciations of Israel's state-sponsored terrorism?

Other Arab extremists also have practiced such disastrous tactics in the name of "Arabism." George Habash, Nayif Hawatmeh, Ahmad Jibril and Mohamad "Abul Abbas" have been accused of terrorist acts against civilians and also against diplomats, thus impugning the honor of the Arab and other governments responsible for their safety.

Habash hijacked airplanes, touched off a civil war in Jordan, and advocated the overthrow of virtually every Arab regime that was helping or could help the Palestinians, thus making them far less likely to continue. Whatever his motives, and whoever his backers, almost single-handedly he set back the Palestinian cause by a generation. Yet he lives in honor in Damascus, and his group, like Hawatmeh's, is permitted to enter and leave the PLO at will.

Yet who among Arab Americans insists that the U.S. media broadcast Arab-American disapproval of such tactics, and of the regimes that make them possible? Until all Arab Americans loudly and unanimously criticize Arab leaders who fund radical Arab terrorists, who will listen to Arab-American criticism of U.S. Leaders who fund radical Israeli terrorists?

The same logic applies to the "fundamentalists," and American Muslims. So long as vicious human rights violations by Islamist governments like those of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in Tehran or of Hasan Al-Turabi in Khartoum go largely unchallenged by U.S. Muslims, who in America will listen to their denunciations of Israeli human rights violations?

The Palestinian Arabs have been victimized by an American-funded Israel. Muslims everywhere are victims of a double standard whereby the international community moves rapidly against a Muslim transgressor, as in Baghdad, but very slowly, if at all, against a Christian transgressor in Belgrade or a Jewish transgressor in Jerusalem.

If there is to be universal condemnation of transgressors, however, Muslim and Arab Americans must speak consistently. One cannot react to the West's double standard with another double standard in which Rabin is a villain, Milosevic is a villain, but Saddam is only a hapless victim.

Until Arab Americans and Muslim Americans make their full weight felt in the U.S. political system, America's Middle East policy will be unbalanced, and Americans and Middle Easterners alike will suffer. To be heard, however, Arab and Muslim Americans must speak clearly and consistently on the basic issues, and be willing to put all of their votes behind a consensus view. United, they could offset the bloc voting, if not funding, in such pro-Israel bastions as New Jersey, California and Michigan, and countless congressional districts in other states.

They must make it clear that neither they nor their Christian, Jewish and secular allies among supporters of peace and human rights seek preferential treatment for any race, religion or country in the Middle East. They ask only that the United States pursue a Middle Eastern policy in its own best interest and consistent with its traditional support for human rights, self-determination and fair play. Only when America rests all of its weight on these traditional pillars of U.S. foreign policy, will there be the stability that Americans, and all Middle-Easterners, so desperately need.