Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 71-73

Muslim-American Activism

U.S. Muslim Leaders Meet Visiting Malaysian Official

During his visit to attend the World Bank meetings in Washington, DC, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia received at his hotel suite a delegation of American Muslim community leaders headed by executive director Atif Harden of the American Muslim Council (AMC) on April 18, 1998. The delegation also included representatives from the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Political Action Committee (MPAC) and others.

The visiting minister expressed his hope that the various Muslim organizations in America will close ranks to provide leadership and guidance to the growing Islamic community in, as he put it, ²the most powerful nation on earth today.Ó He also expressed regret at the absence of real cohesion and unity among Muslim countries.

Answering a question, he said: ²I do not see anything wrong in American Muslims participating in the political process of this country as long as they do not compromise their religious beliefs and moral values.Ó ¾M.M. Ali

AMA Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter Combines Candidate Forum With Annual Conference

The Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the American Muslim Alliance combined its second anniversary regional conference with a candidates­ forum to alert area Muslims to their responsibility to get involved in the American political system, and to acquaint Texas candidates for elective office with Muslim concerns. The March 22 forum at the Omni Hotel in Dallas was followed by a banquet in which many of the candidates joined a cross-section from the local Islamic community, guests from other AMA chapters, and speakers and honorees at the annual conference.

Participants in the candidates­ forum included Republicans Shawn Terry, challenger Martin Frost for House Congressional District 24, and incumbent Judge James Wilson. Democrats included Victor Morales, challenging incumbent Pete Sessions for Congressional District 5, and Ben Boothe, challenging incumbent Joe Barton.

Independent candidates included Ollie Jefferson and J.L. Palmer, candidate for justice of the Court of Criminal Appeals. Reform Party candidates included Joe Montoya, candidate for Congress from District 5 (to succeed Rep. Henry Gonzales, who has resigned). Montoya was the 1996 Democratic challenger to Sen. Phil Gramm. Montoya­s refusal to take contributions from PACs of any kind made national headlines and almost defeated Gramm.

Other Reform Party candidates included Jeanne Doogs, campaigning for controller of public accounts for the State of Texas, who delighted the audience with quotations from the Qur­an and from Prophetic traditions calling upon the community to elect honest, dedicated, and righteous people who would perform the Prophetic duty of ²enjoining good and confronting evil.Ó Still other Reform Party candidates included Randy Sims and Michael Mauzy, incumbent judge of County Commissioners Court of Heald County.

Other speakers at the program included AMA secretary-general Dr. Agha Sayeed, who warned Muslims that unless they become actively involved in mainstream politics, both their issues and their candidates will be ignored in the race for political offices at federal, state and local political levels.

Chapter president Shaukat Kadri welcomed the guests, Hamed Madani emceed the event, and Aftab Siddiqi concluded the candidate forums by emphasizing the responsibility of Muslims to participate in the political system of the country and also to acquaint candidates with Muslim concerns.

Retired Pakistani Ambassador Syed Ahsani, chairman of the state organizing committee, welcomed guests to the banquet. At the banquet, following recitation from the Qur­an by Imam Yusuf Zia Kavakci, Gulam Nabi Fai, president of the Kashmir American Council, outlined the hardships faced by the people of Kashmir at the hands of the Indian government while they await fulfillment of the half-century-old United Nations pledge to let them determine their own future.

Richard Curtiss, executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, in his keynote address explained how U.S. foreign policy has become a hostage of the Israel lobby. As a result, he said, the U.S. has provided Israel $84.8 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds between 1949 and 1998¾more money than the U.S. has provided to all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined, in the same period.

Adding the cost to the U.S. of borrowing the money it gave to Israel, Curtiss said, brings the cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers to $134.8 billion. Put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis had received from the U.S. government by Oct. 31, 1997 has cost American taxpayers $23,241 per Israeli. All this happened, Curtiss said, while Israel­s per capita domestic product climbed to some $17,000, placing it somewhat below Britain and Italy and above Spain and Ireland, none of which has ever created a domestic lobby to campaign for U.S. foreign aid, as Israel has done.

Dr. Agha Saeed dwelt upon salient features of the U.S. political system, pointing out that it has some 520,000 elected offices at local, state and federal levels, to some of which U.S. Muslims should be aspiring. He also called the formation of a U.S. national Coordination Council of seven Muslim political organizations, which held its first meeting the previous day in Dallas, a political landmark which will forge unity of purpose and action for the common good of the U.S. Muslim community. It also can lead to the formation of a voting bloc of Muslims capable of directing the attention of candidates at all levels to issues important to Muslims.

A highlight of the banquet was the presentation by Ambassador Ahsani of a plaque honoring the lifelong services of the late Dr. M.T. Mehdi, founder-president of the National Council on Islamic Affairs. The plaque was accepted by his longtime associate and fellow activist, Ghazi Khankan, who has succeeded Dr. Mehdi as NCIA president. Among NCIA services cited by Ambassador Ahsani was the declaration of the third Friday of December as ²Muslim dayÓ in commemoration of Islamic civilization­s contribution to humanity.

Paul Truax, chairman, Reform Party, Texas, outlined the party­s manifesto; Farooq Selod, Moazzam Syed, Perveen Peerwani, Farooq Khan, and Osama Abdullah introduced the speakers. Zobair N. Haq and Hind Jarrah gave messages of welcome on behalf of the AMA Houston and McKinney chapters. Messages from Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Rep. Dick Army and other prominent Texas politicians were read. Imam Hatim Hamidullah and Mufid Abdul Qadir offered prayers. ¾Syed A. Ahsani

American Muslim Caucus Hosts First Coordination Committee Meeting

The American Muslim Caucus, a regional group with chapters in individual Texas cities, hosted the first regular meeting of the coordinating committee of Muslim political organizations on March 21 at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Participants in the meeting from all over the United States then joined American Muslim Caucus members at a dinner addressed by Republican congressional candidate Shawn Terry. Terry, a businessman who has been active in party politics in Dallas and at the Texas state level, is challenging Democratic incumbent Martin Frost. Frost has held the Texas 24th District seat for 20 years and in that time has received $111,289 from pro-Israel political action committees, according to filings by those PACs with the Federal Election Commission, as compiled by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.*

Organizations represented at the meeting were the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), American Muslim Caucus (AMC), American Muslim Council (AMC), Coalition for Good Government (CFCC), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the National Council on Islamic Affairs (NCIA). Observer organizations represented icluded the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), Kashmiri American Council (KAC), and Muslim Students Association, USA (MSA).

Agenda topics included prioritization of goals for 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004, with emphasis on strategies to achieve the key objectives for 1998 and 2000; division of labor among the organizations; and establishment of a coordination mechanism.

A good deal of the time was spent on the latter topic, with emphasis on bylaws to make the mechanism effective. Participants then took the decisions arrived at during the meeting back to their own organizations for approval, looking toward issuance of a joint press release on May 30.

(See also the ²Election WatchÓ report on p. 21 of this issue.) ¾Richard Curtiss

* Total contributions from all Middle-East related PACs received by all candidates for the Senate and House of Representatives since 1976 are recorded in the book Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U.S. Middle East Policy, available from the Washington Report­s Book Club catalog, starting on p. 127.

University of Maryland Student Groups Present Palestine Program

²Palestine: Horror in the Holy LandÓ was the title of a March 18 program presented at the University of Maryland­s Baltimore Campus by students from the Muslim Student Association and the Organization of Arab Students from both the Baltimore and College Park (near Washington, DC) campuses.

Some 250 persons who attended the program, which included a Pakistani-style buffet dinner, were welcomed by Rhonda Hegazi, secretary-general, and Nasser Moidudeen, president, of the Muslim Student Association.

Participants included Rasha El-Haggan, who introduced many of the speakers, Rawia Ashraf, Sumaya Fahmy, Iman Fahmy and Assmaa El-Haggan, Asma Shafi, Aisha Goheer, Haydar Husseini and Saif Abdul-Rahman, who read poems and brief accounts of ²the Children of Palestine.Ó

Dr. Saleh Al-Saleh, vice president of the Dar Al-Hijjra Council from Northern Virginia, pointed out in a talk to the group that of 240,000 disabled Palestinians, 80,000 are victims of the Palestinian intifada, most of whom were children at the time they were permanently disabled by Israeli bullets, rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas fired into enclosed areas, severe beatings administered by soldiers, police interrogators or jailers, and other Israeli violence.

Richard Curtiss, executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, discussed the reasons why the U.S. has abandoned its traditional support in the Middle East for self-determination, human rights and fair play in support of a policy motivated solely by domestic political interests and getting presidents and members of Congress re-elected. He described the workings of Israel­s lobbying organizations in Washington and their progression over the years from a series of victories over the U.S. foreign affairs establishment to, in fact, becoming the U.S. foreign affairs establishment¾at great cost to U.S. national interests. ¾Donna Bourne

American Muslims Prepare for Their Own Census 2000

The American Muslim Council sponsored a ground-breaking two-day seminar on the demographics of Muslims in America on April 18 and 19 in Washington, DC that included a dozen leading Muslim population specialists from around the country, key representatives of the Bureau of the Census and two Jewish Federation demographers.

Aimed at the most scientific count over the next few years, the conference ended with an agreement to establish a technical committee with a chairman or co-chairman to help establish standards that could be used at the local grass-roots level to make credible counts for each community. Computer-based programs to identify Middle Eastern names in the population will very likely be a part of the approach.

²An indication of the need for accurate counts of Muslims and perhaps other Middle Easterners,Ó said one of the more politically oriented specialists, ²was the question posed to us by Congressman James Moran (D-VA) the other day: ‰Can you tell me exactly how many Arab Americans and Muslims live in my district?­ Of course, we could not.Ó

The highly technical conference acknowledged the tremendous hurdles ahead for actually carrying out a nationwide study that meets scientific standards. The cost estimates for just a single census of the Muslim population range from $2 to $3 million, and even an initial design of the survey would cost several hundred thousand dollars.

Jewish Federation demographers pointed out that they had begun their work more than 20 years ago, but that a major census of U.S. Jewry was not taken until 1990 and then cost about $2 million. They already are raising money for a similar effort in 2000.

The Bureau of the Census officials noted that Congress was unwilling on two counts to put in a question of religious affiliation: the separation of church and state and the reluctance to load up the census with even one additional series of questions.

A computer ²Expert SystemsÓ program has been designed by Imad Ahmad of Imad Ad-Din Inc. in Bethesda, MD to make a computer learn how to recognize names of Middle Eastern and South Asian origin. Run against Federal Election Commission lists of contributors or voter lists, it has a relatively high degree of accuracy that shows a lot of promise. It cannot, of course, determine Muslims by such methods, but follow-up contacts on the much narrowed list of names is possible, either by mail or by telephone.

But there is no substitute in the end for interviews, and particularly among the nearly 50 percent of Muslims who are indigenous or ²revertedÓ Muslims of African descent. That is what costs the money. Supervision of the work of the hundreds of people who would have to be involved is what the Technical Committee will attempt to design and find resources to accomplish in the limited time remaining.

Further information can be obtained from the American Muslim Council in Washington, DC or by contacting Professor Ilyas Ba-Yunnus of New York State University, the chairman of the Washington seminar, or Dr. Ishat Z. Hussein, the coordinator of the seminar and the designated planner for the planned Technical Committee. Both can be reached through the AMC at 1212 New York Ave. NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20005. ÏEugene Bird