Despite Candidates, Muslim Americans Gained Some Ground In 1996 Elections

By Richard H. Curtiss

At the beginning of the 1996 general election cycle, it looked like both Muslim-American and Arab-American citizens would have an easy choice between presidential candidates. Democratic President Bill Clinton was being hailed in the Israeli press as the most pro-Israel president in history, a theme that was picked up by the U.S. press as the campaign wore on.

His Republican challenger, Senator Bob Dole, was one of fewer than half a dozen of the 100 members of the Senate who had recommended a cut in aid to Israel and who was on record with a series of caustic comments about the Jewish state, normally a sacred cow with candidates of both parties.

It was Dole and his campaign advisers who muddied the waters. First Dole sponsored a Senate resolution in 1995 to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a perennial election year bill he personally had killed in 1984 and which he first had supported and then later opposed in 1992. The idea was to overcome his image as a critic of Israel. Unfortunately for Dole, the tactic didn’t influence Jewish voters, who were expected to vote nine-to-one for Clinton. But it did convince a lot of Arab-American voters that, for them, Dole was as bad or worse than Clinton.

The Dole campaign compounded the impression by appointing a campaign “Middle East advisory committee” that included two notoriously pro-Israel figures from the Ronald Reagan administration, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. The move was designed to blunt expected attacks on Dole by some journalists who are believed to set their watches by Israeli time. It may have kept a few in the Dole corral, like William Safire, who defected to Clinton over Bush’s Middle East policy in 1992, and Charles Krauthammer, whose support for Dole in 1996 had considerably more verve and clarity than did his support for Bush in 1992. But by the end of the campaign, Dole was charging the “liberal press” with beating up on him just as mercilessly and unfairly as it dealt with Bush.

The Arab American Institute, whose objective is to help Arab Americans move up in politics, has had support groups working with both parties for the past several years. Working through the AAI, Clinton and Gore met with Arab-American leaders at the White House on Nov. 9, 1995. On Aug. 6, 1996, Clinton joined members of his National Security Council for part of an AAI-arranged second White House meeting for Arab-American leaders. The Dole campaign scheduled a meeting with Arab Americans in Michigan in the last days of the campaign.

Democratic Arab Americans also pointed out that 40 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago were Arab Americans, and Republican Arab Americans pointed out that Dole had turned over to Arab American Sen. Spence Abraham (R-MI) leadership of Campaign America, the political action committee Dole had founded and led.

All this activity may have dampened the pro-Israel campaign rhetoric from both sides in 1996, but any credit due has to be shared with Binyamin Netanyahu’s outrageous conduct in Israel. Unfortunately, working closely with both parties has produced Arab Americans willing to sing the praises of either candidate, but as yet it has produced no discernible changes in Middle East policy, either from the Democratic White House or the Republican Congress.

Therefore perhaps the most decisive factor for Arab Americans, who probably include a slight preponderance of Christians over Muslims, was Dole’s demeaning performance after Israeli voters elected hard-liner Binyamin Netanyahu prime minister. Dole implied he would be a better friend of Netanyahu’s Likud-run Israel than would Clinton and, in an ill-conceived flash of partisan rhetoric, warned Clinton against putting pressure on Netanyahu in attempts to get the Middle East peace process, which Netanyahu’s words and deeds had derailed, back on track.

Like most Americans, individual Arab Americans have basic inclinations toward one political party or another. Dole’s words set them free to follow those inclinations, despite Clinton’s subservience to the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. It’s likely that exit polls will show Arab Americans voted in about the same percentages for each candidate as Americans as a whole. That is because Dole’s campaign rhetoric obscured a record that should have gained him the same kind of overwhelming majority among Arab Americans that Clinton could count on among American Jews.

Muslim Americans Make Their Voices Heard in 1996

Muslim Americans made their first perceptible impact on the American political system in 1996. Until now, although they probably number between six and eight million persons in the U.S. (the U.S. Jewish population is estimated at only 4.9 to 5.4 million persons), there are no Muslims in Congress and almost none as political appointees in the executive branch or as elected officials in state, city or county governments. One of the reasons for this incredible disparity is the political axiom that “Muslims don’t vote.”

In 1996, for the first time, national Muslim organizations set out seriously to correct this, starting with voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives. In some areas local Muslim communities invited Republican, Democratic and other candidates for local office to come meet groups of Muslim voters and, almost without exception, invited candidates showed up.

At national conventions, American Muslims also listened to leaders of their still nascent national organizations debate the next stage toward political empowerment. In those debates several things became clear. For most Muslims, the attachment to their religion greatly exceeds their individual attachment, if any, to political parties.

If they receive political guidance from Islamic national leaders they respect, a high percentage of Muslim voters probably will follow it. The debate therefore centered on bloc voting by American Muslims, which the rank and file clearly favored.

At the local candidate level, such bloc voting has proved fairly easy to organize, particularly since Muslims in large urban areas attend mosques where ideas can be passed rapidly. At the national level it proved more difficult. A leader of the American Muslim Council argued that both candidates were so bad on Middle East issues that the “bloc vote” should be a blank ballot or “for a candidate that no one has ever heard of.” Opponents of that idea pointed out that this would just perpetuate the stereotype that “Muslims don’t vote.”

Some members of Muslim groups argued in open meetings that if Muslims were to vote as a bloc, they should be very sure that that bloc voted for the winner. Leaders responded that this would free either party of ever having to consider or act on Muslim wishes. The Muslims could be counted on just to follow the crowd.

In the end, leaders of five national Muslim organizations appointed emissaries to outline their concerns to both the Clinton and Dole campaigns. The Dole campaign responded by inviting the leaders of national Islamic organizations to a meeting, attended by leaders of three of them, at which they handed over a written summary of their concerns. Following the meeting Senator Dole addressed a letter responding to those concerns to presidents of four groups, the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the National Council on Islamic Affairs, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

As readers can see from the letter on p. 42, Dole’s response to each of the groups contained some remarkably forthcoming language on both domestic and foreign policy. In fact, his call for an “even-handed” American foreign policy revives language that has been anathema to the pro-Israel lobby for a generation and which therefore has been shunned by most candidates for elective office.

To date, the Clinton campaign has rested on laurels earned earlier by First Lady Hillary Clinton. In the spring of 1996 she organized, with the help of the American Muslim Council, an Eid al-Fitr breakfast, marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, at the White House for local Muslims representing a cross-section of African, South Asian, Arab and other ethnic backgrounds. Subsequently, on a trip to Los Angeles, she visited the Islamic Center of Southern California, home base of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Significantly, of the five national organizations mentioned, the American Muslim Council and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, both of which have worked with Hillary Clinton decided not to endorse either candidate. The leaders explained that they felt an endorsement for her husband’s rival would be a poor way to respond to Mrs. Clinton’s overtures. Of the other three groups, at this writing the National Council on Islamic Affairs already had endorsed Dole and CAIR and the AMAwere leaning that way, despite the candidate’s poor poll numbers. The leaders all were scheduled for a personal meeting with Senator Dole at which they once again would discuss their concerns.

For a community that only four years ago still was struggling within individual mosques with the question of whether Muslims should participate in a non-Islamic political system, American Muslims have come a long way. If 1996 goes down in history as the year the sleeping giant of American Islam woke up, perhaps the year 2000 will be the year the giant stands up and shakes off the political lethargy that has immobilized it until now. From now on it’s a giant that neither party can afford to take for granted.