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Islam in
America: Close
encounter with Bush: A political miscarriage.
by Ameen Izzadeen
(Deputy Editor The Sunday Times and Daily Mirror-Sri Lanka)
In 2003 Ameen Izzadeen spent nearly a month in the United States
as a guest of the US State Department. This is part one of a series of
observations penned after his visit.
As an outside observer Mr. Izzadeens insights are both enlightening and squarely
on the mark. Mr. Izzadeen addresses the concerns of Post 9-11 Muslims in
America and the campaign to vilify the American Muslims. We present
the series in its entirety.
Close encounter with Bush:
A political miscarriage Islam in America - (P-6)
Friday November 7th 2003
The Florida vote recount at the 2000 US presidential
election was finally decided by the US Supreme Court after days of fluctuating
fortunes for the two main contenders, George W. Bush of the Republican Party
and former Vice President Al Gore of the Democratic Party. But all this drama
would have been a non-event and Mr. Gore would have won, if the Muslims of
Florida had not en bloc supported Mr. Bush. After all, the recount showed a
difference of a mere 536
votes.
The political picture of the Muslims in America
at the dawn of this millennium was that most of them, especially the Arab and
Asian migrants, were politically inactive, because they believed that some day
they would return to their "native" countries. Unlike their Afro- American
Muslim brethren, who had become politically hyperactive because of their
involvement in civil rights campaigns, most Arab and Asian Muslims did not even
bother to register themselves as voters.
But in the late 1980s and the 1990s, Muslim
groups, such as the American Muslim Council, the Center for the Study of Islam
and Democracy and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, began an intensive
campaign to get the Muslims involved in the political process.
Though these groups were not one hundred percent
successful in their effort, they managed to get a substantial percentage of
Muslims to become voters and use their ballots at the 2000 presidential
elections. Thus began their entry into the great game of lobby politics.
Obviously, they were taking a leaf out of the political book of the powerful
Jewish minority community.
The Muslims did not have to grapple with the
problem of choosing between Vice President Gore and Mr. Bush. With the issues at
stake being domestic as well as international, the Muslims in Mr. Gore saw a
true friend of Israel. Mr. Gore was also reported to have ignored offers of
support in exchange for a promise to attend to their problems. But Mr. Bush
appeared a true friend of Muslims and the Arab world, largely through his oil
connections. Besides, the Republicans had developed links with the Islamic
Institute that virtually acted as an appendage of the Republican Party and
canvassed for Mr. Bush among the Muslims.
One of the key domestic concerns of the Muslim
groups was the Secret Evidence Law. Mr. Bush had promised to repeal this law,
enacted during the Bill Clinton presidency and used largely in cases against
Muslim migrants and Muslim charities. In a case where a suspect is charged under
this law, he or she is denied access to prosecution evidence when preparing his
or her defense - a violation of one of the hallowed principles of the US legal
system.
The Muslims also urged Mr. Bush to ease the
sanction-imposed burden on Iraq - of course, without compromising US security
interests - and play the role of honest broker in the West Asia and Kashmir
conflicts.
According to one account, nearly 75 percent of
US Muslims backed Mr. Bush at the 2000 elections. But did they get what they
wanted in return? Or was it a case of President Bush being unable to honor his
promises due to the exigencies of 9/11?
Whatever the case, the reality facing the
Muslims today is that instead of repealing the Secret Evidence Law, Bush enacted
tougher laws such as the Patriot Act.
The 2003 civil rights report prepared by the
Council on American- Islamic Relations says: "…the Patriot Act of 2001 has
allowed the executive branch to circumvent the Fourth Amendment's requirement of
probable cause when conducting wiretaps and searches. Under the current law,
persons searched could be US citizens who are not suspected of wrongdoing.
The law permits personal or business records to
be seized for an investigation without prior evidence of connection to terrorism
or criminal activity. The lengthy detentions have been criticized in particular
for their violation of the constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the
right to a speedy trial."
As for the Muslim demand on Iraq, Palestine
and Kashmir, the administration's policy, especially in the aftermath of 9/11,
has not only moved away from the pledges Mr. Bush made to the Muslim
community, but gone headlong in the opposite direction.
Instead of removing sanctions on Iraq or easing the burden
on millions of its suffering people, the Bush administration bombed that
country on what is now increasingly becoming evident to have been a false
charge that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and hence a threat to US
security.
On the question of Palestine, the Bush administration came
up with a road map, but at the same time endorsed - both tacitly and openly -
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's harsh measures, including the building of
a new security wall that is gobbling up Palestinian land, in quelling what is
indeed viewed by a majority of the people around the world as a just struggle
against Israeli colonialism.
As regards Kashmir - Kashmir is an issue because a
substantial number of US Muslims are from South Asia - the Bush administration,
analysts say, have drawn closer towards the Hindu fundamentalist BJP regime of
India.
Another aspiration of the US Muslims was more government
jobs, especially in the State Department, once Mr. Bush assumed office. But the
jobs never came their way.
The first attempt by Muslims to show their
political power as a group thus came a cropper or ended in a miscarriage, but it
was not total disaster.
Muslims I spoke to said they would forge ahead
with lessons they learned from their first experience as a lobby group. The
Muslims of Arab and Asian origins now admit that their biggest blunder was not
their support of Mr. Bush, but their failure to identify with the Afro-American
Muslims who make up more than one third of the US Muslim population and who
traditionally backed the Democrats.
With 2004 being the year of another
presidential election in the United States, a large majority of the Muslims, it
appears, have already made up their mind - not to re-elect Mr. Bush.
According to a recent poll carried out by the
Washington-based CAIR, only two percent of the Muslims surveyed said they would
vote for Mr. Bush.
The same survey showed that only one in ten of the
respondents supported the president's Iraq policy.
When asked to name the political party that best
represents the interests of the American Muslim community, more respondents
named the Democratic Party (27 percent) and the Green party (25 percent) than
the Republican Party (3 percent). A large number (44 percent) said none of the
parties represented their interests.
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