Michigan
Michigan, especially Dearborn and Detroit, enjoys an active and well-organized Muslim political, educational, and religious infrastructure. In Detroit, for example, the Muslim Citizens Grass Roots Political Committee, which in mid-October endorsed Bush, serves thirty-six mosques and six Islamic schools. Victor Begg, who oversees the committee’s network, met Bush in a meeting engineered by John Engler, the state’s Republican governor.
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In the eastern part of Dearborn, however, where there is a high concentration of Muslims and Arabs, Bush won by 6,800 votes to 4,600—a difference of 2,200 votes. The pro-Republican Islamic Institute argues that therefore Muslims were responsible for 71 percent of Bush’s total lead in the city. It notes that the eastern part of Dearborn has usually gone Democratic even more heavily than Dearborn as a whole, thereby accentuating the swing to Bush.
This theory is subject, however, to several flaws and contradictions. First, the Arab-American Institute conducted its own analysis of the Dearborn results. At first glance, it appears to bear out the Islamic Institute’s findings of a massive swing to the Texas governor: in particular, by looking at select precincts in east Dearborn, it seems that while Bush’s lead varied, he always won by a larger margin than his overall Dearborn margin of 52 percent to 44 percent. Thus, at McDonald School, Bush led 68 percent to 24 percent; at Salina School, the result was 72 percent to 21 percent; and so forth. The lowest he seems to have attracted was at Maples School, where the result was 53 percent to 40 percent.
However, the Islamic Institute discusses only Muslims, of which, it says, there are 9,800 in the city. The Arab-American Institute, on the other hand, talks of Arab Americans of which there are, according to its figures, 10,000 in Dearborn. The two numbers are suspiciously similar. Because less than a quarter of Arab Americans are Muslims (the rest being Christian), it might reasonably be supposed that one of these organizations has mistakenly conflated Muslims with Arabs. If so, the results, therefore, are severely flawed, even useless.
In any case, rosy Islamist predictions of delivering the “key battleground state” of Michigan to Bush came to nothing, even if Dearborn made for an isolated success. In Wayne County—home of Dearborn—Gore won 68 percent to Bush’s 30 percent, while in the Senate race, Democrat Debbie Stabenow heavily defeated Islamist-backed (and Arab American) Republican Spence Abraham, 67 percent to 30 percent. State-wide, Gore and Stabenow both won, though their leads were significantly narrower.
Moreover, the theory of Bush’s popularity among Muslims contains a flat contradiction. An exit poll of 2,084 Michigan voters conducted by The Detroit News resulted in a very different set of numbers from those commonly bruited by interested parties. In this poll, conducted by a leading news organization using scientific methods and a substantial pool, Muslims were found to have voted for Gore by 66 percent compared to Bush’s 30 percent, reversing every self-administered, unscientific Islamist poll. The percentage of Gore-voting Muslims in fact exceeded that of any other religious affiliation. Even Jews, who vote heavily Democratic, only handed Gore 47 percent. Revealingly, this poll also found that African Americans backed Gore 92 percent to 8 percent, suggesting that black converts swelled the Muslim preference for Gore in Michigan. The Mosque in America survey, which omitted members of the Nation of Islam, noted that African Americans now number 30 percent of mosque attendees. The solid black turnout for the Democrats indicates that, among at least one major ethnic group, the Islamist effort to mobilize Muslims on behalf of Bush has been a failure.
Indeed, black Muslim groups such as the Coalition for Good Government—the political arm of the Muslim American Society, a black convert organization—refused to join AMPCC in endorsing Bush, instead choosing to back his opponent. Black leaders bitterly complained that the AMPCC did not include African-American representation and thought the Islamist vehicle placed its own narrow concerns about Jerusalem, the Middle East, and Senator Lieberman’s Judaism above domestic issues. For blacks, inner-city development, racial profiling, juvenile justice, civil rights, and education policy remain of prime concern.
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Claiming Credit
An “exclusive exit poll” of 350 Florida Muslims, apparently conducted by the AMA and reported on its website, found that 91 percent voted for Bush, 1 percent for Gore, and 8 percent for Nader. The Tampa Bay Islamic Center estimated that 55,000 Muslims in Florida voted and that 88 percent of them favored Bush. If true, this would mean that Bush’s majority among Muslims in Florida was far more than his several-hundred-vote lead over Gore.
From this rather flimsy evidence, Islamist organizations decided that Bush owed them for his victory. Agha Saeed, the AMPCC chairman, concluded that “it won’t be long before political analysts realize that Muslim voters have played a historic role.” And Sami al-Arian, an engineering professor at the University of Southern Florida and someone who was the subject of a six-year federal investigation for alleged links to Islamist terrorism, added, “Political pundits have been slow in acknowledging the crucial, even decisive, role of the Muslim vote in Florida.” The chairman of a Massachusetts AMA chapter, Tahir Ali, crowed that if Muslims “had voted like we did in previous elections, guess who would be president right now? Al Gore.” Republican leaders seeking Muslim support have accordingly paid lip-service to this strange logic: at an MPAC forum in January, Tom Davis, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, declared that without the AMPCC endorsement, “Florida would have been reversed.”
Whether or not they played a key role in George W. Bush’s election, he did repay them in several ways.
The president’s inaugural speech referred to “church and charity, synagogue and mosque” having “an honored place in our plans and in our laws.”
Sheikh Bassam Estwani, a member of CAIR’s advisory board, opened a session of the U.S. House of Representatives with an Islamic prayer.
At the end of January, Imam Hasan Qazwini was photographed next to President Bush (and other religious leaders) at a faith-based-initiative event held at the White House. Previously, he had been a member of a delegation of twenty-five national religious leaders who met Bush in Austin, Texas, on December 22, 2000.
Leading Republicans met with Islamist representatives from CAIR, MPAC, the AMC, and others to strengthen links on January 21, 2001. They discussed secret evidence legislation, the Post Office’s Ramadan stamp, the situation in “Palestine,” the Muslim community’s role in the election, and hiring Muslim applicants in the Bush administration. Party luminaries present included Newt Gingrich, John Sununu, Grover Norquist, and Tom Davis.
Already, however, there are complaints that Bush is not coming through on his “personal debt,” as Findley has put it, to Islamists. The former congressman notes that “in his brief time in the White House, Bush has already offended Muslims” by ordering air attacks on Baghdad, “sending messages of condolence over the death and injury of Israelis,” and “failing to appoint Muslims to senior positions in his administration.” If Islamist demands are not met, this type of complaints could lead AMPCC to withdraw its endorsement of Bush for 2004.
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