Bush, Kerry shun U.S. Muslims in Election

[smiles 0]

Quote

By: itrath syed--- www.straight.com
Publish Date: 28-Oct-2004


During the lead-up to the last U.S. presidential election, in 2000, I was a Canadian living in downtown Chicago. Though surrounded by the garish electoral spectacle, I felt alien to it. Where Canadian elections are a neat and tidy 35 days, the campaign process in the U.S. is a year-long drama. As a Canadian in the U.S., one can be left with the desire to periodically stamp one's foot, much like an impatient child in the back of a minivan, and ask, "Aren't we there yet?"

On that November election night, I went to bed expecting to find President Al Gore on my morning television. But as I watched, with equal parts horror and humour, the legendary U.S. democracy thrashed about and finally "decided" that George W. Bush was the 43rd president, elected or not--perhaps a fitting end to a process that had produced a vigorous debate about whether or not a candidate could be too smart to be president.
But that was not the only folly of that election year. In an unprecedented attempt to mobilize the Muslim American community into political action, the leadership of several national Muslim organizations bonded together to endorse a candidate and call for a national Muslim bloc vote. The candidate who had laid claim to their collective affection?
George W. Bush.
Given the many tragedies of subsequent years, that act will no doubt go down as the mother of all ironies.
As ill-conceived and ill-fated as that decision was, it arose as a response to the marginal but persistent discussion within the Muslim community about whether or not Muslims should even vote. The bloc vote was meant to counter that view and demonstrate the potential power that the Muslim community could wield in U.S. politics. It remains unclear if Muslim Americans actually voted for Bush en masse, and, at this point, who would want to figure that out and risk having to claim responsibility for delivering victory to George Warlord Bush?
But even so, the bloc-vote idea was inherently riddled with problems. Why should more than six million people, with all their diversities, vote uniformly? And, more importantly, by whom and on what basis would the collective interests of Muslim Americans be decided?

I viewed this issue from the perspective of someone who is more comfortable with multiparty democracy. I had thought that if there were to be a bloc vote, then the only candidate who deserved it would be Ralph Nader. Aside from being principled and passionate, Nader represented the flickering hope of an end to the hegemony of the two-party system. It seems to me that it is the U.S.'s polarized two-party system that has resulted in the narrowed spectrum of permissible political discourse in which both parties vie for the middle and end up as cheap facsimiles of each other.
Of course, there are some obvious differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. By choosing to endorse Bush over Gore, the Muslim American leadership had chosen to endorse the conservative familyvalues rhetoric over Gore's more progressive platform. They had made the explicit decision to overlook the racist overtones that encompass much right-wing discourse. Apparently, they had believed Bush in the debates when he spoke about no racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims at airports. Significantly, they had also broken ranks with the African-American Muslim community whose historical political support has generally been with the Democrats.

Four years of the Bush-Cheney regime have, among other things, spawned war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashed unprecedented attacks on civil liberties within the U.S., delivered human-rights abuses from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, and seen the entrenchment of neoliberal, colonial pseudoeconomies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Watching this round of presidential debates, I felt nothing but a deep sadness. Bush continued to use the massacres of 9/11 as his blank cheque, shamelessly manipulating the grief of the American people into a justification for war and occupation. And John Kerry failed to challenge any of the key premises of U.S. foreign policy that have brought such misery to the world. Although Bush derided Kerry for his "global test" theory and other ideas that "are popular in the capitals of Europe", Kerry has not articulated any vision of the U.S. as one nation among a community of nations, as opposed to an empire.
Any hopes of a third-party breakthrough have died. Nader has been reduced to a joke--that is, when he is not being vilified for helping Bush win the 2000 election and thus ruining the world.

And what of the 2004 Muslim bloc vote? The newly formed American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, a coalition of 10 organizations that have joined to "advocate for civil rights and access to government through the electoral process", has struggled to come to a consensus. After first reports of a likely nonendorsement, the task force has issued a "qualified endorsement" of Senator Kerry. Its lack of enthusiasm is based on Kerry's unwillingness to address the civil-rights issues that the task force has identified as critical, as well as his refusal to meet with the leadership.
This pitiful dynamic of mutual disinterest between the coalition and Kerry is in contrast to the political sentiment among Muslim Americans, whose support for Kerry is much more clear.
Muslim Americans, as evidenced by polls and the burgeoning amount of discussion within the community, have left any idea of nonparticipation far behind. Various Muslims have organized campaigns for the three candidates.

But given this new political energy within the Muslim American community, why has neither Bush nor Kerry chosen to court the Muslim leadership or address the civil-rights issues? There is a long way to go before the political voice of American Muslims is respected within American democracy.

Still, I find some hope in seeing that the process of critical political engagement is under way.
And this is necessary, because democracy, like all good things, begins in the mind.

SMiles