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AAI in the News

Arab American Voters Drop Support for Bush

By Michael Ellis
Reuters
Posted on Wednesday October 13, 2004

Hundreds of Arab Americans danced and celebrated in the streets of this Detroit suburb after the fall of Baghdad last year, and enthusiastically shouted thanks to President Bush.

Now, even some of the most vocal supporters of the president blame him for failing to stop the disorder and death in Iraq. One opinion poll shows Bush trailing Democratic Sen. John Kerry among Arab Americans in four key battleground states including Michigan, where every vote could count in a close Nov. 2 election.

“The butcher (Saddam Hussein) is gone, but the bloodshed is still there,” said Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a Shi’ite cleric who in 1979 fled Iraq and moved to Dearborn, home to many of the estimated 235,000 Arab Americans in Michigan.

“President Bush did a good job to remove the cancer,” said Husainy, who led a rally of more than 100 people in support of the invasion when Bush visited Dearborn two years ago. “But he did not do a good job of strengthening Iraq. Iraq is still like an infected patient in an emergency room,” he said.

Angry with the Iraq war, more of the estimated 1.1 million Arab Americans in the four battleground states of Michigan, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania back Kerry over Bush, according to the polling firm Zogby International.

In a poll of Arab Americans in those states conducted in September after the Republican convention, 47 percent of voters favored Kerry to 31.5 percent for Bush. Nine percent favored Ralph Nader, the independent candidate who is of Lebanese descent, while 12 percent were undecided.

Four years ago, Bush won the support of 45.5 percent of Arab Americans, compared to 38 percent for Vice President Al Gore and 13.5 percent for Nader, according to Zogby data.

STUCK IN IRAQ

“Iraq, first and foremost, was seen as a terrible error,” pollster John Zogby said.

Bush has even lost the support of the largest segments of the Arab American populations—Roman Catholics and those born in the United States, according to the Zogby poll.

Dearborn restaurant owner Sam Ajami, a Muslim who immigrated from Lebanon 35 years ago, has voted for the Republican candidate in the last three presidential elections. But now, sitting at a table at his Al-Ajami restaurant, Ajami said he is switching to John Kerry and the Democrats.

“Bush’s (foreign) policy is not working. You cannot be a bully and stubborn,” said Ajami.
“Now we’re stuck,” he added. “It might take 30 years. It’s not something that can be done overnight, or over a year, or over two or three.”

Frustration in the community has also grown over the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and over the Patriot Act, the sweeping anti-terror measure passed immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“The president has talked about an independent Palestinian state, but nothing has been done,” said Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, who left Iran 14 years ago and is the cleric at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, one of about 25 mosques in the metropolitan Detroit area.

“Personally, I feel that there is a need for change in our policy, domestically and internationally,” said Elahi, whose mosque can draw over 1,000 worshipers, mostly Shi’ites, during the month of Ramadan.

PATRIOT ACT

Across West Warren Avenue from the Al-Ajami restaurant, optometrist Hasan Hakim said he was concerned about the arrests of Muslims and Arabs in the United States for terror-related crimes.

Last month, a U.S. court in Detroit dismissed the convictions of two Middle Eastern men after the government discredited its own witness and conceded errors in handling the case. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft last year hailed the convictions, but the acquittal was the latest in a series of terror cases to be dropped.

“When the acquittal is there, it’s in the back of the (newspaper) pages,” Hakim said. “Nobody reads it. It’s creating an opinion in the society against Muslims and Arabs, and the dirt is not being washed off the page.”