Press Room

AAI in the News

Pro-Arab Lobby Gaining in Strength in U.S.

By Laura Chatfield and Carmen Gentile
United Press International
Posted on Wednesday June 20, 2001

Arab-American groups seeking to lobby to change U.S. policy on the Middle East are growing in influence at the White House, the State Department and on Capitol Hill, although the level of support they enjoy varies from issue-to-issue, and Israeli interests remain a top priority for policymakers.

Despite limited resources, feuding over membership, and remaining outgunned by their pro-Israeli competition, two organizations—the Arab American Institute and the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee – have managed to flourish, according to a former Capitol Hill source who has worked closely with both organizations.

“Arab organizations are personalities in themselves,” the former aid said, referring to two of the most powerful Arab- American groups in the nation’s capital and their leadership.

Since the 1970s, Arab-interest groups have been combating what they have seen as a pro-Israeli stance in Washington. Key individuals, like AAI founder and President James Zogby, embarked on a political struggle with influential organizations like the American Israeli Political Action Committee, or AIPAC, which was founded around the same time.

So far, it’s been an uphill battle.

“The challenges are more intense, and the issues are not any easier …what has changed is the ability to deal with time and responsibilities we now have,” said Zogby. “It’s more demanding.”

He estimates that the number of Arab-Americans in the United States falls somewhere between 3.2 and 3.5 million. Since the late ‘80s, he said, about 30,000 Arabs annually have immigrated to America.

Those numbers fall far short of the number of Jewish Americans—6 million, an estimated 2.3 percent of the U.S. population, of whom 89 percent reside in the 12 most important electoral college states—according to Mitchell Bard on the Web site Jewish Virtual Library.

Adding the Christian right, neoconservatives and other pro-Israel groups to those numbers makes the Jewish state’s supporters a formidable block. Arab-American organizations have sought to counter this strength by working with such liberal organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP and National Council of La Raza, as well as Christian and Islamic faith-based organizations and Jewish peace groups.

Their representation in Congress, however, indicates the problems Arab-Americans face. Jewish representatives—who tend to view the Israeli cause sympathetically—make up 6 percent of the House and 10 percent of the Senate. In contrast, with the defeat of former Senator Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., in 1999, there are no Arab-Americans in the Senate, and only 6 in the House, less than 1.5 percent.

Further diluting the strength of Arab-American lobbies are the diverse loyalties of their constituents, who tend to identify with their own religious affiliation or nation of birth—out of more than 20 Arab countries—and align themselves accordingly on Middle East issues and conflicts, says Zogby.

Zogby adds, however, there are a wide variety of politicians on the Hill sympathetic to AAI’s causes, from conservative Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., to Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, which boasts the largest Arab population outside the Middle East—an estimated 200,000 in the Detroit metro area. The AAI president maintains their base of support is “growing all the time.”

As far as the White House is concerned, the jury is still out. Access to the executive office is more restricted in terms of the frequency of visits and discussions than it was under Clinton, which Zogby attributes to the relative infancy of the Bush administration.

“We met much more frequently with the last White House because they were up and running,” he said.

Both AAI and ADC characterize the Bush administration’s State Department as a more receptive and Secretary of State Colin Powell as considerable improvement over former Secretary Madeline Albright.

“We met with Powell soon after he came in to office. He was very receptive, much more receptive than his predecessor. He took notes, showed interest,” said Hussein Ibish, ADC’s director of communications. “Albright looked through me—hearing my words, but not listening to me—(she was there) in body, but not in spirit.”

“Powell works issues out and (sends them) back to the Bureau of Near East Affairs—its proper home. ... Powell is 100 times more respected than the previous secretary of state,” said one Republican source who has worked with Arab-American organizations on Capitol Hill.

Back on the Hill, Arab lobby groups look to the House’s six representatives of Arab descent, such as West Virginian Democrat Rep. Nick Rahall, newly-elected Republican from California Darrell Issa, and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich, another Democrat, for their support.

“There are close to 50,000 Arab Americans in my constituency asking me to be the voice of reason, to bring love where there is hate,” said Kucinich.

The congressman from Ohio, however, is not an exclusively pro-Arab, especially when it comes to the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, where some 600 people, mostly Palestinians, have died in clashes since late September.

“I grieve for Arabs and Jews,” said Kucinich, who, quoting Abraham Lincoln, added that he offers “malice toward none and charity toward all” when it comes to his dealings with Arab issues both foreign and domestic.

While Kucinich would not comment on the specifics of his stance on Arab issues, others, like Michigan’s John Dingell, are more vocal in their stance regarding Arabs in the Middle East.

The congressman from Michigan recently spoke out against the Lantos amendment, which in April, cut off $35 million in USAID money to Lebanon for humanitarian causes and U.S. educational institutions, as well as another $600,000 earmarked for the Lebanese Army.

The amendment called for the cessation of International Military and Education Training grants for the armed forces of Lebanon “unless the president certifies that the Lebanese Army has deployed to the internationally recognized border between Lebanon and Israel and the government of Lebanon is effectively asserting its authority.”

Dingell led a bipartisan coalition in opposition to the amendment. Though approved by a slim margin—216 to 210—Dingell characterized the vote as a Pyrrhic victory, and vowed to fight similar attempts to cut off aid to Lebanon in the Senate.

“This was a reckless, irresponsible move and a threat to peace in the Middle East…it damages the credibility of the United States as an honest broker in the region, and it’s a slap in the face of the people of Lebanon who are working so hard to rebuild their country,” said Dingell.

“If you want to drive the Lebanese into the arms of extremists, the Lantos Amendment is the mechanism for doing so.”

But it is not just Arab-American lawmakers whose support the Lobbyists have begun to win. And it is not just foreign policy issues that the lobby is active on.

In the Senate—now devoid of Arab American’s since Michigan Republican Spencer Abraham’s defeat—ADC’s government affairs affiliate, Khalil Jahshan, characterizes Jewish Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., as someone “extremely receptive to Arab civil right issues.”

Levin urged former Attorney General Janet Reno last January to suspend the use of so-called secret evidence. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act—which allows classified information to be shared with judges in immigration proceedings, but not provided to the accused and their lawyers—is a source of fierce resentment in the Arab American community and a major focus for Washington’s Arab lobbyists.

“The use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings threatens to violate basic principles of fundamental fairness,” said Levin in January 2000 during remarks made on the Senate floor, where he cited the case of an Egyptian man detained for three-and-a-half years based in secret evidence before being released.

Ibish said the most telling legal and legislative advance has been the effort to rescind the law. The libertarian right, according to Ibish, has backed the ADC in this battle.

“Two years ago there were 25 in prison,” he said. “Now we’re down to only one.”

Other domestic issues the groups address include combating defamation and ethnic and racial hate crime. The ADC liaises with the Department of Justice and FBI on these issues, and has met with officials from the Department of Transportation over racial profiling of Arab-Americans at airport security checkpoints, according to Ibish.

These successes reflect the growing sophistication of politically active Arabs in the United States.

An AAI poll found that Arab-Americans are an upwardly mobile population with 30 percent earning more than $75,000 annually and 48.5 percent with at least a college education.

The study also demonstrated the diverse origins of America’s Arabs 56 percent from Lebanon, 14 percent from Syria, 11 percent from Egypt, 9 percent from Palestinian territories, 4 percent from Jordan, 2 percent from Iraq and 4 percent from other Arab countries.

AAI also found religious denominations of those surveyed were mostly Christian, with a breakdown of Muslim, 23 percent; Protestant 12 percent; Orthodox, 23 percent; and Catholic, 42 percent.

In terms of policy positions, the area most agreed by Arab-Americans surveyed was the need for an independent state for Palestinians.

Tracking voter registration from a national Arab-American database, AAI says that the voters are strong in 55 congressional districts across the United States, and constitute between 1.5 percent and 4.5 percent of the voting population.

An estimated 300 elected or appointed Arab American officials can be found nationwide, according to AAI.

Arab-Americans were factored into Bush’s presidential campaign when he solicited their support when stumping and in the debates, most tellingly by promising to stop the use of secret evidence.

However, according to Jahshan, the pro-Israeli mentality continues to pervade politics in Washington. The ADC president said a senator once told him “when it comes to Middle East policy, when the pro-Israel lobby says jump, 90 percent or more of my colleagues ask how high instead of why.” Jahshan himself refers to the response of most congressmen on the Middle East as “a knee jerk reaction.”

He is also pessimistic about the Congressional response to Arab-American lobbying.

“Since Oslo, a new trend began in Congress—it’s begun to loose serous interest in Middle East issues,” said Jashan. “We haven’t had serious legislation.”

“Arab-Americans have good relations with 10 percent of Congress,” he said, adding that the Michigan delegation is the most responsive because of the large Arab-American constituency in the state. ADC says its public relations campaigns—appealing directly to the American public—have been more promising in some respects.

Ibish says that ADC’s full-page ads about the Intifada run at the end of last year in the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today and International Herald Tribune generated a significant positive response—and hate mail.

The leveraging that Arab American organizations use cuts both ways.

When asked about their foremost challenges now, both Ibish and Zogby named the Christian right, which they said has been more aggressive in many ways than even pro-Israeli organizations like AIPAC.

How this power will evolve during the Bush administration has yet to be seen.