Daily Online Alochona: [mukto-mona] New York Times: Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

[mukto-mona] New York Times: Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/us/politics/24muslim.html?
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Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama
Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Muslim women at an Obama rally in February. Last week, two Muslim
women were not allowed to appear behind the candidate.

By ANDREA ELLIOTT
Published: June 24, 2008
As Senator Barack Obama courted voters in Iowa last December,
Representative Keith Ellison, the country's first Muslim congressman,
stepped forward eagerly to help.

Damon Winter/The New York Times
Barack Obama, on the altar at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, has
appeared in synagogues this campaign but no mosques.

Mr. Obama with Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota
and the first Muslim elected to Congress, in 2007.

Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A Jewish supporter expressing his support at Congregation Rodeph
Shalom in Philadelphia in 2008.
Mr. Ellison believed that Mr. Obama's message of unity resonated
deeply with American Muslims. He volunteered to speak on Mr. Obama's
behalf at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, one of the nation's oldest Muslim
enclaves. But before the rally could take place, aides to Mr. Obama
asked Mr. Ellison to cancel the trip because it might stir
controversy. Another aide appeared at Mr. Ellison's Washington office
to explain.

"I will never forget the quote," Mr. Ellison said, leaning forward in
his chair as he recalled the aide's words. "He said, `We have a very
tightly wrapped message.' "

When Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign, Muslim Americans from
California to Virginia responded with enthusiasm, seeing him as a
long-awaited champion of civil liberties, religious tolerance and
diplomacy in foreign affairs. But more than a year later, many say,
he has not returned their embrace.

While the senator has visited churches and synagogues, he has yet to
appear at a single mosque. Muslim and Arab-American organizations
have tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with Mr. Obama, but
officials with those groups say their invitations — unlike those of
their Jewish and Christian counterparts — have been ignored. Last
week, two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred by campaign
volunteers from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit.

In interviews, Muslim political and civic leaders said they
understood that their support for Mr. Obama could be a problem for
him at a time when some Americans are deeply suspicious of Muslims.
Yet those leaders nonetheless expressed disappointment and even anger
at the distance that Mr. Obama has kept from them.

"This is the `hope campaign,' this is the `change campaign,' " said
Mr. Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota. Muslims are frustrated, he added,
that "they have not been fully engaged in it."

Aides to Mr. Obama denied that he had kept his Muslim supporters at
arm's length. They cited statements in which he had spoken
inclusively about American Islam and a radio advertisement he
recorded for the recent campaign of Representative Andre Carson,
Democrat of Indiana, who this spring became the second Muslim elected
to Congress.

In May, Mr. Obama also had a brief, private meeting with the leader
of a mosque in Dearborn, Mich., home to the country's largest
concentration of Arab-Americans. And this month, a senior campaign
aide met with Arab-American leaders in Dearborn, most of whom are
Muslim. (Mr. Obama did not campaign in Michigan before the primary in
January because of a party dispute over the calendar.)

"Our campaign has made every attempt to bring together Americans of
all races, religions and backgrounds to take on our common
challenges," Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, said in an e-mail
message.

Mr. LaBolt added that with religious groups, the campaign had largely
taken "an interfaith approach, one that may not have reached every
group that wishes to participate but has reached many Muslim
Americans."

The strained relationship between Muslims and Mr. Obama reflects one
of the central challenges facing the senator: how to maintain a broad
electoral appeal without alienating any of the numerous
constituencies he needs to win in November.

After the episode in Detroit last week, Mr. Obama telephoned the two
Muslim women to apologize. "I take deepest offense to and will
continue to fight against discrimination against people of any
religious group or background," he said in a statement.

Such gestures have fallen short in the eyes of many Muslim leaders,
who say the Detroit incident and others illustrate a disconnect
between Mr. Obama's message of unity and his campaign strategy.

"The community feels betrayed," said Safiya Ghori, the government
relations director in the Washington office of the Muslim Public
Affairs Council.

Even some of Mr. Obama's strongest Muslim supporters say they are
uncomfortable with the forceful denials he has made in response to
rumors that he is secretly a Muslim. (Ten percent of registered
voters believe the rumor, according to a poll by the Pew Research
Center.)

In an interview with "60 Minutes," Mr. Obama said the rumors were
offensive to American Muslims because they played
into "fearmongering." But on a new section of his Web site, he
classifies the claim that he is Muslim as a "smear."

"A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there's nothing wrong
with being a Muslim, by the way," Mr. Ellison said.

Mr. Ellison, a first-term congressman, remains arguably the senator's
most important Muslim supporter. He has attended Obama rallies in
Minnesota and appears on the campaign's Web site. But Mr. Ellison
said he was also forced to cancel plans to campaign for Mr. Obama in
North Carolina after an emissary for the senator told him the state
was "too conservative." Mr. Ellison said he blamed Mr. Obama's aides —
not the candidate himself — for his campaign's standoffishness.

Despite the complications of wooing Muslim voters, Mr. Obama and his
Republican rival, Senator John McCain, may find it risky to ignore
this constituency. There are sizable Muslim populations in closely
fought states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.

In those states and others, American Muslims have experienced a
political awakening in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the
attacks, Muslim political leadership in the United States was
dominated by well-heeled South Asian and Arab immigrants, whose
communities account for a majority of the nation's Muslims. (Another
20 percent are estimated to be African-American.) The number of
American Muslims remains in dispute as the Census Bureau does not
collect data on religious orientation; most estimates range from 2.35
million to 6 million.

A coalition of immigrant Muslim groups endorsed George W. Bush in his
2000 campaign, only to find themselves ignored by Bush administration
officials as their communities were rocked by the carrying out of the
USA Patriot Act, the detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants
and other security measures after Sept. 11.

As a result, Muslim organizations began mobilizing supporters across
the country to register to vote and run for local offices, and
political action committees started tracking registered Muslim
voters. The character of Muslim political organizations also began to
change.

"We moved away from political leadership primarily by doctors,
lawyers and elite professionals to real savvy grass-roots
operatives," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim
American Society Freedom Foundation, a political group in
Washington. "We went back to the base."

In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for
53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International
Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the
midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in
the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim
Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the
election, according to data collected by the committee.

The committee's president, Mukit Hossain, said Muslims in Virginia
were drawn to Mr. Obama because of his support for civil liberties
and his more diplomatic approach to the Middle East. Mr. Hossain and
others said his multicultural image also appealed to immigrant voters.

"This is the son of an immigrant; this is someone with a funny name,"
said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who is a
Christian who has campaigned for Mr. Obama at mosques and Arab
churches. "There is this excitement that if he can win, they can win,
too."

Yet some Muslim and Arab-American political organizers worry that the
campaign's reluctance to reach out to voters in those communities
will eventually turn them off. "If they think that they are voting
for a campaign that is trying to distance itself from them, my big
fear is that Muslims will sit it out," Mr. Hossain said.

Throughout the primaries, Muslim groups often failed to persuade Mr.
Obama's campaign to at least send a surrogate to speak to voters at
their events, said Ms. Ghori, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Before the Virginia primary in February, some of the nation's leading
Muslim organizations nearly canceled an event at a mosque in Sterling
because they could not arrange for representatives from any of the
major presidential campaigns to attend. At the last minute, they
succeeded in wooing surrogates from the Clinton and Obama campaigns
by telling each that the other was planning to attend, Mr. Bray said.
(No one from the McCain campaign showed up.)

Frustrations with Mr. Obama deepened the day after he claimed the
nomination when he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel. (Mr. Obama
later clarified his statement, saying Jerusalem's status would need
to be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.)

Osama Siblani, the editor and publisher of the weekly Arab American
News in Dearborn, said Mr. Obama had "pandered" to the Israeli lobby,
while neglecting to meet formally with Arab-American and Muslim
leaders. "They're trying to take the votes without the liabilities,"
said Mr. Siblani, who is also president of the Arab American
Political Action Committee.

Some Muslim supporters of Mr. Obama seem to ricochet between
dejection and optimism. Minha Husaini, a public health consultant in
her 30s who is working for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia, lights
up like a swooning teenager when she talks about his promise for
change.

"He gives me hope," Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month,
shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she
sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being
Muslim, "as if it's something bad," she said.

For Ms. Ghori and other Muslims, Mr. Obama's hands-off approach is
not surprising in a political climate they feel is marred by frequent
attacks on their faith.

Among the incidents they cite are a statement by Mr. McCain, in a
2007 interview with Beliefnet.com, that he would prefer a Christian
president to a Muslim one; a comment by Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton that Mr. Obama was not Muslim "as far as I know"; and a
remark by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to The
Associated Press in March that an Obama victory would be celebrated
by terrorists, who would see him as a "savior."

"All you have to say is Barack Hussein Obama," said Arsalan Iftikhar,
a human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Islamica
Magazine. "You don't even have to say `Muslim.' "

As a consequence, many Muslims have kept their support for Mr. Obama
quiet. Any visible show of allegiance could be used by his opponents
to incite fear, further the false rumors about his faith and "bin-
Laden him," Mr. Bray said.

"The joke within the national Muslim organizations," Ms. Ghori
said, "is that we should endorse the person we don't want to win."

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

[mukto-mona] New York Times: Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama

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