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The Pueblo Chieftain Online - February 2, 2008
Muslim voice in U.S. not always easy to distinguish
Stan Nelson
According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, most U.S. Muslims believe peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible.
They do not support suicide bombing or al-Qaida, affirm that hard work yields reward, agree the government should take an active role in the protection of common morality, and see no real conflict between devout faith and living a viable social life.
They are concerned about the rise of Islamist extremism within the borders and elsewhere, and don't think the U.S. has handled the war against terrorism quite correctly.
U.S. Muslims closely mirror the general population in terms of education and income, and tend to describe themselves as satisfied with their lives here, whether native-born or immigrant. In general terms, their appreciation of life in the United States appears quite positive.
Two characteristics of their population should attract the attention of politicians. One is that they tend to be younger than the general population: 87 percent of respondents in Pew's sample were younger than 55 years old, compared to an estimated 70 percent of all U.S. residents.
The other is that they tend to register as Democrats, describe themselves as moderates or liberals, and favor an activist government. All these are counter to the political identifications and sensibilities of most evangelical Christians.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has taken note not only of these statistical distinctions, but of a trend toward political interest as Muslims are swept along in the gathering prelude to Election Day, still nine months away.
CAIR offers enough material and resources online to keep the most obsessively politically inclined person, let alone such a Muslim, busy. Its Web site offers voter guides from the council and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a catalogue of downloadable statements of condemnation against Islamist terrorism, news, statements of position and questionnaire responses by presidential candidates, and a list of Muslim candidates for office. This year two, from Indiana and Virginia, seek to join Minnesota's Keith Ellison in the U.S. House.
Opinion pieces by CAIR staff members recount successful campaigns to register and mobilize voters in 2004 and 2006, and exhort Muslim voters to greater achievement this year.
Still, Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's director of communications, is circumspect: "It should be clear to any candidate," he writes, "that American Muslims are a key group of voters who defy simplistic labeling and maintain an independent streak that should be taken into account by all those running for public office."
All that may be true, but some tough realities must be confronted.
We find a clue in another feature of cair2008election.com, which is a list of what the council identifies as anti-Muslim rhetoric, sometimes accompanied by responses. Noted within are remarks by Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and, yes, a pattern seems apparent. The only Democrat mentioned so far is Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, and not because he said anything anti-Muslim, but because he has suffered insinuations apparently intended to excite fears he might be soft on Islamist extremism.
Still, this feature of the CAIR election site points up a truth that U.S. Muslims will have to face, at least this election year. Implicit within the targeted rhetoric, whether obvious or questionable in anti-Muslim quality, is the presumption that whatever consequence might result should hardly spell the end of anyone's campaign.
Again, numbers tell the tale. The Pew center notes that the Census Bureau is legally constrained from asking people about religious beliefs and affiliations, and polling agencies don't have the manpower to manage samples greater than several hundred people. So no one has better than a guess at how many Muslims live in the United States, but estimates tend to hover at 1 percent of the population or less.
That's about 3 million people, at most, and not all of them are or can be registered voters. In 2004, just fewer than 122 million people voted on Election Day either for the incumbent President Bush or Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Although there weren't enough Muslim voters nationwide to swing the election for Kerry, it's fair to say their concentration in Dearborn, Mich., may have helped him to carry the state.
Still, the fact remains that there aren't that many Muslim voters, and, despite Hooper's injunction to politicians, it is possible to count them among a larger category of moderate to liberal voters. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
The good thing is we can see that, aside from a worrisome minority (for example, the single-digit samples who saw no problem with suicide bombings - if perhaps not here), Muslims are becoming quite well assimilated into the U.S. political culture.
The bad thing is that the voice of the moderate, violence-hating, fully assimilated, culturally comfortable Muslim gets lost in the shuffle, and his or her identity is mixed, resentfully, with the ones U.S. politicians identify as the enemy.
Stan Nelson is news editor at The Pueblo Chieftain.
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