American Muslims – Perpetual Swing Voters?

"Democrats' wins hinged on Muslims" reads the headline of an article by Eric Pfeiffer in the Washington Times, and one wonders how anyone could write such a title with a straight face.

In 2000, year of the Palm Beach hanging chads, it was Muslims who allegedly won the election for George W. Bush. Here is an excerpt from a 2001 article by Alexander Rose, "How Did Muslims Vote in 2000?" in the Middle East Quarterly:

An "exclusive exit poll" of 350 Florida Muslims, apparently conducted by the AMA [American Muslim Alliance] and reported on its website, found that 91 percent voted for Bush, 1 percent for Gore, and 8 percent for Nader. The Tampa Bay Islamic Center estimated that 55,000 Muslims in Florida voted and that 88 percent of them favored Bush. If true, this would mean that Bush's majority among Muslims in Florida was far more than his several-hundred-vote lead over Gore.

From this rather flimsy evidence, Islamist organizations decided that Bush owed them for his victory. Agha Saeed, the AMPCC chairman, concluded that "it won't be long before political analysts realize that Muslim voters have played a historic role." And Sami al-Arian, an engineering professor at the University of Southern Florida and someone who was the subject of a six-year federal investigation for alleged links to Islamist terrorism, added, "Political pundits have been slow in acknowledging the crucial, even decisive, role of the Muslim vote in Florida." The chairman of a Massachusetts AMA chapter, Tahir Ali, crowed that if Muslims "had voted like we did in previous elections, guess who would be president right now? Al Gore." Republican leaders seeking Muslim support have accordingly paid lip-service to this strange logic: at an MPAC forum in January, Tom Davis, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, declared that without the AMPCC endorsement, "Florida would have been reversed."

(It's always good to have the political wisdom of convicted terrorist supporter Sami Al-Arian added to the mix.)

	Mukit Hossain, Democratic activist and "researcher."

This year, with a Senate cliffhanger in the balance, a study immediately popped up to "prove" that Muslims won it for the Democrats. Here is Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, hewing to a very thin line: "Although the-get-out-the-vote campaign was nonpartisan, there is no doubt that our strategy to support a large Muslim voter turnout in areas with potentially close election races was a correct one."

And here is Mukit Hossain, also of MASFF – not to speak of president of the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee, a group that endorsed the candidacy of Democrat James H. Webb Jr. and appearing at a press conference wearing a Webb campaign button on his jacket – with the details, all produced by his very own research: In the Virginia U.S. Senate race, 86 percent of the state's over 50,000 self-identified Muslim registered voters went to the polls; of them, 92 percent, or 47,092, voted for Webb. Webb defeated Republican George Allen by 9,326 votes, so QED. "If Muslims had decided to put their weight behind Allen, Republicans would have had at least a tie in the Senate," Hossain claimed.

Comment: (1) Give me a break. (2) Is this the beginning of a trend, whereby Islamists claim that every close U.S. election is won (never lost) by virtue of the Muslim vote? Stay tuned for 2008 and thereafter. (November 14, 2006)

Nov. 30, 2006 update: Never slack about letting the Washington Times get ahead, the Washington Post has now also run an article using Mukit Hossain's "research."

Dec. 24, 2006 update: Mahdi Bray is now busily spreading the gospel of the Virginia vote. Here he is in Dearborn, Michigan, at the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America convention, as reported by the Detroit Free Press:

A strategy of organizing Muslim voters worked in Virginia this year in the U.S. Senate race. The effort was so organized that Muslim taxi drivers in northern Virginia took the day off to ferry Muslims to the polls, said Imam Mahdy Bray, a speaker at the convention. Volunteers also made phone calls to Muslims in Virginia to urge them to vote, he said. As a result, Democrat James Webb ousted incumbent Republican George Allen by about 9,000 votes in a race in which 50,000 Muslims went to the polls -- 47,000 of them voting for Webb, Bray said. "You can make a difference when you work," Bray said.

Related Topics:  Democracy and Islam, Muslims in the United States, Public opinion polls receive the latest by email: subscribe to daniel pipes' free mailing list This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.