Betrayal-2000 and the 2004 Elections: US Muslims Leaders Still Haven’t Learned Their Lesson

By Jawad Ali

Last weekend, the recently launched American Muslim Taskforce (AMT), an umbrella group of nine US-based Muslim organizations, held a town hall meeting on the upcoming elections at the San Jose Convention Center.

Ralph Nader addressed the crowd along with the regular Bushie heavyweights like Grover Norquist.

AMT has been set up to guide Muslim voters about the 2004 elections. It is the new incarnation of the notorious American Muslim Political Coordination Council (AMPCC) that was set up in 2000 to rally the Muslim vote behind Bush-Cheney. But as we reported in February, the 2000 Bush endorsement debacle was apparently enough of a liability to make AMPCC defunct and require a new name.

However, new name or not, traditional US Muslim leaders still seem to be asleep at the wheel, denying any change in direction and ignoring trends among their rank and file.

Some American pundits and politicians quietly snuck out of Saddam’s heart shaped waterbed one morning and started bad mouthing him for being the monster who gassed his own people. This happened after years of sanctions gave Saddam an erectile dysfunction. These people still have not come clean on what a grand time they had helping Saddam gas his own people, back when he was fully erect.

Muslim political leadership has made its own sneaky U-Turn about these famous U-Turners, and they are hoping that we would stop bringing this up in public. In an article on the weekend meeting in Silicon Valley's Metro newspaper, Najeeb Hasan takes a rare look at this shift. And we learn that some of the Muslim political celebrities who were out to embrace Ralph Nader at the San Jose event are still very proud of their election 2000 performance.

A common excuse they give for Betrayal-2000 is that 9-11 changed everything. The assumption that they want us to accept is that Bush and Cheney only became crooks on that date, and prior to that they were the ideal Islamic ticket. Maybe they share the ditto-heads’ belief that Bush and Cheney are good honest Christians and patriots who are doing their best to beat back an evil world.

Some of them continue with the supreme arrogance that led them into the embarrassing endorsement. One unnamed insider argues that the important part was that they brought all these people to vote, and for whom is not so important—“like teaching children how to read.” How nice. It is more like teaching children to read by handing them the “pissing blondes” magazine that often tries to advertise itself in our comments section.

The neocons that came to power are far more obscene than all cheap pornography combined.

The last bit of justification is that they fell for the Bushies because of the tiniest rhetorical nod—a vague reference in one of the presidential debates by the great Texas civil libertarian Bush opposing secret evidence and racial profiling. Instead of admitting that this was a massively naive mistake, some of the leadership clings to the notion that it actually made sense. If it were not a mistake, then which one of the following rhetorical nods would they accept in Debate 2004, before they start stumping for four more years?

• Troop reductions in Iraq
  
• More troops to provide security for Iraqis
  
• Democracy in the Middle East
  
• Sharon is a man of peace, with only a sprinkling of war
  
• The Christian God is only slightly better than the Muslim God
  
• The “security barrier” is beautiful, but not very helpful

Progressive Muslims have something to celebrate in all of this. The traditional Muslim leadership is starting to wake up to which way the wind is blowing among “the children.” Some of them are even rushing to adopt the “Progressive” label. It is right there on MPAC’s post Betrayal-2000 logo. Ralph Nader’s message about corporate criminality is starting to replace rightwing rants about the horrors of homosexuality at Muslim political meetings.

Only a tiny minority of American Muslims put their faith in their religious or political leadership. Hasan makes the understandable mistake of assuming that the mad rush to deliver the Muslim vote to the far right actually had the impact on “the children” to the same degree that the leadership claims.

The leadership went all out to push for a Bush block vote, and it seems logical that they would exaggerate their influence. Did “the children” really fall in line behind the block vote? Somewhere between a third to half of Muslim American voters are African American, and they tend to vote Democratic. Do we have any credible numbers to show that they joined the notorious block in big numbers? This leadership has even less credibility with them than they do with the immigrants.

We welcome the Muslim leadership’s shift away from the hard right, even if this shift is purely opportunistic. But until they come clean and define their political values, Betrayal-2000 will remain a rotting albatross around their necks.

Jawad Ali is co-founder and executive editor of MWU!