By: Dr. James Zogby
Having become a captive audience to the “clash of civilisations” rhetoric espoused by neo-conservatives and America’s Christian right, US Republicans have dug a deep hole for themselves concerning the Middle East and Islam.
Comments a few weeks back by the 2012 presidential aspirants Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, in opposition to the building of a mosque in New York City, are a case in point. Mrs Palin called the mosque a “stab to the heart,” while Mr Gingrich claimed that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilisation.”
Other top Republican contenders have been no better. Mike Huckabee, a leader of the religious right, has made disparaging comments about Muslims and is so bizarrely pro-Israel that he has stated “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” while Mitt Romney, once the moderate governor of Massachusetts and now the darling of conservatives, has on more than one occasion suggested that the government wiretap mosques.
The GOP has virulently opposed the US president Barack Obama’s Middle East peace initiative and outreach efforts to the Muslim world. Following his June 2009 Cairo University speech, I debated Liz Cheney and former Senator George Allen, both of whom working from Republican Party talking points, took the President to task accusing him of selling America short in order to curry favor with Muslims. They charged Obama with “moral equivalence” (meaning that he equated his concern with the Palestinians with the traditional American concern for Israelis) and “apologizing” for our use of torture and the Iraq War.
The effort to score political points by exploiting fears of Muslims and exacerbating tensions emanating from the Arab-Israeli conflict led two Republican stalwarts, Bill Kristol (the neo-conservative editor of The Weekly Standard) and Gary Bauer (a one-time Presidential candidate and a leader of the Christian right), to form the “Emergency Committee for Israel.” The group has sponsored TV ads attacking a Democratic senate candidate by accusing him of befriending radical Muslims and being an enemy of Israel. The same aggressive, hardline behaviour is on display in Congress. Just last week, the Texas Republican Louie Gohmert introduced a resolution authorising an Israeli attack on Iran. While Mr Gohmert can be dismissed as a loose cannon given his penchant for long-winded fundamentalist rants about Israel’s claims to the Holy Land, it is disturbing that his “Israeli attack on Iran” resolution was endorsed by one third of the Republican Caucus.
Also last week, the Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who will become the chair of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs if Republicans take control of Congress, countered the Obama administration’s effort to elevate the status of Washington’s PLO office by circulating a letter calling on the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton to expel Palestinian diplomats from the US and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
This ideological drift has filtered downwards and is now playing out in elections around the US. In Colorado, for example, the Republican senate candidate Jane Norton criticised the administration’s efforts to include Muslims in Nasa’s science and technology programmes, calling it a “feel good” effort that Americans could not afford. In Tennessee, the sitting Lt Governor, Ron Ramsey, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, was quoted saying “you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life or cult.” And a candidate for Congress in Tennessee has made an issue of efforts by the local Muslim community to build a mosque, saying that “our nation was founded on the tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition; we have a right to defend that tradition.”
These attitudes were on display last week at the annual gathering in Washington of the group Christians United for Israel. While one lone Democrat was on the programme (a stridently hawkish Congresswoman named Shelley Berkeley), other headliners included the second-ranking republican in the House, Eric Cantor, and representatives of right-wing, pro-Israel groups and conservative think tanks.
All of this has had a profound impact on deepening the partisan divide on a range of issues, including how Democrats and Republicans approach critical Middle East policy issues. Recent polling has noted a disturbing gap between the two parties. For example, in an answer to the question: “How should the Obama administration pursue peace in the Middle East,” 14 per cent of Democrats answered “support Israel” and 5 per cent said “support the Palestinians,” while 74 per cent responded that the US “should steer a middle course.” Of Republicans, on the other hand, 71 per cent said “support Israel” and 3 per cent said “support the Palestinians,” while only 20 per cent said “steer a middle course.”
This Republican drift and the harshness of its anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric is worrisome. America’s engagement across the Middle East and South Asia is too important and the dangers too great for such virulence and misunderstanding to have taken hold in one of our political parties, especially when the GOP’s leaders appear so willing to vent their venom and use it for political advantage.
Even George W Bush, for all his flaws, knew better, as did his two secretaries of state, his father and many other Republican leaders of the not-too-distant past. It’s high time for these traditional conservatives to come forward and challenge the current GOP crop who are running their party, and I fear, their country, into a deep hole.
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Right-Wing ‘Qur’an’ Hate: Republicans Exploiting 9/11 For Fear and Political Profit
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| About The Author: James Zogby — is the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream.
Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us, and Why it Matters For the past three decades, Dr. Zogby has been involved in a full range of Arab American issues. A co-founder and chairman of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the late 1970s, he later co-founded and served as the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In 1982, he co-founded Save Lebanon, Inc., a private non-profit, humanitarian and non-sectarian relief organization which funds health care for Palestinian and Lebanese victims of war, and other social welfare projects in Lebanon. In 1985, Zogby founded AAI. In 1993, following the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in Washington, he was asked by Vice President Al Gore to lead Builders for Peace, a private sector committee to promote U.S. business investment in the West Bank and Gaza. In his capacity as co-president of Builders, Zogby frequently traveled to the Middle East with delegations led by Vice President Gore and late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. In 1994, with former U.S. Congressman Mel Levine, his colleague as co-president of Builders, Zogby led a U.S. delegation to the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Cairo. Zogby also chaired a forum on the Palestinian economy at the Casablanca Economic Summit in 1994. After 1994, through Builders, Zogby worked with a number of US agencies to promote and support Palestinian economic development, including AID, OPIC, USTDA, and the Departments of State and Commerce. Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years. Most recently, Zogby was elected a co-convener of the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Committee (NDECC), an umbrella organization of Democratic Party leaders of European and Mediterranean descent. On September 24, 1999, the NDECC elected Dr. James Zogby as its representative to the Democratic National Committee’s Executive Committee. In 2005 he was appointed as chair of the DNC’s Resolutions Committee. A lecturer and scholar on Middle East issues, U.S.-Arab relations, and the history of the Arab American community, Dr. Zogby appears frequently on television and radio. He has appeared as a regular guest on all the major network news programs. After hosting the popular “A Capital View” on the Arab Network of America for several years, he now hosts “Viewpoint with James Zogby” on Abu Dhabi Television, LinkTV, Dish Network, and DirecTV. Since 1992, Dr. Zogby has also written a weekly column on U.S. politics for the major newspapers of the Arab world. The column, Washington Watch, is currently published in 14 Arab countries. He has authored a number of books including two recent publications, “What Ethnic Americans Really Think” and “What Arabs Think: Values, Beliefs and Concerns.” Dr. Zogby has testified before U.S. House and Senate committees, has been guest speaker on a number of occasions in the Secretary’s Open Forum at the U.S. Department of State, and has addressed the United Nations and other international forums. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Public Service Award from the U.S. Department of State “in recognition of outstanding contributions to national and international affairs.” Dr. Zogby is also active professionally beyond his involvement with the Arab American community. He currently serves on the national advisory boards of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Forum, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Additionally, he is a Senior Analyst for the polling firm Zogby International. In 1975, Dr. Zogby received his doctorate from Temple University’s Department of Religion, where he studied under the Islamic scholar Dr. Ismail al-Faruqi. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow at Princeton University in 1976, and on several occasions was awarded grants for research and writing by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Defense Education Act, and the Mellon Foundation. Dr. Zogby received a Bachelor of Arts from Le Moyne College. In 1995, Le Moyne awarded Zogby an honorary doctoral of laws degree, and in 1997 named him the college’s outstanding alumnus. Dr. Zogby is married to Eileen Patricia McMahon and is the father of five children. [ ZOGBY'S ARTICLES IN THE HUFFINGTON POST ] ————————————————————————————————————————————————
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(Palgrave Macmillan, October 2010).————————————————————————————————————————————————
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