Arab American News Focus: A Week of Republican Candidates Anti-Arab and Anti-Islamic Rhetoric

January 18, 2008-

Vol. 9, #2, A regular update from the
Arab American Institute
292 Days Until Election 2008!

Romney's Lucky Break
The Obama-as-nefarious-Muslim saga took a strange twist yesterday. In a Washington Post op-ed, Richard Cohen adds a byline to this disturbing narrative by suggesting Senator Barack Obama is separated by four degrees from anti-Semitism. The precise connection? Last year a magazine, loosely affiliated with Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave its annual award to Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam. Cohen acknowledges Obama is a practicing Christian and the op-ed states "that nothing in Obama's record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views." So why link Obama to Farrakhan? Shame on Cohen and the Washington Post for keeping this story alive.

Indeed, Mr. President, "the state of Palestine is long overdue"
The JTA summed up President George W. Bush's trip to Israel and Palestine by saying that it was "a little like reading the fine print in the nutritional information on comfort food: there's empty puffery, to be sure, but also nuggets of substance." Some of those nuggets came from Bush, himself, such as: an appeal for "Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people...[that is] viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent;" new focus on "international mechanisms, including compensation, to resolve the [Palestinian] refugee issue;" and the appointment of Air Force Lt. Gen. William M. Fraser III to monitor progress on the ground. It is true that President Bush was the first American president to ever visit Ramallah, but that photo-op will only become truly historic if real progress is achieved. We are exercising (very) cautious optimism.

After Seven Years of Silence
This week's Republican Presidential Debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina started off sanely enough, with candidates exchanging well-crafted ideas on the economy and change inside the Beltway. All of that good sense dissipated instantly, however, when the topic turned to American foreign policy in the Middle East. Honestly, it was like someone flipped a switch:

Congressman Ron Paul continued to advocate pre-World War I isolationism and equal opportunity negligence to all countries and conflicts the world over. When asked his opinion of Bush's personal effort to sustain momentum in negotiating Israeli-Palestinian peace, Congressman Paul clarified "we support both sides...not only with the Palestinians, but the Lebanese and all Arab nations. We support Israel, and we try to have this balance. But I think it'd be much better to have a balance by being out of there..."

Meanwhile, Governor Mitt Romney played jingoistic father-figure, noting that "we as great nations need to help [Middle Eastern countries] have the rule of law, have good schools that are not Wahhabi schools..." Clearly this newly-anointed favorite son of Michigan, home to the country's most concentrated Arab American population, has spent little or no time in the Arab world.

And Governor Mike Huckabee was quick to mention he had visited Israel nine times (though eagerly awaiting The Rapture in the Holy Land hardly counts as foreign policy experience) but surely riled many Arab heads of state by affirming "[we] have one true ally in the Middle East, and that's Israel."

Finally, not to be outdone on matters of national security--or general anti-Arab chauvinism--Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proudly recalled that he "threw Arafat out of the U.N. 50 celebration," and bragged that "when confronted by an Arab prince who wanted to give us $10 million for the Twin Towers Fund, [he] said no."

Battling Big Brother
John Sununu, New Hampshire Senator and member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, continued his opposition this week to the REAL ID Act, stating that the program "presents serious privacy concerns and is an unfunded, unnecessary and intrusive mandate on the state." For the second week in a row, we commend Senator Sununu and this time specifically thank him for moving us forward in 2008, not back to the proverbial 1984.

We Could Not Make This Up
A recent audit of the FBI's financial records found that the Bureau can't pay its wiretapping bills! The Justice Department Inspector General reported that more than half of 990 bills for telecom surveillance went unpaid by the FBI, resulting in disconnected phone lines and lost evidence. "It sounds as though the telecoms believe it when the FBI says the warrant is in the mail, but not when they say the check is in the mail," said Michael German, current ACLU national security counsel and former FBI agent. This is not just an embarrassing oversight by the FBI, but suggests increased tension between the telecoms and the Bush administration over provisions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). As FISA is due to expire February 1, we'll keep you posted.

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