Politics

By Robert Samuels

The Washington Post

The morning after the worst mass shooting in American history, Azra Baig woke up expecting Donald Trump to resurrect his message about her religion. And she knew that she, too, had to resurrect her message about him.

“If we don’t stand up now, I don’t know when the Muslim community across this country will be politically engaged or civically minded,” said Baig, a 44-year-old registered nurse who attends the mosque at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey. “Unfortunately, it took this climate for people to be more active, but it will happen. We are going to vote.”

Baig said that she and others living in this Muslim enclave about 80 minutes from New York City had already felt a higher call during this election year. It became personal when Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, reacted to the terrorist attack last year in San Bernardino, Calif., with calls for banning Muslims from entering the country and increasing surveillance at mosques. He backed up his views with what felt like a particular insult to the Muslims who live in this state — echoing a discredited rumor that some in this community openly celebrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In this and other Muslim communities across the country, including in battlegrounds such as Florida and Michigan, candidates from both parties have courted Muslim voters for years. President Obama and President George W. Bush frequently described Islam as a peaceful religion marred by extremists. Republican Gov. Chris Christie gained the respect of New Jersey Muslims after standing up for his appointment of a Muslim lawyer to the Superior Court in Passaic County and dismissing concerns expressed by some conservatives that the jurist would enact sharia law as “crap.”

And until now, many in this community said, they had focused much of their activist energy on building friendly ties with local officials. Community leaders tried to engage with police departments and politicians to give them a more complete understanding of the fundamental tenets of Islam.

Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. in December. But since then, his commitment to a “total and complete shutdown” has wavered repeatedly. Here’s how. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
Trump’s presence is changing the calculation for these Muslims, who say they feel emboldened to become more of a force in national politics. Trump’s response to the shooting early Sunday in Orlando — he delivered a speech Monday in which he accused American Muslims of harboring terrorists such as the Orlando shooter — has only intensified the sense of urgency here.

“I want every American to succeed, including Muslims, but the Muslims have to work with us,” Trump said. “They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death and destruction.”

Many in this community said they had been bracing for Trump’s response since they first heard about the tragedy. They worried about the impact of the moment, particularly coming during the holy month of Ramadan and amid a global outpouring of love and support following the death of one of the world’s most revered Muslims, Muhammad Ali.

The president of the Islamic Society, Arif Patel, felt empowered and inspired after he attended Ali’s memorial service in Louisville last week. On Sunday, he awoke to text messages from fellow Muslims fearing what conservatives might say if Ali werereplaced in the news cycle by a shooter who was Muslim. Then came the anguished messages after news that Mateen had professed Islam as his faith and then his allegiance to the Islamic State. And then, more texts came, wondering if police could do more patrols around the mosque — an added precaution to help protect against attacks.

Patel told worshipers at the mosque to “double down in terms of being good human beings.”

“There’ll be a lot of propaganda,” Patel reflected. “It is so uninformed to think we would harbor terrorists. They kill Muslims, too.”

Trying to avoid the specifics of candidates’ politics, he called on worshipers to “donate blood and participate in domestic violence walks and partner with everyone.”

At a rally in Atlanta on June 14, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed immigrants coming into the U.S. believe in “execution for things that you would say are like standard parts of life.” Trump suggested the U.S. should help build safe zones in Syria for refugees instead of allowing them in. (Reuters)
He pointed out that a national coalition of organizations on Sunday morning launched an online fundraiser with the hopes of raising $25,000 for victims and their families. They surpassed the goal in mere hours and have continued to raise money.

“Be an ambassador for your community,” Patel recalled telling the group. “We had already been doing that, but we need to do even more of that.”

Three years ago, after encouragement from Patel, Baig became the first Asian American woman to serve on the local school board. She said she gave out more than 100 forms at voter registration drives at the mosque in the lead-up to this month’s New Jersey primary — and she plans to hold more during the general election. Many people, she said, told her they would be voting for the first time.

Many in this community attended rallies for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to get a sense of which might best represent their interests.

“My biggest motivation during this election is to stop Trump from becoming president,” Dilawar Jaulikar, 42, said one recent night before Ramadan prayers. He moved from India to the United States when he was 21 and works in information technology. “Now I am paying more attention to politics than ever before. We have to watch everything he is saying.”

Nouran Shehata, a 21-year-old recent graduate of Rutgers University, made a small confession during a group discussion at the Islamic Society.

“I am voting for Trump,” she said. Then she paused and smirked, and now the group was laughing because the very idea seemed so ridiculous to them. Laughter, she said, helps to ease the tensions of the times.

“I don’t understand anyone who would vote for this man,” she said.

“He is trying to destroy us with his hate,” Jaulikar said. “I have never seen anything like him.”

As hundreds streamed in, some wore traditional hijabs and loose dresses and tunics. Others came in jeans, and there were children in pajamas. Inside the mosque, the bulletin board is decorated with newspaper columns excoriating Islamophobia, offers for trips to Mecca and requests for housing for members. A handful of Syrian refugees just started attending services. An enlarged quote reads: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” The inspiring words are not from a Muslim, but from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

About an hour north of the mosque, a man named Diab Mustafa, who was locking up a community center recently, sighed:

“It feels like we’re back at square one.”

Mustafa, 46, is a real estate broker who lives just outside Paterson, where Main Street is filled with restaurants offering Ramadan buffets for hungry Muslims eager to break their fasts after sundown.

After 9/11, Mustafa remembers, people in this primarily Arab American community felt fearful, angry and a little defensive. They worked with police to try to limit profiling. There were raids targeting potential terrorists.

The community, Mustafa said, “tried to moderate language.” Fearing that they might actually harbor terrorists, Mustafa said many kept a lookout for neighbors who might say hateful things about the country — in hopes of calming them down or reporting them to authorities.

Something different has happened in recent months, according to Andre Sayegh, a Paterson city councilman who is Catholic and represents the part of the city known as “Little Ramallah.” When Trump first mentioned the Muslim ban, Sayegh said the community did not feel an obligation to defend the purity of the faith. Instead, religious leaders called on politicians to explain their beliefs.

“We all had to go up to the Islamic Society to assure them that we denounced Trump,” Sayegh said. “That was how much politics have changed in the community.”

Back in South Brunswick, Baig prepared to join hundreds at the mosque for their nightly prayers. The solemn month of fasting that is intended to help build a closer connection to God has also become a festive time to build community. Worshipers spilled out of the mosque after the late-night service and hung out past midnight. One group of young men discussed internships. A small girl in a pink hijab bounced a basketball. Baig ate sweet desserts prepared by Mohammad Jawad, 48, a local restaurant owner.

Jawad began donating food and drinks during Ramadan as a way to honor his deceased father and thank God. Jawad said his faith lifts him above the current state of American politics.

“The politicians are too busy talking about each other,” said Jawad, who said he will vote for a Democrat, like he usually does. “The poor are getting poorer by the day. When I go to New Brunswick, the line for food stamps gets longer and longer. They are not trying to do what they are supposed to do, which is help people. Trump? He can say what he wants, but if he gets to the office, he’ll be just like the rest of them.”

As he spoke, he spotted a security guard patrolling the mosque.

“Sir, did you like the mango lassi?” Jawad asked. “Take some more.”

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

On Monday, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, spoke to the American Jewish Committee Global Forum and told the audience that the U.S. should pledge $40 billion to Israel. Rice said the money would be military aid and go to Israel over a period of ten years. Rice, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, … Continued

By DANIEL SIERADSKI

THE NEW YORK TIMES

IN 1985, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo proposed that New York State divest of its billions of dollars in investments in companies that did business with South Africa “to demonstrate,” he declared, “the abhorrence of our residents to the pernicious system of apartheid.” An opponent of Mr. Cuomo’s plan, the state comptroller, Edward V. Regan, told The New York Times, “We’re not in the foreign-policy business.”

State Republicans blocked Mr. Cuomo’s efforts, and he ultimately settled for divesting personally from apartheid, withdrawing his personal funds from banks with ties to South Africa.

How times have changed.

Last week, Mario Cuomo’s son, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, signed an executive order essentially creating a blacklist of entities that boycott or divest from Israel or encourage others to do so, banning those companies from receiving taxpayer funding.

The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as B.D.S., is a strategy intended to combat Israel’s nearly 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, a situation that three former Israeli prime ministers, as well as Secretary of State John Kerry, have warned would become akin to apartheid if allowed to continue.

I oppose Israel’s occupation and I want the Palestinians to have equal rights and self-determination. Still, I do not support a boycott that targets Israel as a whole. While I avoid buying products from companies that operate in Israeli settlements, I do so out of commitment to the two-state solution and my belief that the occupation endangers Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.

But I also believe that economic boycott is a legitimate form of political expression, one that the government has no business restricting by withholding state business.

Paradoxically, Mr. Cuomo has engaged in a type of boycott himself, issuing three executive orders banning nonessential travel by state employees to Indiana, Mississippi and North Carolina for discriminatory laws against L.G.B.T. people. Apparently, in Mr. Cuomo’s book, boycotts are acceptable against American states with discriminatory laws, but not against a foreign country that has systematically subjected millions of people to decades of oppression.

Documents from statehouses where anti-B.D.S. bills have passed, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, show that there is a concerted effort by advocacy groups, like the Israeli American Council, and even the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect, to promote anti-B.D.S. legislation in statehouses and in Congress.

While bills in other states have, for better or worse, gained legislators’ approval, Mr. Cuomo’s executive order is the first to be instituted without democratic ratification. After it became clear a bill with the same purpose would not pass the State Assembly, Mr. Cuomo decided he wanted to take “immediate action,” as he put it at the order’s signing, joking that the legislative process was often “a tedious affair.”

Legal scholars on both sides of the issue have raised flags. On Twitter, Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School who sits on the Academic Advisory Council of the pro-boycott group Jewish Voice for Peace, called the order “clearly unconstitutional.”

Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, who has supported anti-boycott legislation, has suggested that Mr. Cuomo’s executive order could run up against the First Amendment, and that its language penalizing advocacy of boycott or divestment — the measure is aimed at those who participate in pro-boycott activity or “promote others to engage” in it — was “a bridge too far.”

In analyzing a similar law passed in South Carolina last month, The Harvard Law Review wrote that the motivation behind such laws “could not be more antithetical to the core values of the First Amendment.”

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Worse yet, the vagueness of Mr. Cuomo’s executive order raises more questions than it answers. For example, as the owner of a small web-design business who occasionally does freelance work for CUNY schools and state agencies, will I be denied contracts because I argued against buying SodaStream home carbonation systems while they were being manufactured in a settlement on the West Bank? If a filmmaker declares support for boycotting Israel, will the state deny her production company access to shoot at the new state-funded production center near Syracuse? If a church’s national assembly backs divestment from Israel, will it be denied state grants to operate homeless shelters and soup kitchens in Brooklyn?

And what about companies working in the West Bank that succumb to the economic pressure of boycotts or divestment and move their operations? Will the State of New York tell a private enterprise that it must choose between losing money because of boycotters or losing contracts with the state?

But this is also personal. As a Jew who has lived in Israel and has many relatives there, I feel that the government should not be dictating how I relate to the Jewish state and in what ways I voice my objection to its policies. Regardless of how one feels about the Israeli occupation and the B.D.S. movement, Mr. Cuomo’s decision should be an unsettling precedent.

Source: www.nytimes.com

by James J. Zogby

Arab American Institute

Recent Trump outrages have thrown the GOP establishment into a tizzy. Reactions have been varied, ranging from a few brave souls who have denounced their nominee’s bigotry to those who continue to hope against hope that Trump will begin to behave more “presidential”. Ignored in all of this are two important realities: Trump is Trump; and his message and movement are the handiwork of the very establishment that is now rejecting their creations.

Trump’s xenophobic, male chauvinist, and bigoted bullying campaign rhetoric is not an act. It is who he is and it what the constituency that has propelled his candidacy wants him to be. While this simple truth has been self-evident throughout the campaign, the establishment has been in denial, unwilling or unable to confront reality. With every display of brutish behavior, they pronounced Trump fatally wounded—only to discover that his appalling and dangerous attacks on Mexicans, women, Muslims, people with disabilities, news reporters, and incitements to violence against demonstrators—caused his poll numbers to rise.

Party leaders shouldn’t have been surprised, since it was they who set the table for “The Donald”. For decades, the GOP has preyed off the fears of white voters who are in economic distress. Since the days of Richard Nixon, they have used subtle and not so subtle racial messages to win support. Whether the targets were “welfare queens”, “Willie Horton”, or resentment over “affirmative action”—the appeal was the same: “they are a threat to you” and “they are privileged and are taking from you”.

With the election of Barack Obama, in the midst of the most severe economic crisis since the Depression, this effort swung into high gear with the Tea Party and “birther” movements. New targets were added—Mexicans (“illegals” and “drugs”) and Muslims (“terrorists” and “an existential threat to our way of life”).    

In each instance, the GOP fed the beast. They funded, helped to organize, and used the Tea Party to win elections, and with “a wink and a nod” they let the “birthers” fester in effort to deligitimize the president. They encouraged and celebrated vigilante actions against “illegals” and callously exploited the fear of Muslims with trumped-up campaigns against Sharia law and TV ads in congressional races charging Democrats with being “soft on Muslims”.

All of this created a constituency which Trump, the entertainer, understood and toward whom he directed his campaign. He is but the latest in a long line of demagogues to tap into resentment and fear—following in the footsteps of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Michele Bachmann.    

The hope of the Republican Party establishment that Trump would become a more “respectable” candidate has been, in part, disingenuous. If he were not the nominee, they would be thrilled to have him campaigning for GOP candidate. But as the standard bearer, he is an embarrassment.

His racist attack on the judge who is hearing the case against the so-called “Trump University” has left party leaders flailing about. In an effort to distance themselves from his behavior, they have expressed everything from disappointment to disgust. Last weekend, Trump compounded his bigotry by noting that not only did he feel that a judge of Mexican descent couldn’t give him a fair trial (because Trump was planning to build a wall between Mexico and the US); he also felt he couldn’t trust a Muslim American judge (because he had called for a ban on Muslim immigrants to the US).

While I do not have polling data on Mexican Americans, I did conduct a survey of US voters a few months ago that demonstrates the sad reality that is behind Trump’s calculations. American voters were asked “If a Muslim American were to attain an important position of influence in the government, would you feel confident that person would be able to do the job, or would you feel that their religion would influence their decision-making?”

A plurality of voters (46%) said they felt that Muslims would be unduly influenced by their religion. More telling: while a plurality of Democrats (47%) were confident that a Muslim American could do the job, 63% of Republicans said a Muslim couldn’t be trusted—including a whopping 75% of voters who said they were Trump supporters.  

The bottom line is that Trump didn’t create this mindset or this constituency. It was created for him and he is merely playing to the crowd. Instead of hand-wringing, the party leaders who for years have encouraged this phenomenon need to accept their responsibility. It didn’t just happen, and Trump didn’t will it into being. The fear and/or resentment of Mexicans/Muslims/blacks/strong women/etc has long been cultivated and has now given birth to its evil fruit.

I warned that this beast would turn on its creators, and now it has. Whining or expressions of disappointment won’t make it go away. Decisive action just might.  Republicans should repudiate bigotry and demonstrate resolve by listening to those courageous voices who are calling on them to “Dump Trump” and undo the damage they have done to their party and to our country.  

Source: www.aaiusa.org