Posted By Jonathan Mark
Route 17: The Islamic Vote
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A month is a lifetime in an election year, but this survey (released Jan. 30) is the most recent information I could find on American Muslim political preferences, and an interesting snapshot all its own.
Apparently U.S. Muslims didn’t get the e-mails linking Barack Obama to Islam. The poll, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), reveals that American Muslims prefer Hillary Clinton for president, although more are undecided (45 percent) than support Clinton (24 percent) and Obama (20 percent) combined. (Read the full survey here.)
The survey indicated that Ron Paul (2 percent) was the preferred Republican, slightly ahead of John McCain. Regarding party affiliation, 49 percent considered themselves Democrat, 8 percent Republican, with the rest independent.
The CAIR report said, “it is not clear” why Hillary was leading, but Paul was favored among Republicans because he was “fair minded.”
Asked about what issues mattered to American Muslims, Israel-Palestine was said to be “important” by 90 percent (71 percent said it was “very important”), but Israel-Palestine is not the dominant issue for American Muslims. Twelve other issues were considered more important, and nine other issues ranked higher on the scale of “very important.” Education, civil rights and health care policies were the issues that mattered most.
Only 75 percent said brokering the Israel-Palestinian problem would improve America’s reputation in the Arab world, (I say “only” because we’ve been led to believe that this is the universally accepted antidote for America’s reputation.) Only 74 percent were against waterboarding (simulated drowning) as an acceptable interrogation technique when dealing with terrorists. (I say “only” because it is surprising that so many -- 26 percent—would approve of a torture technique that has been so roundly condemned in the media and among candidates).
I’d be curious to see a story, or poll, that could tell us if American Muslims resent, or are sympathetic, to Obama’s distancing himself from his father’s Islamic roots. How do American Muslims like it when Jews shout that it is a “smear” to mention an Islamic dad? Do American Muslims think Obama is a self-hater, the way certain American Jews would in an analogous situation, if a candidate (a practicing Christian whose father was Jewish) swore up and down that he had nothing to do with Judaism? A candidate who in some biographical material admits that he prayed in a mosque (or shul) as a child but whose official website insists he never did? How will this affect the American Islamic vote in November, or their relations with Jews after that?