by DHinMI
Thu May 01, 2008 at 08:55:46 PM PDT
From Jake Tapper:
The campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., removed a man from his Michigan Finance Committee today.
It started after conservative writer Debbie Schussel called Michigan businessman Ali Jawad not only a supporter of Hezbollah -- a group the US State Department labels a "terrorist organization" -- but also claimed he was a "key agent of the terrorist group in the Detroit area."
After Schussel started asking questions the McCain campaign removed him from the finance committee for a May fundraiser.
"Apparently he is a well known member of the Arab-American community in Dearborn," a McCain staffer tells ABC News. "He is also a known Republican donor and former Bush finance committee member. When these rumors surfaced he notified the campaign and we removed him from the finance committee. The guy never raised a dime for us and he isn’t even a contributor."
Tapper directed people to Schussel's site—if you want to look for yourself you can get there via the link to Tapper—and then wondered if this wasn't some preemptive move by McCain to deny Obama a shot at McCain for being weak on terrorism.
It's both more complicated and simpler. The Arab community, its place in Michigan, and its ties to the Middle East are complicated. However, what's simple is that Debbie Schussel hates Arabs. The McCain campaign is afraid to offend the far right. So they ditched Ali Jawad rather than deal with Debbie Schussel.
A disclosure. I haven't seen him in about 5 years or so, but I once knew Ali Jawad. That may sound extraordinary, but it's nothing special for someone who's run campaigns in Michigan, especially for one who's worked with the Detroit Area's huge Arab community. I've brought candidates to meet with him and his political circle, and I've worked with him to elect Democrats, just as my Republican counterparts have worked with him to elect Republicans.
To fully understand what's happening here, one must understand the Detroit area and its Arab community. There are several million Arabs across the country, most of whom are Christian, with many tracing their families back to Christian Lebanese and Syrians who immigrated to the US in the early 20th Century. What's different about the Arab population in the Detroit area is the size, diversity and power of the Arab community.
Lebanese Shiites have lived in the Detroit area since the early 20th century. In the shadows of the Ford Rouge Complex—one of the biggest factories in the world, which once employed 80,000 men—is the "South End" of Dearborn. This neighborhood was a mix of Shiite Lebanese, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Maltese, Greeks and Armenians. In the 1970's, as the other ethnic groups moved away from the neighborhood, the Lebanese Civil War exploded. Soon the neighborhoods of southern and eastern Dearborn—which borders Detroit—became home to many thousands of Arabs. These immigrants were mostly Shiite Lebanese, but eventually Dearborn also became home to large numbers of immigrants from Yemen. Around the same time many Chaldeans—Roman Catholics from Iraq whose traditional language is Aramaic, the language that dominated the region at the time of Jesus—moved in large numbers to other neighborhoods in the Detroit area.
Today, the Arab population of the Detroit area is somewhere between a quarter and a half million. The largest groups are the Lebanese Shiites and the Chaldeans, although there are also large numbers of Yemeni, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and, since the end of the first Gulf War, Iraqi Shiite Arabs. Many Detroit area Arabs are Christian, but immigrants in the last 20 years are more likely to be Muslim.
Like almost every immigrant group, Arabs have moved beyond their original neighborhoods and can be found throughout the area. And everyone in Detroit has a lot of contact with Arab-Americans. In secular Baathist Iraq, Chaldeans were a semi-protected group that were permitted to sell liquor. When they began moving to Detroit, they took up the same business. Today, Chaldeans own almost all the convenience and liquor stores in the area; everyone in the Detroit area interacts with Chaldeans because almost all the corner stores are family run. And when you stop for gas, you'll be dealing with a Lebanese Shiite, because they own and/or operate almost all the gas stations in the area.
Arab-Americans lean Democratic but are a key bloc of ticket-splitters. Because of their rapidly increasing wealth, they have also become an important source of campaign contributions, especially in the $250 to $1,000 range. This is where Ali Jawad comes in. He is the head guy in the gas stations owners association. He also runs the Lebanese Heritage Club, which hosts just about every candidate forum for Arab-Americans, and which regularly attracts every major politician in the area. He's a major collector of checks, and he's one of the leaders of his community.
As Tapper points out, Jawad has said things about Hezbollah that make it sound less sinister than one would think a group would be to make the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Well, he's not the only person in the area to not condemn Hezbollah; the range of attitudes of Lebanese in Dearborn is probably centered somewhere between ambivalent to fairly supportive. Many of the Dearborn Lebanese come from a handful of villages in Southern Lebanon, within a few miles of the Israeli border. Thus, they come from the heartland of Hezbollah. Their home villages were used by the PLO to stage raids in Israel during the early 1970's—there is often animosity between Lebanese Shiites and Palestinians, for many Lebanese blame Palestinians for destabilizing Lebanon—the area was occupied by Israel for many years, and it was only after years of fierce attacks by Hezbollah that Israel abandoned Southern Lebanon. In the eyes of many Lebanese, Hezbollah liberated their home villages from Israeli occuption.
Hezbollah is now the de facto government of Southern Lebanon, and provides social services as well fights Israel. Many people in Dearborn have family ties to major players in Lebanese Shiite politics. And Lebanese in Dearborn view Hezbollah with much the same mix of distrust mixed with nationalist pride and identity that Catholic residents or former residents of IRA-controlled neighborhoods in Belfast or Derry view the IRA. Most Lebanese in Dearborn came here to escape war, but that doesn't mean they don't identify with one faction more than the others. In Dearborn, many identify with Hezbollah.
But whatever their views about their home country, most Arabs in Southeast Michigan view themselves as Arab-Americans, and that's how they're viewed by most of their non-Arab neighbors. In the Middle East, most would be viewed hostilely by the Sunni terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, because most Arabs around Detroit are Shiite or Christian. They moved to the US to escape problems back home, and have settled in. They often hate the foreign policy of their adopted country, but they love being Americans. And in Michigan, they are political players.
Back in the 1980's, Democratic governor Jim Blanchard was accused of returning contributions from Arab-Americans. When he ran for Governor in 1990, Republican John Engler—with the help of his Republican party chair Spencer Abraham—did the opposite, and enthusiastically reached out to Arab-Americans. For each of his three elections he was rewarded for his outreach with votes and contributions from Arab-Americans. Abraham himself even slid in to the Senate in the 1994 Republican landslide (before losing to Debbie Stabenow in 2000). But many Arab-American voters still strongly supported Democrats, especially members of Congress David Bonior (then the second-ranking Democrat in Congress), John Dingell (who represented all of Dearborn for several decades) and John Conyers (who now splits Dearborn with Dingell). Jawad's personal political contributions mirror these community-wide patterns.
I don't know enough about Ali Jawad's background or business practices to vouch for him, but I doubt the McCain campaign does either. But I do know that just about everyone in Michigan politics, Republican and Democrat, has sought his support, and John McCain's campaign just dumped him because viciously anti-Arab reactionary Debbie Schlussel called him a terrorist (which for her is practically a synonym for "Arab").
Once again we have a case where a politician has no problem with dumping on Arab-Americans because of ethnic stereotyping. It's like accusing Italians in the 1940's of all being tied to the Mafia, or thinking that every Salvadoran that comes in to the US today is connected to a violent drug gang.
Tapper wondered if the Obama campaign might eventually throw the Jawad association back in McCain's face. I would hope not, because that would just be validating the claims of one of the most hateful people on right. She's claimed Media Matters is Nazi-funded. She claimed the shooter at Virginia Tech was a "Paki." And she's used the same scare tactics against Obama himself, pushing the bullshit that he was once a Muslim, and that "once a Muslim, always a Muslim," and that his comments are heavily lifted from the film Malcolm X. In short, this woman hates Arabs and hates Muslims. Hell, she just hates. And anyone or anything she hates she depicts as part of a scary conspiracy of all Arabs and all Muslims (with the occasional Nazi thrown in to give her predictable hatred a bit of retro zing).
There are legitimate criticisms to make against McCain and the Republican party in general about being soft on terrorism. However, in the absence of anything other than the hate-filled rantings of that lunatic Debbie Schlussel, attacking McCain for once having Ali Jawad on his finance committee would not be a legitimate criticism. The legitimate criticism of McCain is for being soft on hatred and bigotry, and caving to Debbie Schlussel. It would be wrong for Obama's camapign to dignify her hate. Furthermore, it would be dumb politics, because it would needlessly alienate tens of thousands of good Americans who also happen to be of Lebanese descent and swing voters in what could be one of the most competitive states in the November election.
No comments:
Post a Comment