c. 2004 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ A new poll by a prominent civil rights group suggests that support for President Bush among Muslim voters has eroded so swiftly that Muslim votes for Sen. John Kerry could swing the presidential election in key battleground states.

Of the nearly 1,200 Muslim voters surveyed in June by the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 55 percent said they had voted for Bush in 2000, but only 3 percent of those same voters would vote to re-elect him.

A full 54 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and 26 percent said they would vote for independent Ralph Nader.

The drop in Muslim support for the president is dramatic _ exit polls in the 2000 election indicated that Bush carried between 70 percent and 80 percent of the Muslim vote.

Muslim activists say their community may carry enough weight in key states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania to swing the vote for Kerry. CAIR has launched voter registration drives in California, Florida, Ohio and Texas, hoping to have 1.5 million Muslims registered to vote in November.

Eugene Bird, president of the Council for the National Interest, a Middle East watchdog group, said Bush won Florida _ a state that was decided by 537 votes _ with 64,000 more Muslim votes than Democrat Al Gore.

Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, said the nation’s 5 million to 7 million Muslims have mainstream views on domestic issues, but have been turned away by the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

“What makes them different than most of the voters in this society is because they have been the prime target of certain practices of the government, they feel that their civil liberties have been sacrificed,” Awad said.

“And on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan they feel they can’t contribute to the decision-making process.”

Nader, whose heritage is Lebanese Christian, participated in a panel discussion to release the poll and pleased many in attendance when he condemned the “messianic militarism” of the Bush administration.

He also decried the “Washington puppet show,” where Israeli leaders visit the president and congressional leaders and leave with billions of dollars in aid.

Nader said Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft have tried to erode the oversight power of Congress and the judiciary, and he decried the treatment of Arabs and Muslims in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“They were innocent, but they were mistreated in the prisons,” Nader said of thousands of Muslims arrested by the government. “They were held without identity. They were arrested in many cases without charges, incarcerated without lawyers. Material witnesses were imprisoned and kept there indefinitely.”

The panel agreed that those policies had soured the perception of Bush in the eyes of Muslims. They said the administration’s push for war in Iraq and its policies toward the detainees in Guantanamo Bay and immigrants from majority-Muslim nations are the chief reasons for disapproval among Muslims.

Hassan Ibrahim, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said the Patriot Act gives the government unnecessary powers and the nation already has enough laws to continue to function as a democracy, even at a time of crisis.

“(Muslims) are not interested in a candidate who is going to look at our international conventions and say, `Well, these are not good enough for a war on terror. We need to torture some people, maybe kill a few and forget about these conventions. Get me a legal opinion to get me out of this box,”’ Ibrahim said.

The poll was conducted by fax and phone to Muslim voters in 43 states. It did not include a margin of error.

KRE/PH END KING