Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Minorities close ranks

By Hoda Tawfiq

The chaos surrounding the disputed US presidential elections deepened this week as courts became the focus of the Florida vote recount battle. The American people are growing not only impatient, but frustrated with what has become a permanent campaign in an endless election with no president in view. The uncertainty reverberated beyond national politics -- the super-power turned into a lame duck as far as its global obligations.

Palestinian President Arafat arrived in Washington last week to convince President Clinton to put pressure on Israel to stop its violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories. But Arafat left empty-handed, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was shuffled in on Sunday. He too was disappointed, as he came and went without meeting the new US president. The unfortunate crossover of the election quagmire with the devastating flare-up in the occupied territories has caused the doubt that now plagues Americans to seep into the floundering peace process.

Will it be President Al Gore? Or President George W Bush? It is a loaded and heated question, but one that was supposed to have been definitively decided on 7 November. And yet, this week the two candidates are still fighting a fierce battle for every vote that could tip the race their way. What started as the only decent thing to do -- recount the unnervingly close race in the pivotal state of Florida -- has devolved into a inelegant display of frayed nerves.

Bush campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes accused Gore of seeking to ignore the laws of Florida "so that he can overturn the results of this election." Gore's campaign spokesman Mark Fabiani responded with equally tough language. "George Bush will have the most tarnished presidency in American history right off the bat," Fabiani countered. "This is an outrageous attempt by Bush to steal the election." And so the counting and recounting went on.

For those who still believe that a vote ends with its natural conclusion -- the votes counted on election day -- demonstrations and rallies in Florida in support of a state-wide recount are a further affront to a crumbling sense of security. But for those minorities who feel they may have been slighted by the vote, post-election confusion has provided the perfect opportunity to regroup. Jews and African-Americans rallied together for a fair vote count in Florida and black civil rights leader Jesse Jackson urged the Gore and Bush camps to move their battle out of the courts. Jackson led demonstrations of several thousands of African-Americans and Jews. Jackson said that African-Americans and Jewish senior citizens "appear to have been targetted" in Palm Beach County, where hundreds of voters say that they were confused by the ballot layout. Blacks also claimed they were subjected to harassment and intimidation at polling stations across Florida, Jackson said. But the Bush camp questioned these claims, noting that if voters were so confused by the ballot, why didn't they ask for help at the time?

Their voice suddenly strong, one wonders why this ethnic factor was only introduced after the results of the first electoral count declared Bush the president-elect. Speakers at a public forum in the Jewish temple of Greater Miami cited intentional discrimination against blacks and Jews, saying that the two groups appeared to have been among the largest of those "disenfranchised" by the disputed vote in Palm Beach County.

American commentators mocked the farcical situation and expressed frustration about the hand count. Isn't America the most advanced technological society? In The Washington Post, Tony Kornheiser wrote, "The Democrats insist on a hand count. Imagine if the person counting forgets whether the last number was 5,243,241 or 5,243,242, and has to start over again. Later, they'll ask for a finger and toe count."

The problem of a hand count is that once it starts, when does it end? The drive to examine and re-examine ballots could simply be endless and the question remains whether all this raucous will serve to do anything more than raise resentment and suspicion. But in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Khalil Gahshan, vice-president of the Arab American Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC) -- the largest Arab American organisation -- said that any recount will play to the advantage of Gore. "There is a sizeable Jewish community in Florida, and they are the ones claiming that they were hurt by the 'confusing ballot'," Gahshan said. Many say that when they voted, they just went down the line of the ballot and voted for both Gore and Senator Lieberman, Gore's running mate. Double-punched votes are automatically discarded, but under the rules of a hand count, the intent of the voter is considered and such votes would go to Gore.

Other claims come from Jewish Florida citizens in Israel who hold double-nationality, who claim that they were not able to mail their votes on time because of difficult conditions in the occupied territories. But a spokesman of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv said that he can't "comprehend or understand how Jews were having a hard time getting their ballots in the mail on time. It is the Palestinians who should complain, because there are no incidents in Israel."

No matter what the next twist in this already contorted tale, Grahshan told the Weekly that the end result of this year's presidential elections is the prominence it offered the Arab American and Islamic communities. "It was the first time we [Arab Americans and Muslims] were invited to participate, and both candidates from major parties were cultivating Arab and Muslim Americans to meet with them," he said. "The reason for that is not necessarily of our own doing. It is because the two candidates were so close."

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Related stories:
See US Election 2000
Can you see a difference? 2 - 8 November 2000
A voice crying in the wilderness 24 - 30 August 2000

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