Arab Americans will vote for Kerry just to get Bush out of office, Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington While recent opinion polls have indicated that American voters remain divided almost equally between US President Bush and his Democratic opponent John Kerry, Arab Americans appear to have few second thoughts. They are set to vote for Kerry, by about two to one. The Arab American Institute (AAI) has conducted six polls among Arab-American voters in four out of the 10 states where they are concentrated. The third of these polls revealed that 51 per cent of Arab Americans plan to vote for Kerry, 24 for Bush and 13 for Ralph Nader, the independent candidate of Arab descent. It also showed that over 71 per cent of those interviewed rated Bush's job performance as "fair/poor". Like the first two polls that were held in February and April, the July poll was directed at 500 Arab-American voters residing in Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. As he announced the results in a press conference last week, AAI President James Zogby said the poll showed a significant shift in the Arab-American vote toward the Democratic Party. The shift was even more significant considering that the majority of Arab and Muslim Americans voted for Bush in 2000. Zogby said that in previous polls, the Democratic margin was never greater than four or five per cent. One subject the July poll sought to investigate, according to Zogby, was the reason why Arab-American voters should choose Bush, Kerry or Nader in the first place, and what factors, if any, would cause them to change their vote in November. Defying the general stereotype that foreign policy issues, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, largely determines the way Arab Americans vote, AAI's poll found the issues that concerned them were, for the most part, not different than those of other US voters. The economy was described as "very important" by 81 per cent of those polled, followed by terrorism/national security -- 74 per cent -- health care and Iraq. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict was regarded as "very important" by 58 per cent, and only nine per cent of those polled approved of Bush's policy on the issue -- an unprecedented low. Zogby noted that although 50 per cent of Arab Americans said they had no confidence that either Bush or Kerry would fairly deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a clear majority still planned to vote for Kerry. "This appears to be more the result of displeasure with the president's performance than with confidence in Kerry," Zogby said. In fact, Kerry has disappointed Arab-American voters because he has shifted his policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict over the past year. In an October speech to Arab-American voters in Michigan, before winning the Democratic Party's nomination, Kerry strongly criticised Israel's construction of the segregation wall in the occupied West Bank, and promised to resume former US President Bill Clinton's initiative to solve the conflict. However, partly confirming the Republican propaganda that he is a "flip-flop" and a classic establishment politician, Kerry gradually shifted his support in favour of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, announcing that building the apartheid wall was a justified move to counter "Palestinian terror". Kerry also backed the letter of assurances President Bush handed to Sharon in April, stating for the first time that the US would not respect the Palestinian right of return to their pre-1948 homes, and approved the annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank in which illegal settlements have been built since 1967. While in Washington, Kerry reportedly asked Sharon for a public meeting, but the Israeli premier told Kerry to visit him in Israel. Last week, Kerry's brother led a delegation of 50 Jewish-American families who have decided to move to Israel and live in illegal West Bank settlements, constituting another dramatic gesture by the Democratic senator showing how he is a die-hard Israel supporter. The majority of Jewish-American voters -- 75 to 80 per cent -- have historically backed the Democratic Party, but those running the Kerry campaign have reportedly been worried by indications that Bush, with his strong bias toward Sharon's right-wing policies due to religious beliefs, could win important Jewish votes in critical so-called swing states, such as Florida. One result that was particularly clear in the AAI's latest poll was that Arab Americans clearly are among the growing "anyone but Bush" camp in the US, and that among them there are traditionally Republican voters who have been unhappy with Bush's unilateral policies, the justifications he used to launch the war against Iraq, and his entire pre-emption doctrine. Over 50 per cent of those polled said they would go for Kerry mainly because they wanted to vote against Bush. Only nine per cent said they liked him as a man. On the other hand, like the rest of the Republican Party supporters, 70 per cent of Arab-American Bush supporters said they endorse him because they "like him as a man". Kerry's choice of the handsome senator John Edwards as his vice presidential candidate has not mattered much to Arab-American voters, the poll also showed. At the same time, having Vice President Dick Cheney on Bush's ticket has only made things worse for the Republican candidate. Cheney has been among the top officials supporting the war against Iraq, and he continues to claim there were links between the former Iraqi regime and Al-Qaeda, although many independent reports have concluded that no evidence exists to support such a charge. Arab-American voters supported Bush in 2000 because they thought that his family's ties to oil-rich Gulf states, and the fact that several members of his foreign policy team were involved in the Middle East for decades, would make him adopt a more balanced approach to the region. Conservative Arab-American and Muslim-American voters have also traditionally voted against the Democratic Party for its liberal stand on social issues such as abortion, gay marriage and the separation of church and state. But after 11 September 2001 and Bush's introduction of the Patriot Act -- whose limitations on civil rights mainly affected Arab and Muslim Americans -- the president's popularity sharply diminished. The war against Iraq, and spending four years in the White House without any serious effort to put an end to Israel's violence against the Palestinians clearly added to Arab frustration. After all, Bush was the only world leader to describe Sharon as a "man of peace", a label not even used by Israelis to describe their own hawkish prime minister.
