How Norquist Sold Bush on the Muslim Vote

In the 1990s, Grover Norquist had decided that Muslim American voters would make a great target market for Republican recruitment.

Click here to read the entire series.

In the summer of 2000, Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi got a meeting with Texas governor George Bush. Al-Amoudi promised Bush that he, al-Amoudi, could deliver Muslim support for Bush if Bush would oppose "secret evidence" in immigration hearings.

At the time, US immigration authorities were attempting to deport terrorism-connected Muslim immigrants to the United States. Immigration authorities did not want to reveal the sources and methods that had confirmed the terrorist connections, for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, al-Amoudi and his friends took the opposite view.

How did al-Amoudi get his meeting? After all, presumptive candidates for president who also happen to be serving governors are not accessible on a walk-in basis.

The answer is that sometime in the 1990s, Grover Norquist had decided that Muslim American voters would make a great target market for Republican recruitment. And few conservative activists had as much sway with Karl Rove as Norquist.

You can see why Rove would be interested. He knew that Florida was a must-win state for George W. Bush. Florida had a rapidly growing Muslim community concentrated in the state's swing I-4 corridor. If they could be persuaded to vote Republican, it might help compensate for the GOP's decline among younger Cuban-American voters, a very complicating factor in that year's election.

But what was Norquist's angle? Norquist and I talked about his outreach to US Muslims on a DC streetcorner in the late 1990s. He argued that Muslim immigrants were entrepreneurial, family-oriented, culturally conservative. At a time of massive immigration to the United States, here was a fertile opportunity to offset what some were already calling the "emerging Democratic majority."

Others who knew Norquist hypothesized other motives.

At the time, Norquist was involved in a lobbying firm that did business with state enterprises in Qatar and Malaysia. Did this affect his thinking somehow?

We can't know, and I won't guess.

But here's what we do know: among the most prominent targets of "secret evidence" deportation hearings were two prominent South Florida Muslim immigrants, Sami al-Arian and his brother-in-law Mazzan al-Najjar. To the dismay of many of his political allies, Norquist had developed a political relationship with these two fundraisers and activists for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Click here for part 4.

Tweet