Al Jazeera News :
James Reinl is a journalist and world affairs analyst who has reported from more than 30 countries and won awards for covering Haiti’s earthquake, Sri Lanka’s civil war and human rights abuses in Iran.
New York, United States – The blue skies were among the prettiest that a New York autumn could offer, but still a cloud hung over Masjid-al-Aman mosque on Friday, the last day that locals could register to vote in next month’s bitterly contested presidential election.
The community of Bangladeshi immigrants in Ozone Park, Brooklyn, still mourns the killing of an imam and his assistant nearby in August. The shootings were widely seen as part of a rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has shaken America this election cycle. After praying, worshippers gathered outside the mosque around a table for registering voters. Those who understood English helped new arrivals with tricky words in the final hours of a drive to register more Muslim voters in a US election than ever before.
Organisers say they seek more civic engagement, but when pressed admit they are scared by the prospect of a win for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who talks of halting Muslim immigration to the US among a raft of anti-immigrant policies. Golam Uddin, 46, a Bangladeshi American, has lived in the US for the past 27 years but he plans to vote for the first time on November 8. His choice – Trump’s Democratic rival
Hillary Clinton – is a no-brainer, he told Al Jazeera. “Trump’s a racist guy. He don’t like Muslims, he stops immigrants, Latinos, everything,” Uddin, a father-of-two who runs subway kiosks, said.
“There are 3.3 million Muslims; everything goes to her. The Democrats are always with us immigrants.”
According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a religious rights group, Muslims are fired up this election cycle – 86 percent of registered Muslim voters plan to cast ballots, with 72 percent backing Clinton against Trump’s 4 percent. Al Jazeera found no Trump supporters in Ozone Park. Worshippers spoke ruefully of the murdered imam and complained of everything from assaults to passers-by kicking the buggies of Muslim toddlers in a wave of Trump-fuelled hostility, they said. Such scenes are replicated at mosques and community centres across the US this month in advance of voter registration deadlines, which vary by state, in a bid to enrol a million more Muslim voters than in previous elections. Voter drives are backed by CAIR, a public action committee called Emerge USA and Yalla Vote – a scheme from the Arab American Institute (AAI), a lobby group for an estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans, who comprise Christians, Muslims and others.
Neither Arabs nor Muslims are factored in the US census, but Pew Research Center counted a fast-growing population of 3.3 million Muslims in the US this year – a one percent share of the population that is expected to double by 2050. Almost a third of respondents spoke of experiencing profiling or discrimination this past year.
Neither Arabs nor Muslims pack as big an electoral punch as Latinos, some 17 percent of the population, or blacks [13 percent]. But they cluster in a handful of swing states and their near-total rejection of Trump could hurt him on polling day.
“While our population is not so large, we’re concentrated in some key battleground states. Winning in these places can come down to several thousand votes and in a close-call race, Arab Americans are a swing constituency that could sway the outcome,” Maya Berry, the director of AAI told Al Jazeera.
James Reinl is a journalist and world affairs analyst who has reported from more than 30 countries and won awards for covering Haiti’s earthquake, Sri Lanka’s civil war and human rights abuses in Iran.
New York, United States – The blue skies were among the prettiest that a New York autumn could offer, but still a cloud hung over Masjid-al-Aman mosque on Friday, the last day that locals could register to vote in next month’s bitterly contested presidential election.
The community of Bangladeshi immigrants in Ozone Park, Brooklyn, still mourns the killing of an imam and his assistant nearby in August. The shootings were widely seen as part of a rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has shaken America this election cycle. After praying, worshippers gathered outside the mosque around a table for registering voters. Those who understood English helped new arrivals with tricky words in the final hours of a drive to register more Muslim voters in a US election than ever before.
Organisers say they seek more civic engagement, but when pressed admit they are scared by the prospect of a win for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who talks of halting Muslim immigration to the US among a raft of anti-immigrant policies. Golam Uddin, 46, a Bangladeshi American, has lived in the US for the past 27 years but he plans to vote for the first time on November 8. His choice – Trump’s Democratic rival
Hillary Clinton – is a no-brainer, he told Al Jazeera. “Trump’s a racist guy. He don’t like Muslims, he stops immigrants, Latinos, everything,” Uddin, a father-of-two who runs subway kiosks, said.
“There are 3.3 million Muslims; everything goes to her. The Democrats are always with us immigrants.”
According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a religious rights group, Muslims are fired up this election cycle – 86 percent of registered Muslim voters plan to cast ballots, with 72 percent backing Clinton against Trump’s 4 percent. Al Jazeera found no Trump supporters in Ozone Park. Worshippers spoke ruefully of the murdered imam and complained of everything from assaults to passers-by kicking the buggies of Muslim toddlers in a wave of Trump-fuelled hostility, they said. Such scenes are replicated at mosques and community centres across the US this month in advance of voter registration deadlines, which vary by state, in a bid to enrol a million more Muslim voters than in previous elections. Voter drives are backed by CAIR, a public action committee called Emerge USA and Yalla Vote – a scheme from the Arab American Institute (AAI), a lobby group for an estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans, who comprise Christians, Muslims and others.
Neither Arabs nor Muslims are factored in the US census, but Pew Research Center counted a fast-growing population of 3.3 million Muslims in the US this year – a one percent share of the population that is expected to double by 2050. Almost a third of respondents spoke of experiencing profiling or discrimination this past year.
Neither Arabs nor Muslims pack as big an electoral punch as Latinos, some 17 percent of the population, or blacks [13 percent]. But they cluster in a handful of swing states and their near-total rejection of Trump could hurt him on polling day.
“While our population is not so large, we’re concentrated in some key battleground states. Winning in these places can come down to several thousand votes and in a close-call race, Arab Americans are a swing constituency that could sway the outcome,” Maya Berry, the director of AAI told Al Jazeera.
