Call it a surprise within a surprise. While America digested the news of Bernie Sanders’ pollster-pulverizing upset in Tuesday’s Michigan Democratic primary, many pundits, along with the more clued-in commenterati, were left scratching their heads and scrambling to make sense of the fact that Sanders, a Jew and a Zionist to boot, positively dominated among Michigan’s Arab and Muslim voters.
There was a particularly intense focus on the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the “Arab Capital of North America,” where nearly 42 percent of the population is of Arab descent. Although not all of Dearborn’s Arabs are Muslims, most of them are, and on Tuesday the city’s voters chose Sanders over Hillary Clinton by a 20 percent margin. Statewide, exit polls suggested that Sanders won about 70 percent of the Michigan Muslim vote.
How could it be, the mainstream media wondered, that a Jew—albeit a secular one—could win so much of the Muslim vote? Ismat Sarah Mangla at International Business Times noted that:
Television pundits like Lawrence O’Donnell and Chuck Todd marveled on MSNBC that Sanders was doing so well in Dearborn “despite” the large Arab-American population there. WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer tweeted that Sanders’ dominance in Dearborn was “the stat of the night,” later adding “It’s official: Arab city feels the Jewish Bern.” Meanwhile, The Week dubbed it “just one more strange data point in an election overflowing with them.”
Others pointed to Tuesday’s results and waxed patriotic about the virtues of the American melting pot. “Seventy percent of Muslims in Michigan voting for the Jewish candidate in the race—God bless America,” gushed Cenk Uygur at The Young Turks.
If only it were that simple. If only the narrative could be reduced to, “Muslims, who are inherently biased against Jews, overcame their seemingly intractable antisemitism to vote for a Jew.” Even if that were true, it begs the question: Why? Especially considering the fact that, despite recent predictable pronouncements about the need for the United States to be an honest broker in the interminable Israel-Palestine “peace process,” Sanders has taken heat for his mostly pro-Israel stance. If anything, this should make him a less attractive choice for those who care about justice for Palestine.
The short answer why Sanders crushed Clinton among Michigan Muslims can best be summed up by evoking the other Clinton—“It’s the economy, stupid.” The disastrous decline of Rust Belt manufacturing, much of it permanently exported due to the sorts of “free trade” agreements implemented by disciples of economic neoliberalism like Clinton, has dealt a devastating blow to most Michiganders regardless of race, religion or national origin. Sanders’ message of raising the minimum wage, taxing the wealthy to pay for social services like healthcare and education and protecting the rights of workers particularly resonated in Dearborn, where the Ford factory closed in 2004 and where nearly half of all Muslims live near the poverty line.
“Michigan’s blue-collar Arab Americans are suffering economic challenges too, not just white blue-collar Americans,” Libyan American author Hend Amry told International Business Times.
“The ‘Muslims voting for a Jew' tagline is trite,” tweeted Khaled Beydoun, a law professor at Barry University in Miami and native Detroiter. “Muslims [are] voting for Bernie in Michigan primary because of his progressive policies and outreach.”
"Bernie received 70 percent of our vote because he spoke to our economic, political and social circumstance," Beydoun wrote on Facebook. "[Sanders] met with us on our turf. And explicitly addressed our community's greatest concerns, spanning rising Islamophobia to climbing unemployment. This is why Arab and Muslim Americans voted for Bernie Sanders and pushed him past Hillary in Michigan. Not because he is, or isn't, Jewish."
Shiab Mussad, 22, told the Detroit Free Press that he supports Sanders because “he’s for people like us, people like me. I got thousands of dollars of college debt, and he talks about making college affordable, giving me a fair shot. That resonates a lot with me, with young voters." Mussad also likes that Sanders is “not beholden to the financial industry” like Clinton is. He added that while some of his friends on social media "will see… my Arabic name and they'll be like, why are you supporting him, he’s Jewish," Sanders’ religion is not a factor in his decision to back him.
"I support him because of his policies, not because of… his personal religion,” Mussad insisted.
Sanders spent plenty of time articulating those policies to Michiganders in the days leading up to Tuesday’s vote. He visited Dearborn and met with Arab American and Muslim leaders. He even broadcast a campaign ad in Arabic. Speaking at a Dearborn auditorium packed to the rafters with supporters, Sanders blasted the Islamophobia that characterizes so much of the Republican narrative about Muslims.
"We're going to end bigotry in this country once and for all," he thundered. "The Donald Trumps and their friends are not going to be successful in scapegoating minorities in this country. They are not going to be successful in attacking and denigrating our Muslim friends and neighbors or our Mexican friends and neighbors. They are not going to divide us."
Sanders has also consistently rejected US militarism in the Middle East, a stance that has endeared him to many Arabs and Muslims and has earned him the endorsements of prominent Muslim Americans including Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Suehaila Amen, former star of the TLC reality series “All-American Muslim,” who said that Dearborn connects with Sanders “not only on a political level but on a personal level.”
“People are connecting with him in a way that they cannot with Clinton,” Amen told Telesur.
Still, the mainstream media too often seem unable or unwilling to get past the simplest, most headline-grabbing explanation for what happened Tuesday in Michigan.
“It’s no surprise that the mainstream media... is guilty of promoting two-dimensional caricatures of Muslims and Arabs,” Amry told International Business Times. “I tweeted that the media is shocked that Dearborn residents didn't announce an ‘intifada’ against Jewish Bernie Sanders to point out this very stereotype.”
Transcending those two-dimensional caricatures, Good staff writer Tasbeeh Herwees asks if it is “perhaps possible maybe there exists no inherent enmity between Arabs and Jews?”
”Maybe that’s a racist supposition,” she asserts. However, it is a supposition that fits too well into the official narrative for the mainstream media to reject.