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 McCain-Palin Ticket Chills Arabs, Muslims

By SANA ABDALLAH (Middle East Times Writer)

AMMAN -- With the U.S. presidential elections just two months away, many Arabs and Muslims are increasingly worried that a victory for another conservative Republican administration will exacerbate the tensions and turbulence that have followed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The events and speeches at the Republican Party convention in Minnesota, which endorsed the candidacy of Arizona Senator John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, were given special attention in the Arab media, as commentators voiced fears that a McCain administration would pursue, perhaps more belligerently, the path of the current government.

As a rule, Arab governments in the region prefer to refrain from showing their preferences in U.S. elections, but the media, including the state-controlled TV and press, have made no secret of their desire to see a new leadership in Washington that is run by Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

While talking heads have said they did not expect either administration to be more sympathetic to the Arab and Muslim causes, many are now saying that Obama would be the "lesser of two evils," after having endured a George W. Bush administration that has launched an undefined and indefinite "war on terror" that is raging in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Particularly highlighted in the media Friday were remarks made by Palin in June that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the American troops there were "on a task from God."

"Our national leaders are sending soldiers out on a task that is from God," Palin told ministry students at her former church in a video that spread like wildfire across the Internet.

She asked her audience to pray for the troops in Iraq. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan," she said.

Analysts here commented that these sound bites, the first publicizing her foreign policy positions, were eerily similar to Bush's rhetoric when he embarked on the war on terror that started in Afghanistan and was redirected into a massive invasion and subsequent occupation of oil-rich Iraq.

Bush had irked millions of Muslims around the world when he called the war a "crusade," the term that denotes for Muslims a Christian battle against Islam.

Later, Bush was reported as telling leaders at a Middle East summit in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh that he was "driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did. And then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.' And I did."

Although the "crusade" concept was later retracted, the military policy that the outgoing administration had pursued since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon remains to be seen as a Christian crusade against the Muslims, particularly among many Arabs.

McCain has also been public about keeping Iraq -- an Arab and predominantly Muslim country -- under U.S. occupation indefinitely, despite growing Iraqi demands to regain their sovereignty and for a clear deadline for a full withdrawal of American troops.

Independent Iraqi analysts say the political and religious ideology of the McCain-Palin ticket is not being viewed in a positive light in Iraq, where conservative Muslim Shiites dominate the population and the post-Saddam Hussein government institutions.

Some Iraqi and Arab politicians and pundits have privately ridiculed as ironic the fact that Palin is regarded in the United States as socially conservative while her unwed teenage daughter is pregnant.

Commentators warn that the vast social and religious gaps dividing the Muslim and U.S. Christian beliefs, particularly Evangelical ones, would be further widened if a McCain-Palin administration took office, because it could further politicize and militarize U.S. policy in the region.

Specific attention has been given to the fact that the 72-year-old McCain, if he wins the election, would become the oldest U.S. president to win the race, raising the odds for his demise in office resulting in the vice president taking over the running of a country that has spread its political and military power across the Middle East.

During his speech accepting the Republican Party's candidacy for the White House on Thursday, McCain vowed to bring change and that Palin was the right person to help him bring that change to Washington.

As far as those Arabs and Muslims, who are looking forward to the end of the Bush era are concerned, that change may very well be for the worse. Some have indeed expressed that the prospect of a McCain-Palin victory is nothing less than chilling.

I wonder how it is that the Muslims of Jihad always seem to be on the same page as the democrats?