Officials of the American Muslim Alliance acknowledge that some members have hard-line views against Israel, but they say the group is essentially mainstream and advocates peaceful solutions to the Mideast conflict. Its support has long been actively courted by politicians of both major parties -- notably Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, who recently accepted its endorsement for president.
A co-founder and former president of the American Muslim Alliance, Farooq Ansari, expressed distress last night over the telephone campaign. ''We are just as good citizens as anyone is,'' Mr. Ansari said. ''Associating Muslims in this country with terrorists is nothing less than McCarthyism. It is totally false, inaccurate and should totally be stopped.''
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ATTACK ON COLE IS RAISED AS ISSUE IN NEW YORK RACE
By ADAM NAGOURNEY AND DEAN E. MURPHY
Published: October 29, 2000
Hillary Rodham Clinton denounced Representative Rick A. Lazio yesterday over a telephone campaign by the New York Republican Party in which callers were told that she took money from ''a Mideast terrorism group -- the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the U.S.S. Cole.''
Mrs. Clinton called the tactic a ''new low'' in the New York campaign for Senate, while Mr. Lazio said he would not apologize for it.
Republican officials said the calls, which began Thursday night, would reach more than 500,000 New Yorkers.
The contributions to Mrs. Clinton's campaign that are referred to in the telephone calls came from a fund-raiser sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, returned the money, $50,000, after the group's leader was quoted as defending a United Nations resolution that he said allowed for the use of armed force by Palestinians against Israel.
American investigators have said they strongly believe that terrorists were behind the Oct. 12 bombing attack on the destroyer Cole, which killed 17 sailors, but there has been no indication that the explosion was connected to any organization that gave money to Mrs. Clinton.
In Ithaca yesterday, where Mrs. Clinton began a three-day bus tour across upstate New York, the first lady somberly criticized Mr. Lazio, her Republican opponent, for the telephone campaign, and urged him to apologize to the families of the sailors who were killed.
''I went to that memorial service,'' she said. ''I met those families. I just really never thought I would see this kind of tactic used. It is beyond anything I have ever heard of, and I have heard of some pretty terrible techniques and tactics during campaigns in the past. This hits a new low.''
President and Mrs. Clinton attended the memorial service for the sailors in Norfolk, Va., and television coverage showed her weeping during parts of the service. At a stop yesterday afternoon at Cornell University, she made a point of mentioning the service, telling about 750 students that it ''had made an incredible impression on me.''
Mr. Lazio's aides said he had not been consulted about the telephone campaign, and at first the candidate seemed to distance himself from it.
''These are not calls done by my campaign,'' Mr. Lazio said after appearing at a morning rally with Gov. George E. Pataki at West Babylon Junior High School on Long Island, the first of six stops he made yesterday. ''As far as I know, the Republican State Committee has acknowledged that this is the state committee'' sponsoring the calls.
But Mr. Lazio asserted that the telephone campaign was fair, and he disputed Mrs. Clinton's accusation that Republicans were exploiting a national tragedy to help his candidacy.
''I don't think we need any instructions or lessons from the Arkansas political machine that Mrs. Clinton is affiliated with,'' he said. ''We don't need any advice from Harold Ickes and Hillary Clinton on how to run a campaign in New York, especially from people who are forced to return $50,000 to people who associate themselves with violence in the Middle East.'' Mr. Ickes is a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton.
Yesterday's exchange was the harshest yet between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Lazio, and signaled what aides on both sides said would be a bitter finale to what has been a surprisingly restrained contest.
The Republican Party's decision to link Mrs. Clinton to what it said was a terrorist group was first reported yesterday in The New York Post and on the ABC News Web page.
Mrs. Clinton's campaign accused the Republican Party of engaging in push-polling, a practice in which telephone workers pose as pollsters, calling voters and asking questions that are intended to spread damaging or false information about an opponent. But Dan Allen, a spokesman for William D. Powers, the state Republican chairman, denied that, saying that callers announce at the beginning that they are phoning on behalf of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is actually using two different telephone appeals, with one script for Jews and one for non-Jews.
In the call to Jewish New Yorkers, Mr. Allen said, the caller asks: ''Did you know that before Mrs. Clinton started her run for our U.S. Senate seat, she supported a Palestinian state and didn't support moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem?'' According to Mr. Allen, the caller goes on to say that Mrs. Clinton took money from an organization that ''openly brags about its support of Hamas and Yasir Arafat, a group that our own State Department called a terrorist organization because of its attacks on Israeli civilians.''
In June 1999, Mrs. Clinton broke with her husband's administration and said in a letter that she wanted the United States Embassy moved as soon as possible to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
In the Republican committee's calls to non-Jewish New Yorkers, callers say that Mrs. Clinton accepted money from an organization that ''openly brags about its support for a Mideast terrorism group -- the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the U.S.S. Cole.''
Officials of the American Muslim Alliance acknowledge that some members have hard-line views against Israel, but they say the group is essentially mainstream and advocates peaceful solutions to the Mideast conflict. Its support has long been actively courted by politicians of both major parties -- notably Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, who recently accepted its endorsement for president.
A co-founder and former president of the American Muslim Alliance, Farooq Ansari, expressed distress last night over the telephone campaign. ''We are just as good citizens as anyone is,'' Mr. Ansari said. ''Associating Muslims in this country with terrorists is nothing less than McCarthyism. It is totally false, inaccurate and should totally be stopped.''
Mr. Allen said the Cole reference was not included in the call to Jewish voters only because each script had to be limited in length. He said he did not know the process by which New Yorkers were identified as Jews and non-Jews. He also said he was unable to provide a written text of either script last night.
Mr. Powers, the state Republican chairman, is a former marine known for advocating particularly tough campaign tactics, a trait that has been on particular display in this contest to succeed Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is retiring. For example, Mr. Powers wrote a fund-raising letter that described Mrs. Clinton as an ''ambitious, ruthless, scheming, calculating, manipulating woman.''
Mr. Allen said Mr. Powers believed that it was fair to link Mrs. Clinton to the attack on the Cole because Hamas was the same kind of organization that investigators say might have been behind the attack on the destroyer.
''This is something that Mrs. Clinton is upset about,'' Mr. Allen said. ''But it's something she has to answer for.''
Mrs. Clinton's aides clearly viewed the telephone campaign as a political misstep, coming during a critical stretch of the campaign, and moved quickly to turn it to their advantage. Edward I. Koch, the former New York mayor, was dispatched to City Hall to hold a news conference denouncing Mr. Lazio and urging him to put a stop to the telephone calls. ''I expect to get a call tomorrow from the state Republican Committee or Lazio's campaign that they heard that Hillary was a serial killer,'' Mr. Koch said.
Mrs. Clinton's campaign also issued a statement from Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and a veteran of the Vietnam War, asserting that Mr. Lazio had turned the Cole tragedy into part of ''a political smear operation.''
Mrs. Clinton appeared tired as she began her upstate bus trip with Senator Charles E. Schumer of Brooklyn. The purpose of the trip was to challenge Mr. Lazio on what should be the heart of his political base, but the telephone campaign was clearly the first lady's her main focus.
''It is a clear example of how desperate and sad their campaign has been,'' she said. ''To go beyond the pale, as they have done here, really deserves the condemnation of everybody. I can't understand how the Republican Party in this state would engage in a political tactic like this. It defies my imagination.''
Mr. Lazio's campaign, meanwhile, moved yesterday to turn the attention back to Mrs. Clinton, noting that in her filing with the Federal Election Commission, she misidentified Abdurahman Alamoudi, a board member of the American Muslim Council, who gave her $1,000.
Officials of that group also say they do not support terrorism, but Mr. Alamoudi has been quoted in interviews as making statements sympathetic to Hamas. In the F.E.C. filing, the Clinton campaign listed him as a member of the ''American Museum Council.''
A news release put out by Mr. Lazio's campaign quoted Governor Pataki as assailing Mrs. Clinton, saying, ''Mrs. Clinton should say why she filed this under the American Museum Council, and not the American Muslim Council.''
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, said the mistake was a typographical error. ''Congressman Lazio will say anything to avoid taking responsibility for these phone calls.''
Correction: October 30, 2000, Monday An article yesterday about Hillary Rodham Clinton's denunciations of the New York Republican Party for telephoning New Yorkers and telling them that she had received donations from a Muslim group quoted incompletely from the script used in the calls. It said she had accepted contributions from an organization that ''openly brags about its support for a Mideast terrorism group -- the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the U.S.S. Cole.'' The script did not speak of accepting money from an actual terror group. |
