The love of Muslims for a Jewish candidate for presidency in the United States is explained

Islamic practitioners in the United States actively support Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, despite his Jewish background, thanks to his statements in defense of the Palestinians and his work with Muslim organizations. This explanation of Muslim love for Sanders leads Newsweek.

According to a survey conducted by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) among Muslim Democrats shortly before the start of the election race, Sanders was already the most popular Democratic candidate at that time: he was supported by 39 percent of the respondents, while his main opponent inside the party , former US vice president Joe Biden, is only 27 percent. In the future, the popularity of Sanders only grew, the newspaper notes.

In many respects, Newsweek believes, this was facilitated by the consistent work of Sanders in establishing contacts with Muslim Americans and involving them in the electoral process. So, it was the senator from Vermont who initiated the caucus (assembly of activists) in mosques – this year this happened for the first time in the history of the election races in the USA thanks to the efforts of Sanders. As a result, at one of these gatherings in Des Moines, Iowa, he gathered 115 votes in his favor out of 120. A similar picture was observed at other caucus held in mosques. In addition, several days later during a conference call with Sanders, some of the Muslims for Burney organization volunteers, referring to the politician, called him “Uncle Burnie” in Arabic, which indicates their good attitude towards him.

A special factor that contributed to the sharp increase in the popularity of Sanders among Islamic professing US citizens was his statements on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Despite his Jewish origin, Sanders repeatedly supported the Palestinians in his speeches. Thus, during a debate in Charleston, South Carolina on February 25, a senator from Vermont stated that he was certainly a supporter of Israel’s independence, but recalled that “the suffering of the Palestinian people cannot be ignored.” In addition, in his speech, he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a reactionary racist” because of his policy towards the Palestinians.

Also, the newspaper notes, it’s been playing into the hands of Sanders that he has demonstrated interest in the Islamic community for more than a year: it is not connected with the start of the 2020 campaign and was not connected with the 2016 campaign. In addition, the senator from Vermont repeatedly spoke in public with prominent Muslim leaders of the Democratic Party, and was also seen in relations with some anti-Semites.

On the other hand, writes Newsweek, all this affects Sanders’s popularity among Jewish voters: among the supporters of the Democratic Party of Jewish origin, only about 11 percent of respondents support him, which is significantly less than the number of internal party opponents supporting him.

Bernie Sanders was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Eli Sanders, was a Polish Jew who fled to the United States in 1921, and his mother, Dorothy Glassberg, came from a family of Jews from Poland and the Russian Empire.