Text of the add 27/10/04
Lebanese-Americans Salute President Bush and our Troops
Facts about our community:
• More than 300,000 U.S. citizens of Middle-Eastern descent live in southeastern Michigan. The media mistakenly identifies them all as "Arab-Americans".
• Media reports and political analyses often fail to distinguish between "Middle-Easterners", "Arab-Americans" and "Muslim-Americans".
• In Michigan, as in the United States at large, 75-80% of citizens of Middle-Eastern descent are Christian and 20-25% are Muslim (Time Magazine survey, October 2001).
• In Michigan, Lebanese-Americans are by far the largest single group of Middle-Eastern descent. Lebanese-Americans and Chaldean-Americans constitute over 80% of all citizens of Middle-Eastern descent in Michigan.
• The overwhelming majority of citizens of Middle-Eastern descent live in Macomb County, northeastern Wayne County, and southwestern Oakland County. Less than 10% live in the Dearborn area.
• Political analyses and views, as well as political endorsements, expressed in the media under the "Arab-American" name reflect the views of a small minority of the more than 300,000 citizens of Middle-Eastern descent.
Views of Lebanese-American members:
• We are grateful to our troops and their families for their immeasurable sacrifices to safeguard America's security as well as that of the free world.
• We fully support the leadership of President Bush in the global fight against terrorism and we subscribe to his vision of spreading democracy throughout the Middle-East for a safer America.
• We recognize the 'global' nature of the war on terrorism and the vital necessity to deal with it globally. We realize the need to preemptively confront terrorism in any of its cradles to reduce the risk of facing it here in the homeland.
• We deplore the comparison of the war in Iraq after 9/11 to a supposed war on Mexico after the Pearl Harbor attack. Saddam was an oppressor of his people and a threat to neighbors and to the free world, while Mexico was and still is a country peaceful and friendly to the U.S. Realizing the global dimension of the war on terrorism, an appropriate comparison would have been to the war America led to remove Hitler's threat to the world.
Can we imagine the world today had the U.S. not taken the lead in removing Hitler?
• We urge our fellow citizens to vote for America's security first and foremost.