Club organizers.

New York City's first Muslim club is looking to have an impact on the mayor's race. And organizers of the group, the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, cited current Mayor Michael Bloomberg's policies--notably, the city police department's controversial Muslim surveillance efforts--as a key motivating factor as they seek to ensure his successor follows a new path.

"The mayor has been a problem for this community," one club leader, Ali Najmi, told Politicker. "We want to send a message to City Hall that the next mayor needs to treat us differently."

But the club's first ever meeting, held in a posh Midtown lounge Thursday night, also focused on even more local political issues. Mr. Najmi, along with Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour and other organizers, led a PowerPoint presentation for the dozens of attendees about the untapped voting strength of Muslim Democrats in the city, keying on City Council districts in Brooklyn and Queens where Muslims live in significant numbers.

The ultimate goal of the club, which will begin fundraising soon, is to build a field operation powerful enough to influence elections throughout New York City. Influence for its own sake, though, is not the goal. In addition to the surveillance issue, MDCNY is currently pushing for the inclusion of Muslim holidays in the public school calendar. Foreign policy issues are not on the agenda.

"Those are the two main issues that we hear already on Twitter, on Facebook, from our community and the centers that we work for. As you know, many of us are in the grassroots community. Those are going to be our two big issues and the usual, health care, immigration," Ms. Sarsour said.

Two Democratic mayoral candidates, Comptroller John Liu and Sal Albanese, addressed the club, as well as the city's only Muslim elected official, Councilman Robert Jackson, also a Manhattan borough president candidate. Mr. Liu in particular has been a vociferous critic of the NYPD.

"I think more than any other community, the Muslim community has some very severe challenges and important issues the city has to deal with," Mr. Liu said. "We have ongoing issues of surveillance of people just because of their religious faith- that's not right, we should put an end to that. Kids and families have to choose between going to school and observing important holidays in the Muslim faith- that has to change also."

Through a tally of Muslim-seeming surnames in voter rolls (religions are not counted in the Census), MDCNY determined that there are a total of 105,000 registered Muslim voters in New York City. 70 percent of that total, according to MDCNY, are Democrats and if 100 percent of Muslims voted, they would be 10 percent of the primary electorate. Mr. Najmi identified five City Council districts where the most Muslims lived. To the surprise of attendees, the district with the most Muslims was not Councilman Vincent Gentile's Bay Ridge district or Councilman Peter Vallone Jr.'s Astoria district. It was Councilman Mark Weprin's eastern Queens district, typically perceived as being white and suburban. Four out of the top five most Muslim districts are in Queens.

"We are swing voters," the organizers emphasized, pointing out that 6,500 Muslim voters live in Mr. Weprin's district. Mr. Weprin won his 2009 Democratic primary with less than 4,500 votes. The goal of the club, however, isn't to depose incumbents. A long-term goal will be to train candidates of their own, but for now they will focus on raising money, hiring full-time staff, reaching out to ethnic media and trying to tap into the power of the Muslim electorate. The membership of the club will guide their turnout operations and Ms. Sarsour said they were going to target two council races this year, but club organizers did not specify which two.

"Even if we were 5 percent of the electorate, we could be a swing voter on the citywide level and guaranteed swing voters in specific districts in the City Council," Ms. Sarsour said.

David Weprin at an Arab-American bazaar in Bay Ridge earlier this year. (photo credit: Robert Nickelsberg)

Debating Israel with a congressman from Brooklyn isn’t easy, then or now.

Asked about the tone of the debate over Israel-hawk credentials in the upcoming special congressional election to replace Anthony Weiner, James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, recalled a run-in he had more than 20 years ago.

"In 1988, when I raised the plank at the Democratic National Convention, I went up against Chuck Schumer," said Mr. Zogby, who was a delegate from the Jesse Jackson campaign at the time. "They were telling me, ‘Zogby, if you even raise this at the convention you’ll never have a place in the Democratic Party again’ and blah blah blah. The plank was actually quite modest," Mr. Zogby recalled. "The plank actually read, ‘mutual recognition, territorial compromise and self-determination for both people.’

"Schumer, after I spoke at the convention, he got up to the platform and he said, ‘Zogby is duplicitous, Zogby is this and Zogby is that.’ Afterward, he came up and put his arm around me and said, ‘[You] have no idea how much money you made for me back home.’"

A year later, according to Mr. Zogby, the two met again. "I was at a fund-raiser for Dave Dinkins at Pamela Harriman’s, and I was talking to Mrs. Harriman," said Mr. Zogby, "and he comes up and puts his arm around me and calls me ‘the guy who made him a hero in Brooklyn.’" A spokesman for Mr. Schumer did not immediately comment on Mr. Zogby’s version of events.

Still today in New York’s Ninth, Mr Schumer’s old district, there is something of this attitude recognizable in the race between Democratic assemblyman David Weprin and Republican challenger Bob Turner, which former mayor Ed Koch declared to be a referendum on Barack Obama’s position on Israel, endorsing Mr Turner as a means for Jewish voters to express their displeasure. Mr Weprin, an orthodox Jew with family in Israel, duly took pains to respond that he too disagreed with President Obama’s position on Israel, importing Senator Joseph Lieberman to appear with him as a counterweight to Mr Koch.

Logic doesn’t have much to do with it in these situations. The district has one of the highest concentration of Jewish voters in New York—and many of those voters are elderly, and presumably inclined to take Ed Koch’s word for things. (In fact, what Messrs. Koch, Turner and Weprin imply about the president’s position on Israel is not precisely correct; they criticize him for saying that the 1967 border between Israel and a Palestinian state ought to be a basis for negotiations over a permanent border, whereas Mr. Obama actually said the basis should be the ’67 border with "swaps" that would allow Israel to retain heavily settled parts of the West Bank. The latter is a far less controversial proposition.)

Thus stymied, Mr. Turner’s campaign has ratcheted up the militancy somewhat by dredging up the issue of the "World Trade Center mosque," calling on Mr. Weprin to explain why he supported the project. The Weprin campaign, for its part, has attempted to guide the campaign back to economic issues and job creation, but only after having made the case that no Republican will out-hawk him on Israel-Arab relations.

"I’m one of the few [Democrats] who has been very strongly criticizing Obama on the statement he made that the starting point [in Mideast peace talks] is Israel going back to the pre-‘67 border," Mr. Weprin told Jewish Week recently.

Which is the funny thing (or the sad one, depending on how you look at it): Mr. Weprin’s reputation before the campaign on these issues was that of a conciliator, secure in his Jewishness but evenhanded in his outreach.

"David Weprin has actually been quite liberal—I would call him progressive—on a lot issues, particularly pertaining to the Arab and Muslim community," said Linda Sarsour, a steering committee member of the Arab-American Democratic Club of New York, based in Bay Ridge.

Ms. Sarsour recalled seeing Mr. Weprin at the Fifth Annual Bay Ridge Arab Bazaar "the largest festival in Brooklyn celebrating Arab culture and heritage."

"He played up his co-sponsorship of incorporating Muslim holidays into schools, how he’s very friendly with Muslim Americans and how he supported the building of the mosque and how this is about religious freedom and that he believes whole-heartedly in the constitution and blah blah blah," said Ms. Sarsour.

"You should have heard him," Ms. Sarsour gushed. "You thought he was like the Muslim-lover."

Ms. Sarsour said she is disappointed at how Mr. Weprin responded to the criticism from Mr. Koch and Mr. Turner. "I’m just like, ‘Come on, David Weprin, you’re better than that.’"

Referring back to the bazaar—which another one of Ms. Sarsour’s group’s organized—she noted, "We didn’t even invite him."

"Right now, I’m not seeing a difference," Mr. Zogby said of the candidates, "and they’re doing their darndest for there to not be a difference."