The Express-News missed a good story last week when it failed to cover presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich's speech to the new San Antonio chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The news hook was that more than 300 people, most of them Muslims, gathered for an evening of political organizing.

Nationwide, a coalition of Muslim organizations plans to register at least 1 million new voters before the November elections.

In San Antonio, CAIR organizers were busy registering voters, signing up election judges and training citizens to be delegates at the state party conventions. It's a flurry of political activity that had never been seen in San Antonio.

Nationwide, about a third of Muslims originally hail from South Asia: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. About one in four are Arabs. Twenty percent to 30 percent — the number is disputed — are African Americans.

The remainder have origins in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Turkey and Iran. About 1.6 percent are white native-born Americans; 0.6 percent are Hispanic.

Religion isn't recorded on the census and there is heated disagreement about the actual number of Muslims in the United States.

Last spring a survey sponsored by several Muslim organizations and conducted as part of Hartford Seminary's larger "Faith Communities Today" study pegged the number at 6 million to 7 million.

This number has been disputed by the American Jewish Committee, which commissioned an alternate study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The results suggested a more accurate number is 1.9 million to 2.8 million.

The 2000 election was a watershed for Muslim voters. For the first time, four Muslim organizations joined to endorse a candidate — George W. Bush. And the voters responded.

A survey after the election suggested 72 percent of Muslim voters voted for Bush, 19 percent supported Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and only 8 percent voted for Vice President Al Gore. Thirty-six percent were first-time voters.

Nader is a first-generation Lebanese American who speaks fluent Arabic. He was — and still is — critical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians.

Gore inherited President Clinton's uneasy relations with the Muslim community, which deteriorated after Camp David when Clinton threatened to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Hillary Clinton completed the rift when she returned a $50,000 donation to her senatorial campaign from the American Muslim Alliance after her opponent called it "blood money from terrorists."

Gore was one of Israel's staunchest supporters in the Democratic Party, and his running mate, Joe Lieberman, is an Orthodox Jew generally supportive of the Israeli government.

Muslims are natural allies with the Republicans' conservative stance on social issues such as gay rights and abortion. Bush actively courted the Muslim community in 2000.

In the second presidential debate, Bush won Muslim accolades by pledging to end the use of secret evidence in deportation hearings. He also spoke out against racial profiling, which appealed to traditionally Democratic African American Muslims.

Muslims are especially numerous in the powerhouse states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. In the 2000 presidential election, an estimated 60,000 Muslims voted in Florida, 90 percent of them for Bush.

All that good will evaporated after Sept. 11, 2001.

Muslims are critical of the Patriot Act, which has affected their community disproportionately. They were outraged by immigration authorities' special registration roundup of men from predominately Islamic countries last year, an admitted case of racial profiling.

Although it's doubtful that national Muslim organizations will endorse any candidate this year, it's clear in the grass roots that the Republican honeymoon is over.

Muslims have discovered their political muscle and they are going to flex it.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.