ALJAZEERA
On November 1, less than a month into Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, United States President Joe Biden’s administration announced a national strategy to battle Islamophobia. The move came as anti-Muslim incidents were on the rise nationwide.
On October 14, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American child, was stabbed to death in Chicago while his mother was critically wounded in a racially motivated assault by their landlord. Five days later, Jasmer Singh, a 66-year-old Sikh man, was beaten to death in New York City by a man screaming “turban man”. (Observant Sikhs are often mistaken for Muslims.) On October 28, Muslim American physician Talat Jehan Khan was stabbed to death in Texas.
Biden’s initiative was mirrored by some US academic institutions, which adopted anti-Islamophobia measures, typically alongside anti-Semitism prevention policies. Stanford, the University of Maryland, Columbia and Harvard are among the educational institutions that announced such initiatives.
But the White House strategy to fight Islamophobia has been met with widespread scorn and ridicule. X (formerly Twitter) users responded to Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement of the initiative with criticism and pointed questions about US complicity in the atrocities taking place in the Gaza Strip. On campuses, the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism and advocacy has belied universities’ anti-Islamophobia initiatives.
These reactions reflect Muslim Americans’ growing rejection of the attempt to replace systemic political demands with those focused on intolerance or exclusion. This marks a break from the past two decades, when a focus on cultural acceptance or interfaith dialogue, rather than political critique and action, shaped Muslim American advocacy and organising.
This shift was apparent in the funeral of the slain child Wadea, which was attended by thousands and became a veritable Free Palestine rally. Speakers condemned the pro-Israel slant of US media coverage, the blank cheque given by the US to the Israeli occupation forces to commit atrocities and the years-long siege on Gaza that has hobbled life for its residents. Wadea’s death was mourned not as a matter of anti-Muslim bigotry or hatred but a grisly domestic flashpoint in the US-Israel alliance…
