President Biden has established the first national strategy to fight Islamophobia after his support of Israel in its war against Hamas sparked outrage in the Democratic Party.
Since the Hamas terrorist attack last month, Mr. Biden has sought to balance his support for Israel with calls for restraint in its military response. He called for a pause in fighting to allow women and children to flee the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, pushed to increase humanitarian aid to the region and spoke out against Islamophobia.
White House officials met with Muslim and Arab American leaders to discuss ways to become more supportive of their communities.
Yet none of it has been enough to mollify Muslim and Arab American voters who have soured on Mr. Biden since the war began. Their voices have joined a growing faction of the Democratic Party’s base who view Israel as the villain and a colonizer of indigenous Palestinians.
At a private campaign fundraiser this week in Minneapolis, a protester in what should have been a friendly crowd repeatedly heckled the president with demands that he secure a cease-fire. It was a replay of a scene last month when a guest interrupted Mr. Biden at an LBGTQ dinner by chanting, “Let Gaza live. Cease fire now.”
The White House is keenly aware of the anti-Israel and sometimes antisemitic undercurrent on the far left, which has come into sharp focus with protests on college campuses and in big cities since the grisly Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in Israel.
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The White House also is sensitive to the political danger of siding too closely with the Jewish state.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations expressed displeasure with Mr. Biden.
“We are running out of words to describe the American Muslim community’s disappointment with the Biden administration’s refusal to demand a cease-fire,” CAIR said in a statement. “At this point, President Biden’s refusal to demand a cease-fire is bordering on the absurd. For the sake of God, President Biden, stop this madness and demand a cease-fire.”
A Reuters/Zogby poll released Tuesday found that just 17% of Arab Americans support Mr. Biden, down from 59% in 2020. In contrast, 40% of Arab American respondents said they would vote for former President Donald Trump in 2024.
The same poll revealed that for the first time since 1997, a majority of Arab Americans did not identify as Democrats. Now, 32% say they are Republicans and 31% identify as independents.
Desperate to reverse these trends, the White House this week announced the contours of the anti-Islamophobia strategy. The administration said it will bring together lawmakers, advocacy groups and other community leaders to “counter the scourge of Islamophobia and hate in all its forms.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris announced the initiative in a video posted on social media.
“For years, Muslims in America and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks,” she said in the video. “As a result of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, we have seen an uptick in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents across America.”
She noted the horror of the stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy last week in Chicago.
White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons said the anti-Islamophobia strategy will take months to implement. The next step involves government agencies. She did not offer a time or other details about the plan.
CAIR called the strategy “an important step” but said the administration can do more, including demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.
“First and foremost, we need a cease-fire. The American Muslim community will accept nothing less,” the group said in a statement.
Others panned the administration’s focus on Islamophobia as “tone deaf.”
“After the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and a breakout of pro-Hamas activism on campus, the White House is claiming *Islamophobia* is our top concern,” Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, wrote on social media.
On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified on Capitol Hill that Jews account for just 2.4% of the American population but are targets of roughly 60% of all religious-based hate crimes.
“This is a threat that is reaching in some way sort of historic levels, in part because, as you know all too well, the Jewish community is targeted by terrorists, really across the spectrum,” Mr. Wray said.
On Monday, the Biden administration announced a series of actions to combat rising antisemitism at colleges and universities after several heated anti-Israel protests.
Under the plan, the Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department will partner to track antisemitic rhetoric and provide federal resources to schools. The Education Department will host webinars on how to file hate crime reports.
The administration’s efforts to condemn antisemitism have fallen flat and are widely criticized as weak.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last week was forced to backtrack after she deflected a question about an uptick in attacks on Jewish Americans by condemning hate crimes against Muslims. She was roundly criticized for dodging the antisemitism issue.
This week, she took more heat after refusing to say whether Mr. Biden saw anti-Israel protesters on college campuses as “extremists” because of antisemitic rhetoric and threats of violence.
Instead, Ms. Jean-Pierre simply repeated, “There’s no place for hate in America.”
A 21-year-old student in New York was arrested this week on charges of threatening to kill and rape Jews at Cornell University.
Blake Beye, a member of the City Council in Hillsboro, Kansas, referenced Mr. Wray’s statistics in a tweet slamming Ms. Harris’ statement.
“This is one of the most tone-deaf posts I’ve ever seen on this platform,” he wrote. “The amount of hatred I’ve seen towards the Jewish community and the nation of Israel over the last month makes me sick to my stomach and breaks my heart. Read the room, sweetheart.”
For Mr. Biden, the need to soothe angry liberals and Muslim Americans is about his political survival.
Arab Americans account for just a fraction of the U.S. population and about half the number of Jewish Americans, but their communities reside in battleground states that could shift an election if they withhold their support from Mr. Biden in 2024.
The U.S. Religion Census, which tracks statistics for faith communities, found that the Muslim adherent population in several states exceeded Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.
Mr. Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, and its Muslim adherent population is around 123,000. He won by about 154,000 votes in Michigan, which has more than 242,000 Muslim adherents. Wisconsin, which Mr. Biden won by 21,000 votes, has 69,000 Muslim adherents.
Last week, Mr. Biden said he had no confidence that the Gaza death toll was accurate because he had “no notion” whether Palestinians were telling the truth. He was slammed by the first Muslim American woman elected to the state House in Georgia.
Rep. Ruwa Romman, a 30-year-old Democrat who is also a Palestinian American, called the president’s remarks “crushing.” She had campaigned for Mr. Biden by knocking on doors in 2020, according to her Twitter page.
“I will keep repeating it, pretending Palestinians don’t exist or their pain isn’t real doesn’t make either of those things magically disappear,” she wrote on social media.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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