The outgoing Democratic regime of Joseph Biden has announced a National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate. A sixty-page document released by the White House has called for a coordinated campaign to counter anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination and propaganda. Given that Biden has just one more month left in office after his deputy Kamala Harris lost the recent election, it remains to be seen to what extent this strategy can be implemented.

The document calls on Americans to take a “historic opportunity to strengthen our country by living up to its highest ideals”. It quotes Biden’s sage platitudes: “History teaches us that hate never fully goes away; it only hides until it is given just a little oxygen.” The piece distinguishes between anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudices, noting the truisms that most Arab-Americans are not Muslim and that most Muslim Americans are not Arab. It also calls on strategies to counter anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab hate online and to end discriminatory practices. Given the frequent resort to anti-Muslim rhetoric by much of the American elite, perhaps most notably during the reign of George Bush II, and policies that heavily targeted Muslims, particularly in matters of security, such talk is no doubt an improvement.

But there is some reason to doubt its worth given the intrinsic support that Biden’s own policy, particularly in foreign affairs, has given to anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments. For instance, Biden has strongly thrown his support behind Israel’s far-right, supremacist Likud regime as it both commits a genocide of Palestinians and spreads anti-Muslim, anti-Arab rhetoric to justify this. To take one of countless examples, last winter the Israeli government mocked the standard Islamic view that Prophet Isa nor Jesus were Muslims, and the Likud faction, in particular, has spread anti-Islamic rhetoric, not least in the United States, since at least the 1980s. Nor has the desecration of mosques and Quran copies by the Israeli military prevented Biden’s government from not only supporting Tel Aviv but blocking international attempts to censure it. Biden himself cast aspersions on the widely documented mass slaughter by Israel in Gaza, and a personal distaste for the Likud tendency among the American Democrats has never prevented them from giving unconditional diplomatic, military, financial, and political support to Israel.

Particularly ironic is the report’s citation as an example of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab hatred of the murder of the American-Palestinian child Wadea Fayoumi in October 2023 – given that the murderer had explicitly been incited by the same fallacious, sensationalist claims of Palestinian savagery that Biden himself had repeated. In other words, Biden was guilty of the same sort of rhetoric that had incited the murder of an American child – a murder that he now cites as an example of the hatred that he wishes to fight. Similarly the murder of Palestinian Americans, such as Tawfiq Abdul-Jabbar, by Israelis has elicited no reaction from Washington.

Given how late Biden has left this “National Strategy”; and given its domestic, and pointedly non-international, focus when anti-Muslim and anti-Arab trends continue to play a role in American foreign policy – it is worth wondering as to the motives and substantiveness of the entire project.

-by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

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