Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Packing bags to leave the White House a day before his bete noire and predecessor-cum-successor Donald Trump re-occupies it on January 20, 2025, outgoing US President Joe Biden has released a 64-page ‘Muslim appeasement’ plan on how to combat “Islamophobia,” the media reported on Friday.
Amid Washington’s strong and continuing support to Israel in its ongoing Gaza conflict, this move is being viewed as an attempt to balance the Muslim and Aran American support base of the Democratic Party, and also as an effort to embarrass Trump to either force him to follow it or reject it to earn the Muslims’ ire.
Released on Thursday, barely five weeks before his term ends, the reports said, Biden’s officials spent months preparing the anti-Islamophobia plan. The White House released its first national strategy to combat Islamophobia, listing over 100 steps to address hate, violence, and discrimination against Muslims and Arab Americans.
This plan follows a similar national strategy to combat antisemitism, announced in May 2023, amid growing concerns about hatred and discrimination against Jewish communities in the United States.
Its implementation will largely depend on the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
“Over the past year, this initiative has become even more important as threats against American Muslim and Arab communities have spiked,” the Biden administration said in a statement announcing the strategy. It referred to the October 2023 killing of six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi, a Palestinian American Muslim boy, who was stabbed to death in Illinois.
The plan outlines the steps the executive branch can take, along with over 100 recommendations for various sectors of society.
Its priorities include raising awareness of prevailing prejudice against Muslims and Arabs while celebrating their cultural contributions, enhancing their safety and security, addressing discrimination by supporting religious accommodations, and fostering unity among communities to counter hate.
Many of these goals are similar to the ones the Biden administration laid out in its plan to reduce antisemitism — especially the emphasis on improving safety and security and building cross-community solidarity, the reports said.
“While individuals have sometimes been targeted because they are thought to be Muslim, it is also crucial to recognize that Arabs are routinely targeted simply for being who they are,” it said, noting that Muslims and Arab Americans have helped build the nation since its founding.
New data collection and education efforts are “increasing awareness of these forms of hate as well of the proud heritages of Muslim and Arab Americans.”
The plan calls for spreading successful methods of involving Muslim and Arab Americans in reporting hate crimes and for federal agencies to more explicitly state that “discrimination against Muslim and Arab Americans in federally funded activities is illegal.”
The White House plan also encourages “state, local, and international partners, along with the nongovernmental sector, to pursue similar efforts aimed at fostering unity by acknowledging our shared humanity, affirming common values and history, and upholding equal justice, liberty, and security for all.”
Pro-Palestinian groups, criticizing the Biden administration’s ongoing strong support for Israel in its war with Gaza, often disrupted election campaign events for Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris after the President withdrew from the re-election race in July.
Trump, who introduced a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries during his first term (2017-21), won the largest majority-Muslim city in the US in the November presidential elections. However, some Arab Americans, who supported him, have started raising concerns about certain Cabinet and administration picks for his upcoming term.