WASHINGTON — The White House on Thursday announced what it called the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia, detailing more than 100 steps federal officials can take to curb hate, violence, bias and discrimination against Muslims and Arab Americans.
The proposal follows a similar national plan to battle antisemitism that President Joe Biden unveiled in May 2023, as fears about increasing hatred and discrimination were rising among U.S. Jews.
Officials worked on the anti-Islamophobia plan for months, and its release came five weeks before Biden leaves office — meaning implementation will mostly fall to President-elect Donald Trump, if his administration chooses to do so.
In a statement announcing the strategy, the Biden administration wrote that “Over the past year, this initiative has become even more important as threats against American Muslim and Arab communities have spiked.” It said that included the October 2023 slaying of 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi, an American Muslim boy of Palestinian descent, who was stabbed to death in Illinois.
The plan details actions the Executive Branch can take, along with more than 100 other calls to action across all sectors of society.
The strategy has four basic priorities: increasing awareness of hatred against Muslims and Arabs while more widely recognizing these communities’ heritages; broadly improving their safety and security; appropriately accommodating Muslim and Arab religious practices by working to curb discrimination against them; and encouraging cross-community solidarity to further counter hate.
Many of those state 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.
“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,” the announcement of the strategy states, noting that Muslims and Arab Americans have helped build out the nation since its founding. It says that 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 more widely disseminating successful practices of engaging Muslim and Arab Americans in the reporting of hate crimes, and that federal agencies are now more clearly spelling out that “discrimination against Muslim and Arab Americans in federally funded activities is illegal.”
The White House’s plan also urges “state, local, and international counterparts, as well as the nongovernmental sector, to pursue similar initiatives that seek to build greater unity by recognizing our common humanity, affirming our shared values and history, and embracing equal justice, liberty, and security for all.”
Pro-Palestinian groups decrying his administration’s full-throated support for Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza, frequently disrupted Biden campaign events, as well as those of Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden abandoned his reelection bid in July.
Trump, who implemented a travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries during his first term, won the largest majority-Muslim US city in last month’s elections. Yet some Arab Americans who backed Trump have begun expressing concerns about his some of his choices to fill out his Cabinet and other picks for his incoming administration.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., panned what it called “the White House’s long-delayed document” as “too little, too late.”
“The White House strategy lays out some positive recommendations related to anti-Muslim bigotry, but it has been released too late to make an impact, fails to promise any changes to federal programs that perpetuate anti-Muslim discrimination on a massive scale,” the council said in a statement further noting that the plan doesn’t address what it called a “federal watchlist” targeting some Arab-Americans as potential terrorists.
It added that the plan “fails to promise an end the most significant driver of anti-Muslim bigotry today: the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza.“