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How Biden's plan to 'combat Islamophobia' whitewashes US state violence

More than a year after the US-backed genocide in Gaza, the recent strategy guide is the administration's final act of violence against Arab and Muslim communities
Community members, including a child carrying a sign proclaiming 'I am not a threat', attend a vigil for six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoume, who was killed in a stabbing attack fuelled by Islamophobia, on 17 October 2023 in Plainfield, Illinois (Scott Olson/AFP)
Community members attend a vigil for six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea al-Fayoume, who was killed in an attack allegedly fuelled by Islamophobia, on 17 October 2023 in Plainfield, Illinois (Scott Olson/AFP)

On 12 December, the White House released a strategy guide to combat Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate.

The strategy guide opens with a statement from US President Joe Biden lamenting the killing of Wadea al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American Muslim boy who was allegedly killed by his landlord in October 2023 when Israel's American-backed genocide of Palestinians had just begun.

Likening the present climate in the US to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, in which Muslims, Arabs and South Asians were targeted, Biden's condemnations make ambiguous the cause of the violence directed at these communities and the role of the state in marginalising them in the first place.  

Conveniently, Biden highlights one particular instance of state violence: Donald Trump's Muslim ban.

Lauding himself, the lame-duck president asserts that such discriminatory policies are wrong and that this was the reason he rescinded the travel ban on his first day in office.

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Condemning this policy further, he states that the Muslim ban was "a stain on our national conscience and inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and backgrounds".

What Biden leaves out, however, is an executive order he signed in June that relied on a regulation from the ban to restrict asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border.

The White House strategy guide is simply the latest manifestation of the Biden administration's superficial and mostly symbolic engagement with Muslim communities. 

It deliberately treats both hate crimes and state violence as aberrations from the norm, thus allowing for a particular set of policy interventions that ignore root causes and fail to address the problem of Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate meaningfully.  

Who 'deserves' to die?

Preserving American mythology about the character of the US, Biden writes in the guide's opening that "we must realise the dream upon which this country was founded: that freedom and opportunity are for everyone".

Such claims are belied by the historical and ongoing legacy of genocide, marginalisation, exclusion and brutality of this settler-colonial state. But the violence of this mythology is that it continues to be deployed today despite its blatant mendacity.

Biden states that "history teaches that hate never fully goes away; it only hides until it is given just a little oxygen".

The guide's framing attempts to paint violence as rooted in some mysterious antagonism towards members of these groups

Yet this wholly removes the role of the state in giving hate oxygen. The fact that this guide came out after 14 months of his administration's full-throttled support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians and perpetuation of the "war on terror" are illustrative examples.

When Joseph Czuba allegedly waged his deadly attack on Wadea and his mother, he reportedly shouted: "You Muslims have to die!" Not long after, reports emerged that Czuba was "obsessed with the Israel-Hamas war", allegedly telling Wadea's mother, who was severely injured, that "Palestinians don't deserve to live". 

While the strategy guide decries such physical attacks on Americans (ostensibly on US soil) based on "who they are", it omits the government's justifications for Israel's slaughter in Gaza which, in effect, share Czuba's alleged position that Palestinians do not deserve to live.

The guide's framing attempts to paint violence as rooted in some mysterious antagonism towards members of these groups. But no one is targeted simply because of "who they are" devoid of any context; they are targeted because of the construction of who they are thought to be.  

Domestically, the US government routinely targets Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims based on "who they are", whom it has defined as irredeemable, violent, inherently rageful and perpetrators of "terrorism", among other demonising tropes.

Fallacy

The state's theoretical desire to combat hate violence, as demonstrated by this guide, is strategically insidious.

By seeking to challenge the occurrence of hate violence, the state can promote the facade that it exists as an objective adjudicator of justice that is committed to the equal protection of its citizens.

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Biden's statement in the guide that "standing up against anti-Muslim hate is essential to who we are as a country founded on freedom and justice for all" is an emblematic example of this fallacy.

Not only do such claims minimise state violence towards many of the same groups it claims to be protecting against hate crimes, but they also seek to misguide and placate targeted communities by convincing them that the government is genuinely interested in their safety and well-being.  

The Biden administration's continued criminal targeting of these communities domestically as it facilitates the mass killing of their brethren overseas not only exposes the bald-faced hypocrisy of this guide but also insults community members' intelligence.

In addition, far from changing course in the global "war on terror", Biden has perpetuated it by conducting "counterterrorism" operations in several Muslim-majority countries, including drone strikes and special operation raids in Afghanistan, where he claimed the war was over, and Africom's bombing of Somalia.  

The state naturally has a vested interest in exculpating itself from the occurrence of hate crimes. This makes it even more crucial to understand its role in societal violence against marginalised groups.

In their essay on the role of the state and media in inspiring violence against Muslims since 9/11, political scientist Scott Poynting and right-wing extremism expert Barbara Perry write that "in declining adequately to recognise and to act against hate crime, and in actually modelling anti-Muslim bias by practising discrimination and institutional racism through 'ethnic targeting', 'racial profiling' and the like, the state conveys a sort of ideological licence to individuals, groups and institutions to perpetrate and perpetuate racial hatred".

But even if hate crimes were adequately recognised, the deployment of this framework is still problematic, as scholar Sherene Razack explains.

In her article, Razack writes that "there is obvious political capital to be gained by employing hate as analytic, capital related to the work hate performs in turning our gaze away from the structural and from historical injustice and towards the psychosocial and even the biological".

She further argues that using hate as an analytical tool "establishes the innocence of the state and of dominant collectivities".

Flawed framework

When Vice-President Kamala Harris first announced the development of "the country's first National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia" in November 2023 - a month into Israel's genocidal war on Gaza - she noted the increase in "anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents across America".

Still, she attributed the uptick in hate to "the result of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza". Of course, the narrative that she carefully deployed here was meant to emphasise Israelis as victims of a known entity - Hamas - while Palestinians, on the other hand, could only be victims of something like a natural disaster.

With a fundamentally flawed framework, the guide offers little to nothing in the way of concrete measures to change the material conditions of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims

Coupled with a fixation on 7 October as the origin story placing Hamas as the actual instigators of the "conflict", not only does this narrative dehumanise Palestinians, but it also makes the state violence inflicted by Israel and the United States illegible. Rendering state violence illegible in this way serves as another pathway through which the framework of hate can circumvent any understanding of institutional and structural forces at play.

This approach has defined this strategy guide. 

With a fundamentally flawed framework through which to address Islamophobia and anti-Arab hatred, the guide offers little to nothing in the way of concrete measures that will yield changes in the material conditions of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.

This is despite the fact that the guide offers more than 100 "executive actions" in addition to 100 other actions meant to address issues such as bullying and employment discrimination.

But to provide these actions and recommendations while remaining the primary source of institutionalised Islamophobia is nonsensical - and even if the guide had made recommendations aimed internally that would actually address state violence at its core, it would basically amount to the fox guarding the hen house.  

Symbolic gestures

Delving into a few examples of actions also reveals the symbolism in which these gestures are rooted.

One executive action is re-establishing the position of liaison to Muslim communities within the White House Office of Public Engagement.

US Muslims don't need a White House Muslim liaison. They need an end to state violence
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However, as I previously argued, rather than creating any meaningful engagement with the Muslim community - to whatever extent that is even possible - it appoints a colonised interlocutor to parrot and promote the views and actions of the administration, if not obfuscate its sheer violence.

Since its creation, the position has done nothing to advance the rights of Muslims as it was, in fact, designed to subdue them.

The guide also celebrates Biden's "achievement" as the first US president to recognise the annual "International Day to Combat Islamophobia" on 15 March.

Setting aside the fact that the United Nations only declared this day of observance in 2022 - making Biden the only sitting president who could commemorate it - what matters more is to implement policies that actually address the violence and root causes of Islamophobia.

Finally, in the section addressing religious freedom and accommodations to students, the guide attempts to show its support for free speech in the context of the campus protests earlier this year to end Israel's genocide.

According to the guide, "President Biden has made it clear that there are two fundamental principles that must be respected during these protests: 'The first is the right to free speech and for people to assemble and make their voices heard peacefully. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.'"

If free speech, however, were an actual principle that the Biden-Harris administration wanted to protect, then it would have refrained from embracing the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which explicitly equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.  

'Final hurrah'

With a month to go before Trump's inauguration and over 400 days into Israel's US-backed genocide, this guide is too little, too late.

Not only does the framing of the guide preclude the possibility of any meaningful action to combat anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hatred, but the guide itself exists against the backdrop of unrelenting state violence targeting these very communities.

The guide itself exists against the backdrop of unrelenting state violence targeting these very communities

If anything, it would be more appropriate to read it as a tone-deaf administration's final hurrah in inflicting violence - this time symbolically by performing care and concern for the communities that have been demonised and criminalised over the last four years.

While this guide doesn't accomplish much of anything, it does succeed in further cementing Biden's legacy as a war criminal and, now, a core part of the genealogy of the war on terror, which he staunchly supported even in his final days.

There is an Arabic proverb that says: "They'll kill you and then march in your funeral." The Biden administration's combatting Islamophobia guide is emblematic of precisely this.

Fortunately, many in the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities have refused to let this violence go unchecked because they know that it is not the government that will protect us; it is our communities that will.

We are and will always be our best defence. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Dr. Maha Hilal is a researcher and writer on institutionalised Islamophobia and author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Newsweek, Business Insider and Truthout, among others. She is the founding executive director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, an organizer with Witness Against Torture. She earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, DC. She received her Master's Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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