American Muslims angry over President Joe Biden’s support for Israel say they will not attend White House Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr celebrations this year as they continue to demand the government push for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Robert McCaw, director of government affairs for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said there was “widespread understanding” that American Muslim community leaders and organizations would decline the invitation if it were extended.
“This decision is driven by the government’s failure to meet the Muslim community’s demands for an immediate and permanent ceasefire,” McCaw told VOA. “And its refusal to stop supplying Israel with manufactured weapons that are being used against our Palestinian brothers in Gaza. Sisters commit genocide.”
The administration is considering scaling back Ramadan events at the White House, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying no Ramadan-related celebrations have been announced yet, according to media reports.
“We understand that this is a painful time for many communities,” she told VOA at a news conference on Monday. She added that senior White House officials met with members of the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities, “We welcome talking about their views and expressing their concerns.”
President Joe Biden said in a statement earlier this month that the suffering of the Palestinian people “will be at the forefront of many” Muslims’ minds this Ramadan. “That’s the most important thing to me.”
Since taking office, Biden has continued a decades-long tradition of hosting Muslim community leaders at the White House that began under President Bill Clinton in 1996. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have hosted iftar dinners, or Eid receptions, during Ramadan to commemorate the fast that follows the holy month. This month.
But this year, in addition to the embarrassment of potentially facing a massive boycott, the White House may want to avoid scenes of pro-Palestinian protesters yelling and heckling Biden. Some of them disrupted his campaign across the country.
Anger over Gaza has also affected Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebrated by diaspora groups of various ethnic and religious affiliations from countries other than Iran, including Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan Stan and Kazakhstan.
This year Nowruz overlaps with Ramadan. This weekend, the White House will host a Nowruz Open House tour instead of inviting hundreds of people to a reception like the administration has done in the past.
“I’m not sure if the president himself will attend,” said Javed Kotwal, a board member of the Afghanistan American Foundation. “So this is completely different. It’s a watered-down, downgraded version of the typical Nowruz celebration that we have at the White House.”
Kotwal told VOA that he personally declined the invitation but that his organization would “look for any way to continue to engage with any occupant of the White House.”
The White House has not responded to requests for more details about Nowruz or Ramadan plans.
In a statement marking Nowruz, Biden said the war had “brought horrific suffering to the Palestinian people” and vowed to “continue to lead international efforts to provide them with more humanitarian assistance.”
shrouded in controversy
This year is not the first time Ramadan has been mired in controversy at the White House. President Donald Trump banned Muslims from entering the United States during his first year in office and signed several executive orders restricting immigration from Muslim-majority countries, but he held no Ramadan events.
In 2018 and 2019, Trump welcomed diplomats from Muslim-majority countries to the White House for iftar meals, but American Muslim organizations and lawmakers were not on the guest list. At the time, American Muslim groups said they would decline if they were invited.
Some American Muslims boycotted Biden’s virtual Eid celebrations in May 2021 as hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza escalated. According to the United Nations, more than 260 Palestinians were killed in that round of violence.
The death toll is a fraction of the more than 31,000 Palestinians killed since Israel launched a military operation in response to an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. The attack killed at least 1,200 Israelis and took more than 240 people hostage. The level of anger now felt by American Muslims, Arabs and Biden’s broad Democratic base has also grown exponentially.
Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American and former policy adviser at the Department of Education, said this year’s White House Ramadan event will make people, including government workers, feel “gaslighted.” Tariq Habash resigned in protest in January.
“You can’t try to show unity and understanding while at the same time providing unlimited amounts of weapons and military funding to an extremist government bent on bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately,” Habash told VOA.
The White House says it has been actively engaging with Arab and Muslim Americans since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Some in the community have refused to meet with government officials.
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