Arab American and Muslim leaders admonished the Biden administration for being insensitive and even reckless in their rhetoric following Hamas’ bloody attack on Israel in a private call with State Department officials on Monday.
The discussion was a blunt airing of concerns about the conduct of a president and his team. And it came at a particularly sensitive time: in the wake of the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in the Chicago area, which authorities have described as a hate crime.
On the Monday call, which is being first reported by POLITICO, Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer, addressed what she thought was the Biden administration’s problematic language: At a press briefing last week, a State Department spokesperson declined to say directly that Israel should stop cutting off medicine, water and humanitarian aid to Palestinians, though he said he expects Israel to follow international law.
“It gave the impression that it’s okay to do that to Palestinians because they’re Palestinians,” she said on the call. “That’s dehumanizing, and it opens the door for people to think that, well, you know, certain things are okay because they must be bad people. They must be terrorists.”
David warned of “the demonization of Palestinians in Gaza and of Arabs in general” that “has really escalated hatred” against them. And he asked Miller what the State Department and President Joe Biden planned to do to “walk back their negative discourse” in light of the slaying of Wadea Al-Fayoume.
“We feel great damage has been done regarding the image of Arabs in the United States,” David said on the call. “In some ways, it’s worse than what happened in 9/11.”