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 Biden unveiled in May 2023, as fears about increasing hatred and discrimination were rising among US Jews. Officials worked on the anti-Islamophobia plan for months, the AP reports, and its release came five weeks before Biden leaves office—meaning implementation will mostly fall to President-elect Trump, if his administration chooses to do so.
"Over the past year, this initiative has become even more important as threats against American Muslim and Arab communities have spiked," the administration wrote in its announcement. It said that included the October 2023 slaying of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, 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 the communities' safety and security.
- Appropriately accommodating Muslim and Arab religious practices by working to curb discrimination against them.
- Encouraging cross-community solidarity to further counter hate.
The 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 announcement noted that Muslims and Arab Americans have helped build out the nation since its founding. The plan calls for more widely disseminating successful practices of engaging Muslim and Arab Americans in the reporting of hate crimes, saying 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 plan also urges state and local governments, as well as the nongovernmental sector, to pursue similar initiatives.
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