(WASHINGTON, D.C., 12/10/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) calls on President Joseph Biden to bring US policy and practice in its treatment of Muslim populations at home and abroad and the peoples of predominantly Muslim nations in the world into true alignment with the promises of democracy that his Summit for Democracy seeks to renew in the world, and also to directly act on the stated priorities of his presidential campaign – namely, to uphold their God-given human rights to life, liberty, food, health, livelihood, and education, and to support their political freedom from tyranny and repression.
In the US, and especially Europe – the self-professed leaders of the “free world” – a virulently aggressive nationalism (including religious nationalism) openly and knowingly propagated by power-seeking politicians, constant media conflation of terrorism and Muslims, and the religious racialization of Muslims, including by high profile majoritarian religious leaders, has triggered a dangerous rise in Islamophobia. Both academic studies (e.g. Perpetuating Islamophobic Discrimination in the United States) and reliable analytical reports (Predicting and Preventing Islamophobia; Muslims…Still Face Negative Views (Pew-Research Center) show anti-Muslim discrimination remains a growing and menacing sentiment in the US.
Muslim children across the world and here in America, as well as Muslim adults, are also paying a grievous mental health price for US policy enacted abroad, and for the racism, structural violence, social stigma, threat of hate crimes, and daily microaggressions that Islamophobic attitudes at home promote. American Muslims now report two times the odds of suicide attempts compared with other faith groups, as research published in the prestigious JAMA Psychiatry shows.
The demand by US policymakers and legislators that China ceases its genocidal campaign against the Uyghur Muslims amounts to no more than a moral request. American lawmakers have proven unwilling to bring real consequences to China for its ongoing, horrifically inhumane actions, the unspoken word of truth being that state have a right to oppress their Muslim populations, something former President Trump reportedly literally stated to China’s Xi Jinping.
Biden’s Summit for Democracy organizers – after 20 years of the US’s egregious Middle East War on Terror, funded by $8 trillion of tax-payer, including American Muslims, money – found themselves in the embarrassing position of having no single Muslim-majority nation or country to invite to as a democracy – not Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or the becoming of Tunisia.
All of them are tyrannies, autocracies, or despots. All of them yet receive the American peoples’ money in the form of shameful weapons of mass destruction sales and copious military aid or straight-up payments, and for what? The unspoken (because it is unspeakable) quid pro quo between the US and these state juntas, cabals, and crowns is that they continue their shamefully brutal and unending cruelty of jailing and torturing their own peoples in order to cow their populations’ into political and social submission, to rob them of their human rights and deprive them of their dignity so that these people can never raise their heads to demand justice, to end the massive corruption of their rulers, to reform their own lines and historical lineage as independent peoples.
Rather, US policy is to pay these brutes, or equip and militarily guide them, even to conduct wars of unremitting atrocity on countless innocents in the poorest places in the world – as in the case of Saudi Arabia’s pogrom in Yemen. American policy has been to arm, direct, and defend the Saudi royals to literally starve 2.3 million Yemeni children under 5; to take the food out of the mouths of 1.2 million malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women; to push 16.2 million people to the very brink of famine; to turn Yemen into “a haven for infectious diseases”: 2.5 million cholera cases; Covid-19 running virtually unchecked through the entire population; the return of diphtheria in 2017 after 25-years of eradication; dysentery, malaria, polio, bilharzia, worm parasites, river blindness, and other vector-borne diseases; even a massive locust plague has overtaken Yemen, destroying what little crops farmers can grow amid a raging war.
The Biden administration Summit organizers were reduced to inviting the massively corrupt and failing Iraq government to represent democracy in the Middle East and Israeli authorities that Human Rights Watch has described as a government perpetrating over the long-term massive “crimes of apartheid and persecution.”
The US itself, according to its own funded Freedom House study ranks a dismal 61 among 210 world countries in its domestic exercise of freedom and civil liberties, along with Panama and Romania, and beneath Mongolia.
The US Council of Muslim Organizations and American Muslims call on President Biden to fulfill his pledge to fight human rights abuses and Islamophobia, at home and abroad, with three actions:
- To appoint a US Envoy to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia” at the State Department, to be filled by an American Muslim, on par with the existing Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.
- To himself initiate the “inflection point” of US foreign policy in the Middle East and among Muslim-majority countries and populations in line with international human rights law and to heed his own rhetoric in announcing this Summit and become a homegrown champion of democracy: “In the face of the sustained and alarming challenges to democracy and universal human rights around the world, more than ever, democracy needs champions.”
- To open up the US’s electoral system to allow for all political parties against an exclusivist Democratic and Republican hegemony, and to further protect the US electoral system against the building plan to contest credible elections and the massive movement underway to suppress voter participation, with 19 states currently enacting 33 laws that suppress American citizens’ free right to vote.
We urge President Biden to lead by example in championing US democracy and its stated ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all.
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