WASHINGTON, DC (7 July 2022) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest umbrella for Muslim America
n organizations, strongly rejects as “unjust, undemocratic, and unacceptable” the U.S. State Department findings on the Israeli killing of Al Jazeera journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Akleh, issued Monday, July 4th.
Council representatives in their recent meeting with US State Department officials pressed them in an “intense” 2-hour discussion on the Israeli targeted killing of the renowned Middle East reporter, and other systematic human rights abuses by the Israeli government of the Palestinians.
“It is not merely as U.S. Muslims that we vigorously object to this ongoing Israeli insistence that American politicians verify Israeli falsehoods against blatant truth – as with the Biden Administration’s bizarre acceptance of Israeli forensic ‘findings’ about their own murder of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO secretary-general.
“We are tired as Americans of seeing our politicians compel this nation to kneel in humiliation, again and again, before this anti-democratic Israeli apartheid human desecration and killing machine – even when it means abandoning our own citizens, like Shireen, or Rachel Corrie before her, and countless others in between.
“There is absolutely nothing American, just, or in the U.S. national interest about U.S. Israeli policy. It must change.”
The delegation also raised other urgent issues about reflexive U.S. diplomatic cover for Israeli expanding and blatantly racist and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, whether Muslim or Chrisitan (as was Abu Akleh), that have become matters of widespread outrage for American Muslims.
The Israeli government regularly guides and protects its colonialist-settlers to provoke Palestinians and Muslims by desecrating Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, particularly during Ramadan and other holy days. There is less talk of Israeli persecution of Palestinian Christians and their holy places and sacraments, as horrifically beheld during Abu Akleh’s funeral in which Israeli soldiers beat her pallbearers and family as they tried to carry her to the church to receive her rites.
The Israeli occupation government is now increasing its already notoriously bigoted visa policies designed specifically to single out Palestinians for harassment and discrimination, be these American Palestinians seeking to visit their homes and loved ones in the illegally occupied or blockaded Palestinian lands, or the brutal persecution of Palestinians who reside in their own homes and seek to cultivate their farms and orchards or even build on their own Israeli proscribed lands.
“We let State Department officers know we appreciate reopening the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem to help Palestinians and American citizens of Palestinian origin,” Jammal said. “Still, there is an urgent need to formally reopen it and to undo Trump’s unilateral and misguided photo-shoot American Embassy there.”
“We also raised points for President Biden to bring up in his upcoming visit with Israeli and Saudi officials later this month,” he said.
USCMO officers will deliver a letter to President Biden before his trip, spelling out the policy concerns of American Muslims regarding the Israelis, Palestinians, and the Middle East and actions they will urge him to get behind.
An important matter for the American Muslim community is the U.S.’s desperately needed refunding of UNWRA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which Trump lethally cut to almost nothing.
While Biden in 2021 resumed about half of U.S. contributions to UNWRA (now $150 million), the agency upon which the world has made more than 5 million Palestinian refugees dependent by its unwillingness to reign in Israeli apartheid and aggression is at least $100 million short of its necessary immediate budget.
Many observers say that the Israelis and the U.S. are now trying to force the outsourcing of UNWRA aid to other UN agencies in order to disband it, a long-time objective of the Israelis.
“There is no denying the immense pressures on U.S. officials when it comes to Israeli demands against backing any Palestinian rights,” said Jammal. “Yet our discussions with U.S. State Department officials, though intense, offered up alternative views that are clearly sound for the U.S. to get behind.”
“Public opinion on the inhuman plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis – a plight made possible only by the U.S. diplomatic shield of the Israelis – is steadily spreading among a broad swath of Americans. It’s only going to grow even more rapidly in a way that this and future U.S. administrations and political representatives will not be able to ignore.
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