WASHINGTON — Hours before President Joe Biden gave a rare prime-time address last week, his head speechwriter sat down with a group of senior Arab and Muslim American officials to go over the draft and take suggestions.
Dissent was sprouting even inside the White House, where some aides worried that Biden hadn’t shown enough empathy for Palestinian civilians and a Muslim community facing a torrent of anger, said a person familiar with the discussions, who, like others, requested anonymity to talk freely.
The hourlong editing session reflects a vigorous outreach effort the White House is undertaking to reassure Arab Americans who feel they’re being scapegoated for the atrocities Hamas has committed half a world away. Senior advisers have been calling Muslim officials throughout the country and inviting community advocates onto the White House campus for frank conversations. Cabinet secretaries are sounding out federal workers to see how they're coping with the Israel-Hamas war, which has sparked angry protests in the U.S.
Shaken by reports of Hamas militants’ killing unsuspecting Israelis on Oct. 7, Biden gave remarks in the first days of the war that channeled Israel's anger and resolve to fight back. He met with Jewish leaders and said the Hamas attacks evoked the horrors of the Holocaust.
Some allies in Congress complained that he seemed indifferent to innocent victims of Israel's counterattack. Now Biden is calling more attention to Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire and the discriminatory backlash against Muslims back home.
In his West Wing office, speechwriter Vinay Reddy read aloud from the draft to make certain his Arab American colleagues were comfortable with language denouncing “Islamophobia” and name-checking the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian populations that felt vulnerable, a White House official said. The group listened and approved.
Said the official: “There will be things that the United States does in the Middle East that the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian populations don’t like. And there will be plenty of disagreements to come. But as an Arab American, I felt very seen and respected.”
A president's words carry outsize weight on any occasion, but they are even more magnified in wartime. Some Muslim advocates took note of Biden's address to Jewish leaders across the street from the White House on Oct. 11 and questioned why he hasn't spoken directly to their community. Within a week of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, by contrast, President George W. Bush visited a mosque and delivered a message that "the face of terror is not the true face of Islam."
“We had great concerns with what we saw at the beginning” of the war, said Hanna Hanania, former president of the Detroit-based American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine, who voted for Biden in 2020. “We thought the messages were as if we were totally left out. The messages were going totally for the other side, as if we never existed.”
In the past two weeks, Democratic members of Congress have phoned senior White House adviser Anita Dunn and other top officials and warned that Biden needed to address the isolation and fear their Muslim constituents were experiencing, according to White House and congressional officials.
Muslim advocates have told NBC News that women have been fearful of wearing the hijab and that parents have been afraid to take their children to school, worried they would be targeted because of their ethnicity.
“The Muslim community is very, very angry at him,” a Democratic lawmaker said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely. “It could hurt him.”
The message is sinking in. Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, led a Zoom meeting with Cabinet members last week in which he asked them to reach out to staffers of different faiths and make sure they feel they’re being heard, White House officials said.
Dilawar Syed, a Small Business Administration official who is the highest-ranking Muslim in Biden’s government, attended the funeral of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was murdered in Chicago in what authorities say was a hate crime. Last Thursday, he spoke to administration officials about what he heard from people at the ceremony and shared his reflections on being Muslim American “in this environment,” said the White House official, who attended the meeting.
After the boy was murdered, Zients sent an email to the staff that read: "The events of the last week have been challenging for all of us — and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge how difficult it has been for our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim American colleagues — in addition to our Jewish colleagues."
On a separate track, senior officials have been contacting scores of Muslim, Arab and Palestinian American elected officials at all levels across the country to hear their concerns.
“Not every message back is super positive,” the first White House official said. “It’s more like: ‘We care about the president, and we want to make sure you’re understanding what we’re hearing on the ground.”
When it comes to the ancient argument over who has a right to Middle East land, presidents have learned through bitter experience that it's impossible to accommodate all sides. The best they can do is appear to be fair brokers.
At a news conference Wednesday, Biden said Israel “has to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect innocent civilians.”
Hanania, for one, says Biden’s message has gotten more inclusive of late. But he’d like to hear him call for a cease-fire in Gaza — something Israel won’t accept at this point. The Israeli government is determined to wipe out Hamas and is preparing a ground incursion to root it out so assaults like the one on Oct. 7 don’t happen again.
Eliav Benjamin, the deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said in an interview: “We are determined to win this war. I’m an infantry person myself for many years. I’m not aware of any real substitute to being on the ground. We tried this in the past multiple times in Gaza. It did not work. It just doesn’t.”
With the war set to enter a bloody new phase and the number of Palestinian civilian deaths likely to rise, Biden can expect more pressure from American Muslims he is working mightily to assuage. The White House points to steps it has taken over the years to make sure they feel embraced.
Last year, Biden revived the Eid al-Fitr celebration at the White House marking the end of Ramadan. In 2017, President Donald Trump broke a 20-year tradition by not hosting an Eid event.
Still, the conflict in the Middle East tends to overshadow such gestures. Biden and his top deputies have called upon Israel to minimize civilian casualties as it carries out its counterattack. But Muslim Americans want him to go further.
Asked whether he would attend the White House’s Eid celebration next year if he is invited, a Muslim advocate said, “Right now, I would go to drop off a letter and leave."
A former administration official, a Muslim who is trying to mobilize voters for Biden, said some Muslim and Arab American voters are going through “9/11 PTSD,” pointing to safety meetings underway in community centers.
“They said if women in headscarves are worried, we will maybe set a buddy system so you can have somebody who accompanies you so you won’t be outside alone by yourself,” the person said. “People were not sending their kids to our Sunday school, because they didn’t think there was enough of a police presence around it in case somebody attacked it.”
It's by no means certain that a different president would be a more restraining influence on the Israeli military. The Republican front-runner in the 2024 race is Trump. He said this month that if he's elected he would bar Gaza's refugees from entering the U.S., an extension of the travel ban he imposed after he took office in 2017.
The White House called Trump's new plan "revolting and dangerous" and will keep hammering that point, a second White House official said.
Bradley Tusk, a Democratic political strategist, said, "You can guarantee that Trump will say something offensive to Muslims every chance he gets, whether he wants to or not."
But voters will have other options than a binary choice between Biden or Trump. Hanania campaigned for Biden in 2020 but said he might leave the top of the ticket blank or support a third-party candidate next year.
"My wife is telling me I just can't vote for him [Biden] again," he said.
