US Muslims don't need a White House Muslim liaison. They need an end to state violence
On 8 July, Mazen Basrawi, a senior adviser to US President Joe Biden, announced the end of his tenure as the White House Liaison to American Muslim Communities.
Replacing him is Elvir Klempic, who most recently served as the White House Liaison for the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
The news of Basrawi's departure came a little more than a year after he was appointed in April 2023, which was part of Biden's fulfilled campaign promise to restore the position that former President Donald Trump had terminated.
At the time, Muslim organisations celebrated the announcement, calling it a step towards the government "building stronger relationships with the American Muslim community".
However, rather than facilitate engagement with Muslims or make any substantive policy changes on issues that affect them, the liaison has thus far seemed only to parrot the positions of the administration. This is unsurprising, as the role itself was designed to undermine the Muslim community.
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Like many US spokespersons and officials legitimising Israel's genocide of Palestinians over the last nine months, Basrawi has regurgitated the official pro-Israel narrative while promoting superficial efforts to convince communities that Biden cares about them.
If there were any doubt that the new liaison would do anything more than faithfully serve the current administration, the first email sent from Klempic on 11 July was an announcement regarding the sanctioning of additional Israeli individuals and entities.
This is not the first time that the State Department has imposed sanctions on extremist settlers over the past nine months of the genocide. Far from being a cause for celebration, such measures do nothing to stop the ongoing violence experienced by Palestinians, whether in the West Bank or Gaza.
Hollow statements
Last month, as millions of Muslims across the globe - many of whom live under oppressive state violence - marked Eid al-Adha, Biden issued a statement to mark the occasion.
The president acknowledged that the holiday came "at a difficult time" for Muslims, but he failed to mention Israel's wanton slaughter of Palestinians or the direct role his administration is playing in providing weapons, funding and diplomatic cover for it.
For several months, thousands of protesters have marched on cities and university campuses across the country, demanding an end to US complicity in genocide, only to face violent suppression and targeting by federal agents and police.
That Israel is methodically starving, murdering and maiming an entire population with total impunity is perhaps a detail Biden hopes we may overlook in his Eid message
The current administration has remained defiant against these continued calls, including the growing campaign to "Abandon Biden" in the upcoming presidential election due to his hard-line support for Israel.
In his Eid statement, Biden employed the characteristic passive voice that has come to define western coverage of Israel's war crimes - so much so that it has become its own genre on X. Palestinians just happened to be "suffering the horrors of war", he lamented.
That Israel is methodically starving, murdering and maiming an entire population in front of the world with total impunity is perhaps a detail Biden hopes we may overlook. No Israeli atrocity has been grave enough to cross Biden's mythical "red line".
But for most Muslims who either reside in the US or are otherwise affected by its foreign policy, the president's words not only ring hollow but brought his administration's hypocrisy to the fore.
Biden's statement was also unsurprising given the government's signature move of whitewashing its culpability as it inflicts massive violence on communities domestically and abroad.
'Colonised interlocutor'
When it comes to people of colour, rather than simply imparting the hypocritical and violent messages on their own, Democratic officials frequently use a "native" interlocutor to make them more palatable to the affected community.
Thus, in what may have been an attempt at "sending reinforcements" to an angry and devastated community, Biden's Eid message was supplemented by equally shallow greetings from his vice president and White House Muslim liaison.
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The stated purpose of Basrawi's email was to call Muslims' attention to the administration's tweets and statements. It seemed to suggest that the community should be excited to receive such acknowledgement.
Basrawi further pointed to the administration's alleged action on Islamophobia as a marker of success.
But it's not just the expected gratitude for token gestures that is problematic. To believe that the Biden administration has any such regard for the Muslim community requires massive cognitive dissonance.
Just two weeks earlier, the White House Muslim liaison sent an email with the subject line, "Details of President Biden's remarks on the Middle East" about the permanent ceasefire proposal that Israel notoriously rejected to "finish the job".
Yet, in his email, Basrawi orders his community to "raise [their] voices and to demand that Hamas come to the table, agrees to this deal, and ends this war that they began".
The AJC Abraham Accords delegation was engaged in high-level discussions with representatives from the State Department and National Security Council today, including @WhiteHouse Jewish Liaison @ShelleyGspan and Muslim Liason Mazen Basrawi.
— American Jewish Committee (@AJCGlobal) September 13, 2023
Important conversations exploring ways… pic.twitter.com/nFgws1ZZfV
Of course, anyone following the progression of Israel's genocidal war would recognise this statement as part of the Biden administration's "campaign of deception".
To blame Hamas as the obstacle to a ceasefire when Israel has repeatedly rejected all offers and continues its rampage in Gaza is nothing other than propaganda designed to justify the ongoing genocide.
Basrawi's email was yet another instance in which US officials underestimate Muslims or assume they can be manipulated into working against their own interests.
Still, it is consistent with other communications from Basrawi during his short tenure and exposes the Muslim liaison's role as a colonised interlocutor deciphering the government's "benevolent" efforts to combat a violence of its own making.
Basrawi did not respond to a request for comment from this author on the deployment of positions such as White House Muslim liaison by the Biden administration to placate the Muslim community on these critical policy issues.
Feigned concern
In February, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled "Welcome to Dearborn, America's Jihad Capital".
The opinion piece was met with outrage and fears that it would provoke yet another violent and potentially deadly attack against members of the Arab and Muslim communities.
Like clockwork, the Muslim liaison was ready with an email alerting his list to a statement Biden posted on X about the article.
The president wrote: "Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong. That's exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn't happen to the residents of Dearborn - or any American town. We must continue to condemn hate in all forms."
Setting aside the fact that Biden had only narrowly won the state of Michigan against Trump in the 2020 election (by a little over two percent) - or that the state is home to the largest number of Arabs in the country - Biden's condemnation of the article rang particularly hollow.
By divorcing the policies of the state from individual acts of violence against these communities, the president avoids responsibility for actions that underpin this rhetoric.
In other words, Biden strategically loves to hate "hate" as it gives the facade that he actually cares about a religious community whose mass killing in Gaza he has supported "unconditionally".
And given that Israel's genocide is based on collective punishment, Biden's feigned concern for the well-being of Arab Americans only adds insult to injury.
'Select leaders'
The absurdities in Basrawi's outreach to the community raise the critical question of what, fundamentally, the position of the White House Muslim liaison is designed to do.
In his book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), American philosopher Olufemi O Taiwo sheds light on elites' co-optation of identity and resistance.
Taiwo explains that "a key problem with elite capture is that the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources that get used to describe, define, and create political realities- in other words, elites - are substantively different from the total set of people affected by the decisions they make".
'Select leaders' are appointed not to represent or engage the community sincerely but to demand subordination and surrender to the violence they themselves are taught to endure
The position of White House Muslim liaison was never about protecting the interests of the community. Instead, it was designed for one of its "elite" members to occupy it, under the guise of representation, and set the agenda for oppressed groups (through one-sided communications) while also defining their position to the oppressor class.
Rather than appoint members who actually represent the community, the Biden administration has consciously chosen career civil servants who will faithfully send a message to Muslims that they should a) be grateful to be acknowledged, b) accept their subordination, and c) remain loyal and resist the impetus to challenge the actions of the administration.
Paulo Freire, the famed Brazilian philosopher, advises: "The oppressors do not favour promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders."
Indeed, rather than sincerely engaging the community, such "leaders" demand subordination and surrender to the violence they are taught to endure.
What Muslims need is an end to the violence, not an elite member of the community to peddle lies about it to them.
Deserving dignity
If anything, the White House Muslim liaison position highlights the insidiousness of US state violence, which not only harms Muslims but also makes symbolic gestures to make it more palatable to them.
As the late anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon instructed: "In the colonial context, the settler only ends his work of breaking in the natives when the natives admit loudly and clearly that there is no more dispute between them."
Muslims and other communities targeted by the government must, therefore, demand their rights and not submit to their infringement in exchange for empty recognition and superficial "inclusion".
This means continuously and categorically rejecting the pressure to accept unjust policies in exchange for false representation or proximity to power.
South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko asserted that "the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed".
As such, Muslim communities must reject shallow words, empty promises and symbolic politics as substitutes for justice, dignity and liberation. And they must fully embrace and assert their humanity and dignity and wield their convictions as potent weapons against the forces of oppression.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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