Citing safety concerns, USC announced Monday that pro-Palestinian undergraduate student Asna Tabassum who was selected as valedictorian will not be allowed to give a speech at the May commencement ceremony.
Tabassum, a major in biomedical engineering and a minor in “resistance to genocide,” had been previously announced as this year’s valedictorian. However, critics raised questions about views relating to the conflict in the Middle East she has posted online.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations-Los Angeles issued a statement demanding that the decision be reversed and that Tabassum be permitted to speak.
Tabassum released a statement through CAIR-LA, saying “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices have subjected me to a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all.”
Of course this plays into the myth that Islamophobia is the cause and even on the rise. And the Biden administration has been encouraging it.
The announcement in November that President Joe Biden assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to work on developing “the first-ever U.S. national strategy to counter Islamophobia” has been dismissed as nothing more than a political gesture. It’s clearly intended to counter the bitter criticism he has received from his party’s left-wing intersectional base that is deeply upset about the president’s support for Israel.
Prejudice against any group is deplorable, and where there are incidents of bias against Muslims or Arabs, they should be vigorously condemned.
But claims that Islamophobia has been on the rise in the last two decades are false. As FBI statistics for the past two decades have shown, there is little or no empirical evidence to back up the claims that Muslims faced a backlash of prejudice after the 9/11 attacks.
More recently, FBI statistics for over 90% of the country show that Jewish people were targets of seven times as many hate offenses as Muslims in 2022. As a rate of incidents per 100,000 members of each group, Jews are targeted at three times the rate of Muslims.
In 2022, nationwide, the FBI cited a total of 11,643 hate-crime incidents against all groups. Blacks were the most frequent targets, at 29% of incidents (vs. 13% of the U.S. population in 2020), and Jewish people were No. 2 at 9.6% of cases (vs. 2.3% of pop.)
Muslim targets were a whopping low 15 on the list at 1.357% of the total offenses. Antisemitic attacks totaled 1,122, compared with 158 offenses against Muslims. This is a rate of 15 per 100,000 Jewish people, three times the rate among Muslims, at fewer than four cases per 100,000 Muslim people.
But as counter-intuitive to the facts as it may be, it actually makes a great deal of sense that an administration that has embraced the intersectional worldview of critical race theory, like Biden’s has, would attempt to flip the script from this blatant antisemitism to one about alleged Islamophobia.
The administration’s willingness to impose DEI policies that reject equality in favor of racialized quotas rendered their much-ballyhooed plan to combat antisemitism meaningless. And that betrayal is only underlined by the pivot to Islamophobia in the midst of the greatest crisis to face American Jewry in living memory.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, asked in October about antisemitism in the U.S., instantly pivoted to Islamophobia: “Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks. And certainly President Biden understands that many of our Muslim, Arab, Arab American, and Palestinian American loved ones and neighbors are worried about the hate being directed at their communities.”
After a backlash, she insisted she had misheard the question. Over a week later, on November 1, the White House published a statement by KJP saying the same thing. Vice President Harris invoked the same wording the same day.
