Guantanamo

Muslim American groups and individuals are boycotting the White House’s Iftar dinner and will instead be participating or supporting a protest outside the White House against United States government policies, which disproportionately impact Muslims all over the world. The Iftar is when Muslims break fast during Ramadan. In the past, the White House has held its Ramadan dinner with members of Muslim groups and various distinguished Muslim Americans. The dinner has been seen as an opportunity for Muslims to engage with officials in power. And, while there will still be Muslim Americans who attend the dinner, there is a growing concern that policies simply keep getting worse and they would be complicit if they attended the Ramadan dinner. More than a hundred Muslim advocates, activists, and scholars put out an open letter the day of the dinner explaining why they believed a boycott was necessary. They claimed the dinner “represents nothing more than an attempt to whitewash state violence, absolve government institutions from taking responsibility and creating mechanisms of accountability and transparency for the civil rights violations that have been perpetrated towards Muslims and Muslim Americans, and Americans at large, beginning from even before the onset of the War on Terror.”