Topline
The Council on American-Islamic Relations on Thursday said it has been forced to move its annual banquet after the original venue and its staffers were targeted with multiple terror threats, which the Muslim civil rights group said was in response to support for Palestinian human rights amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
FILE PHOTO: Nihad Awad, Executive Director and co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic … [+]
Key Facts
The event scheduled to take place at a Marriott in Arlington, Virginia on Saturday will now be moved to an alternate secure location “due to multiple terror threats targeting the hotel, its staff, CAIR and American Muslims,” the group said.
The original venue, the Marriott Crystal Gateway, has hosted the event for over a decade, CAIR said.
The group said the Marriot had received anonymous phone calls threatening to plant bombs in the hotel’s parking garage, kill hotel staffers and “storm the hotel in a repeat of the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol” if the banquet took place at the hotel.
CAIR said the decision to move the event was prompted by the sheer number of threats, along with their inability to get additional security from local police.
The civil rights group said it has informed both the FBI and local law enforcement about the matter.
Crucial Quote
“We will not allow the threats of anti-Palestinian racists and anti-Muslim bigots who seek to dehumanize the Palestinian people and silence American Muslims to stop us from pursuing justice for all,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said.
Key Background
The latest threats have come a day after CAIR warned that government officials and news outlets were “fanning an atmosphere of hate and dehumanization, not seen since the aftermath of 9/11.” The civil rights group says there has been a spike in violence targeting Muslim Americans and Palestinian Americans since Hamas’ terror attack on Israel and Tel Aviv’s subsequent retaliation. Over the weekend, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy, was murdered and his mother stabbed by their landlord in Illinois in an incident that law enforcement authorities linked to the conflict in the Middle East.
Tangent
Speaking from the Oval Office on Thursday evening, President Joe Biden raised the issue of hate crimes targeting both Muslims and Jews in America and said: “We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.” Biden addressed Wadea’s murder and acknowledged that Muslim Americans and Arab Americans are “outraged and hurting” about the potential post-9/11-style rise in Islamophobia.
