On Wednesday, Fox News host Jesse Watters made some provocative comments about the Israel-Hamas War.
A spokesperson for the White House loudly demanded an apology… while the White House was quietly trying to deal with discord behind the scenes.
Watters said on The Five —
I want to say something about Arab Americans and about the Muslim world…
We – and when I say we, I mean, the West and Western technology – have created the Middle East. We made them rich. We got that oil out of the ground. Our military protects all of these oil shipments flying around the world, making them rich. We fund their military. We respect their kings. We kill their terrorists, ok? But we’ve had it. We’ve had it with them.
Obama, Trump, now Biden, have tried to get the heck out of that stupid desert. Just as we’re about to get out, because we have this great balance of power we’re arranging, these crazy Muslim fanatics come in and massacre over a thousand of our allies and hold Jewish people hostage, hold Americans hostage. And so, if you are an Arab American in this country and you ripped down posters of Jewish hostages, American hostages, no! No, no, no. Someone is gonna get punched in the face. When you rip down posters of the hostages like that — this is — absolutely not.
Watters was talking about Middle Eastern nations.
Still, President Joe Biden’s White House interpreted the remarks as being about Arab Americans… even though Arab Americans don’t have their own military.
“These hateful lies about ‘Arab Americans and…the Muslim world’ highlight the urgency of President Biden’s work to ensure hate has no safe harbor in America, and why he committed to the first national anti-Islamophobia strategy in our history,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson said in an email to Mediaite.
The White House demanded an apology… and tried to link Watters to last month’s murder of a Palestinian American child in Illinois.
“Fox News owes an apology to every single viewer for this sickening attack on the rights and dignity of their fellow Americans. President Biden will always stand up against Islamophobia, antisemitism, and all forms of hate. Fox News should learn from his example,” the White House spokesperson continued.
“These unacceptable remarks come just weeks after the heartbreaking killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American child, and during a spike in threats against Muslim and Arab Americans.”
In May, the Biden administration released a strategy for fighting antisemitism domestically, and the White House has been reiterating its support for that strategy.
More recently, the White House has announced “the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia in the United States.”
“Today’s announcement is the latest step as part of President Biden’s directive last year to establish an interagency group to increase and better coordinate U.S. Government efforts to counter Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and related forms of bias and discrimination within the United States,” the White House announced in a statement Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Democrats have stressed Biden’s need to court the Arab American vote. Michigan Democrats have been especially vocal, given their state’s status as an electoral battleground and its high concentration of Arab Americans.
“Certainly none of us want to see part two of a Trump disaster presidency. But we also are not going to just passively give Joe Biden a second term if our concerns are not even dignified through a response,” Abraham Aiyash, the third-ranking Democrat in the state House of Representatives, told the Associated Press.
A senior Michigan Democratic Party official told the AP that Biden’s handling of the war has emerged in the state as a “huge” problem and could become more vexing if the war stretches on and the death toll in Gaza continues to rise. The official remained anonymous.
The White House originally was expected to announce the Islamophobia plan last week, three insiders told the AP. At the time, Biden was meeting with Muslim leaders.
However, the White House delayed the announcement after sensing some mistrust from Muslim Americans, two of the insiders told the AP. The Biden administration alienated some Arab and Muslim Americans after granting foreign aid to Israel in the past.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.