White House eyeing a scaled down Ramadan reception this year

The White House is considering a scaled-down version of its traditional ceremony marking the end of Ramadan next month, after Muslim leaders warned aides that people would decline invitations in objection to the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

Typically, the president hosts hundreds of Muslim leaders from around the country for an Eid al-Fitr celebration to mark the holiest month of the Muslim calendar. But according to three people familiar with the White House’s planning — who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations — the administration has discussed limiting invitations this year to a smaller group of administration officials and ambassadors from Muslim-majority nations.

That would resemble an affair similar to what then-President Donald Trump hosted several times when he was in office. But it would also mark an admission that the president and his team are still grappling with ongoing frustration within Arab American and Muslim communities over Biden’s handling of the war.

“I’m not sure how they’re going to be able to do this this year. A lot of people are just not going to go,” said a Muslim leader who has attended past Ramadan receptions hosted by Biden, adding that many people in the community would find it too difficult to celebrate “with the president they deem responsible, or partially responsible, for what’s happening.”

Salam al-Marayati, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, was blunt when asked about community interest in participating in any White House event: “No appetite.”

The Muslim and Arab American communities have seethed at Biden’s handling of the crisis in Gaza. The discontent has also been registered at the ballot box, as activists in states like Michigan have organized protest votes in the Democratic primary in an effort to send a message to Biden. And Muslim and Arab American leaders have warned Biden that if he does not alter his approach to the conflict, he risks alienating voters in the general election who are critical to his reelection success.

The White House is still thinking through different options for Eid al-Fitr, according to the three people familiar with the planning process. They stressed that no final decision has been made.

“I don’t have anything to preview in the way of events,” deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton said Monday when asked if the White House intended to host a Ramadan celebration this year. “But certainly, this is a holy time of year. The president will extend his typical well wishes to the Muslim community here and around the world.”

A White House official also pointed POLITICO to a statement Biden released earlier this week marking the first day of Ramadan, which spoke to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the “appalling resurgence of hate and violence toward Muslim Americans” at home. On Friday, Biden issued the first ever White House recognition of the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, the official noted.

Attendees of past Ramadan receptions said that it’s still too early to expect formal invitations to be sent out, given that the White House usually holds its reception a few weeks after the end of Ramadan, which falls on April 9 this year.

Even if the White House were to go forward with a bigger celebration, people who have attended past receptions said there would be some unavoidable awkwardness about who to invite. A number of people who have attended past receptions have also been publicly critical of the president’s handling of the conflict.

Delaware state Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, for example, got a shoutout from Biden at the Eid al-Fitr event she attended in 2022. Two years later, Wilson-Anton, the first Muslim elected to the Delaware General Assembly, is an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. When she was invited to a holiday party in December at the vice president’s residence, she used the opportunity to interrupt Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech to call for a ceasefire. Layla Elabed, a community organizer and the younger sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), also participated in last year’s Eid al-Fitr event, but she’s spent the past few months organizing the “uncommitted” vote in the Michigan primary in an effort to pressure Biden to call for a permanent ceasefire.

The possibility that Biden could host a celebration and the Gaza conflict simply not come up would be unlikely, Muslim leaders argued. They noted that the holiday is a period of reflection and that, in his speech last year, Biden said that Ramadan was a time to remember “Muslim communities around the world that are enduring conflict, poverty, hunger, disease, and those that are displaced from their homes.”

It would be hard, past attendees said, to listen to the president echo those same sentiments this year.

“If the president tried to say something like that, it would ring quite hollow,” said Sadaf Jaffer, a former New Jersey assemblymember who attended the past two Ramadan receptions hosted by Biden. “Right now with the administration continuing to provide weapons and political cover for the genocide in Gaza, it is showing the opposite — that Palestinian lives don’t matter.”

The White House Eid al-Fitr celebration has been an annual tradition dating back to the Clinton presidency. But it briefly lapsed under Trump, who did not host an event his first year in office in the wake of the travel restrictions he implemented on people from majority-Muslim nations. Trump brought back the iftar dinner in 2018 and 2019, but it was mostly foreign diplomats in attendance rather than American Muslims.

At the first in-person Eid al-Fitr celebration that Biden hosted in 2022 (the 2021 celebration was virtual due to the pandemic), he made a point of celebrating the fact that the tradition had been restored to his original form. The event that year was held in the East Room and was packed full of Muslim American advocates, lawmakers and community leaders from around the country.

“One of the promises I made when I ran for office is that I was to restore this annual celebration, because it’s important,” Biden said.