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WASHINGTON: The US Secret Service said on Monday that it had banned A Raed Muslim From Prospect Park, N.J., from attending a White House celebration with President Joe Biden to a belated celebration of the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Shortly before his arrival at the White House to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, Major Muhammad Khairallah He said he got a call from the White House saying he had not been let in by the Secret Service and could not attend the ceremony where Biden gave remarks to hundreds of guests. He said the White House official did not explain why the Secret Service denied him access.
Khairallah, 47, notified the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations after he was told he would not be allowed to attend the event.
The group called on the Biden administration to stop the FBI from releasing information from its so-called terrorist screening dataset that includes hundreds of thousands of individuals. The group informed Khairallah that a person with his name and date of birth was in a dataset obtained by CAIR lawyers in 2019.
Khairullah has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump’s travel ban that has limited entry to the United States for citizens of several Muslim-majority countries. He also traveled to Bangladesh and Syria to do humanitarian work with the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation.
“It left me baffled, shocked and disappointed,” Khairallah said in a phone interview on his way home to New Jersey on Monday evening. “It’s not that I couldn’t go to a party. That’s why I didn’t go. It’s a list that targeted me because of who I am. And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should go down with such profiling.”
US Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi confirmed that Khairallah had not been allowed into the White House compound, but declined to say why. Khairullah was elected to a fifth term as mayor of the town in January.
“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the Mayor was not permitted to enter the White House complex this evening,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we cannot comment further on the specific precautions and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.”
The White House declined to comment.
Salahuddin Maksout, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the move “totally unacceptable and insulting”.
“If these incidents are happening to high-ranking and respected Muslim American figures like Mayor Khairallah, it begs the question: What happens to Muslims who don’t have the access and visibility that a mayor has?” Maksout said.
Khairallah said that in 2019 authorities stopped him and interrogated him at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for three hours and questioned him if he knew any terrorists. The accident happened when he was returning to the United States after a family visit to Turkey, where his wife has family.
On another occasion, he said he was briefly detained at the US-Canada border while returning to the country with his family.
The group said Khairallah helped the New Jersey Democratic Party gather names of local Islamic leaders to invite them to White House holiday celebration And over the weekend he was a guest at an event at the New Jersey governor’s mansion.
Khairallah was born in Syria, but his family was displaced amid government crackdowns by Hafez al-Assad’s government in the early 1980s. His family fled to Saudi Arabia before moving to Prospect Park in 1991. He has lived there ever since.
He became a US citizen in 2000 and was elected to his first term as mayor of the city in 2001. He also spent 14 years as a volunteer firefighter in his community.
Khairallah said he made seven trips to Syria with humanitarian aid organizations between 2012 and 2015 as civil war ravaged much of the country.
“I am Syrian and you know it was very difficult seeing what we saw on TV and social media, not reacting to help people,” he said. “I mean, we felt so helpless.”
Shortly before his arrival at the White House to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, Major Muhammad Khairallah He said he got a call from the White House saying he had not been let in by the Secret Service and could not attend the ceremony where Biden gave remarks to hundreds of guests. He said the White House official did not explain why the Secret Service denied him access.
Khairallah, 47, notified the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations after he was told he would not be allowed to attend the event.
The group called on the Biden administration to stop the FBI from releasing information from its so-called terrorist screening dataset that includes hundreds of thousands of individuals. The group informed Khairallah that a person with his name and date of birth was in a dataset obtained by CAIR lawyers in 2019.
Khairullah has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump’s travel ban that has limited entry to the United States for citizens of several Muslim-majority countries. He also traveled to Bangladesh and Syria to do humanitarian work with the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation.
“It left me baffled, shocked and disappointed,” Khairallah said in a phone interview on his way home to New Jersey on Monday evening. “It’s not that I couldn’t go to a party. That’s why I didn’t go. It’s a list that targeted me because of who I am. And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should go down with such profiling.”
US Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi confirmed that Khairallah had not been allowed into the White House compound, but declined to say why. Khairullah was elected to a fifth term as mayor of the town in January.
“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the Mayor was not permitted to enter the White House complex this evening,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we cannot comment further on the specific precautions and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.”
The White House declined to comment.
Salahuddin Maksout, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the move “totally unacceptable and insulting”.
“If these incidents are happening to high-ranking and respected Muslim American figures like Mayor Khairallah, it begs the question: What happens to Muslims who don’t have the access and visibility that a mayor has?” Maksout said.
Khairallah said that in 2019 authorities stopped him and interrogated him at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for three hours and questioned him if he knew any terrorists. The accident happened when he was returning to the United States after a family visit to Turkey, where his wife has family.
On another occasion, he said he was briefly detained at the US-Canada border while returning to the country with his family.
The group said Khairallah helped the New Jersey Democratic Party gather names of local Islamic leaders to invite them to White House holiday celebration And over the weekend he was a guest at an event at the New Jersey governor’s mansion.
Khairallah was born in Syria, but his family was displaced amid government crackdowns by Hafez al-Assad’s government in the early 1980s. His family fled to Saudi Arabia before moving to Prospect Park in 1991. He has lived there ever since.
He became a US citizen in 2000 and was elected to his first term as mayor of the city in 2001. He also spent 14 years as a volunteer firefighter in his community.
Khairallah said he made seven trips to Syria with humanitarian aid organizations between 2012 and 2015 as civil war ravaged much of the country.
“I am Syrian and you know it was very difficult seeing what we saw on TV and social media, not reacting to help people,” he said. “I mean, we felt so helpless.”
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