Slain Palestinian American boy Wadee Al Fayoumi's mom meets Biden, discusses Islamophobia

The mother of 6-year-old Palestinian American Wadee Al Fayoumi, who was killed in a Chicago suburb soon after the onset of the war in Gaza, met with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office this week for a “human-to-human” conversation about grief, anti-Palestinian hate and dehumanizing political rhetoric.

In the meeting Biden was confronted with an issue that has dominated the latter half of his presidency just days before he leaves office — and one day before a reported ceasefire agreement in Gaza.

“It was important to have a human-to-human meeting,” Hanan Shaheen told the Chicago Sun-Times after her White House visit.

Wadee became a symbol for anti-Palestinian violence when, according to prosecutors, the landlord of the Plainfield apartment he and his mother lived in stabbed the boy 26 times in a brutal hate crime in October 2023. Authorities said Joseph Czuba, who’s set for a jury trial next month, had been radicalized by listening to commentary just one week into the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Authorities say Israel has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians in Gaza — though experts estimate casualties to be much higher, with people buried under rubble or having died from hunger, disease or a lack of medical care. Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack killed 1,200 in Israel.

White House aides connected last year with legislative lawyer Maaria Mozaffar — who wrote a congressional resolution honoring Wadee that passed the Senate unanimously, sponsored by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin — looking to set up a call between the mother and the president on the anniversary of Wadee’s killing in October. During that call, Mozaffar urged the president to meet with Shaheen in person.

She reiterated that request late last week, and the White House agreed to meet Tuesday.

“The question is, ‘What would you say to the president of the United States if you had the opportunity at this time in history, after watching what has happened for the last 15 months?’” Mozaffar said in an interview Thursday.

The pair spent three hours at the White House. They met with senior administration officials for more than an hour, and with Biden for a few minutes.

Shaheen wasn’t available for an extended interview about the visit.

Mozaffar said “every single person” who passed by the pair during their White House visit stopped to honor Shaheen.

Senior officials discussed the White House’s initiative to combat Islamophobia. Mozaffar told the officials about “political rhetoric and dehumanization coming from the highest political office against Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs, that resulted in the impact of Wadee’s murder.

“Then I connected that to the larger dehumanization piece, which has falsely misrepresented students across college campuses and identified them as something that they’re not, in which they’re losing their futures and their careers, and they’re being silenced,” she said.

The pair also told officials that the violence in Gaza has contributed to the spreading of a lack of empathy in the U.S. that has led to hate crimes.

“I said this in the room: ‘The only way we are able to witness the crushing of children under buildings and look away is because we dehumanize them. … If this was Chicago or New York, there would be no way that we would say the crushing of babies is OK for any military objective," she said.

Mozaffar said the officials were “welcoming” and she and Shaheen felt they were genuinely listening and understanding.

“And then [Shaheen] had a private moment, parent-to-parent, with President Biden,” Mozaffar said. “She went into the Oval Office, and they had a beautiful moment in which they discussed loss and faith.”

Biden has spoken for years about the impact of losing two of his children. He and Shaheen held hands, shared photos of their loved ones and talked about parental grief.

“He said to her, ‘This is personal.’ And he said to her, ‘I read that Wadee had said to you, momma, I’m fine,’” Mozaffar said. “So he remembered every part of Wadee’s story.”

Mozaffar gifted the president a Palestinian keffiyeh, an English-language Quran and a wood plank with a Bible verse: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

“Dear President Biden,” read an accompanying handwritten note. “I gift you a Palestinian keffiyeh. In honor of the thousands of Palestinians whom live with dignity and pride. And in honor of Hisham al Wartani, a Palestinian American college student shot for wearing his keffiyeh and speaking Arabic while crossing the street. Now paralyzed, Hisham’s story is one of resilience and strength.”

The White House did not comment on the visit.

Palestinian American and Muslim community leaders in Chicago and across the country have refused meetings with White House officials in the last year in protest of the Biden administration’s continued military aid to Israel despite the mounting civilian death toll and catastrophic conditions in Gaza.

Mozaffar said she was among those who declined to meet with White House advisers in June.

“I took a very strong stance with what we were seeing that we needed to reject it at that time, because I felt it was not going to be an impactful meeting since we did not see any policy change,” she said.

“When this opportunity opened up, and I recognized that we can have a human-to-human meeting and that Wadee Al Fayoumi’s death is such a powerful illustration of dehumanization of Palestinians, I understood … that if we could share it in a powerful way and connect directly with the president to reaffirm that, it would have a different impact,” Mozaffar said.

At one point, Mozaffar told officials, “‘You know, I’m not Palestinian.’ And they were surprised. One of them was like, ‘You’re not?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not Palestinian, but the reality is, I’m a human being.’”

Contributing: Lynn Sweet