USA: Muslim Mayor slams Secret Service for blocking him from White House Eid event: “Reeks of Islamophobia”.

From the Independent, The Guardian and North Jersey News

United States Secret Service and White House officials aren’t saying why the Muslim mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, was not permitted onto the White House grounds for an Eid event with President Joe Biden on Monday.

Mohamed Khairullah, a Democrat who has served as the New Jersey town’s mayor for nearly two decades, (and) who was critical of the Trump administration’s travel ban in 2017 that restricted entry to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries, received the call from the Secret Service while he was en route to the White House.

“It’s disappointing and it’s shocking that this continues to happen under our Constitution which provides that everyone is innocent unless proven guilty. I honestly don’t know what my charge, if you want to put it that way, is at this point, to be treated in such a manner,” Khairullah said in an interview.

A United States Secret Service spokesman confirmed in a statement Monday night that the mayor was not permitted to attend. “While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not allowed to enter the White House complex this evening,” said Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the U.S. Secret Service. “Unfortunately we are not able to comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.”

During a news conference held Tuesday in South Plainfield by the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ),  Mayor Khairullah and several other speakers condemned the list as illegal, discriminatory and unconstitutional. They also called on the U.S. Secret Service and other federal agencies to stop using and distributing the list, which the group says has more than 1.5 million names, a majority of which are “Arab or Muslim sounding.”

Representatives for the group condemned the White House’s denial of entry to Khairullah, with the New Jersey chapter’s executive director, Selaedin Maksut, calling for the White House to issue an apology to the mayor, (saying)“That a well-respected Muslim leader would effectively be disinvited from the White House Eid celebration, just hours ahead of time, iswholly unacceptable and insulting. . . If these such incidents are happening to high-profile and well-respected American-Muslim figures like Mayor Khairullah, this then begs the question: what is happening to Muslims who do not have the access and visibility that the mayor has?”

“It’s not a matter of ‘I didn’t get to go to a party.’ It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity,” Khairullah added to Al Jazeera. “And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.” They shouldn’t be protecting the president? One of the biggest prizes a terror attack could aim at? Behave.