(WASHINGTON, D.C. – 7/14/2025) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, today demanded that President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, and Attorney General Bondi end their shameful silence about the lynching of American citizen and Florida resident Saifollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers backed by the Israeli military in the Israeli-occupied town of Sinjil on Friday.
USCMO is calling on the Trump administration to condemn the murder of Saif, for the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against those responsible, and for the State Department to seek sanctions against Israeli settlers and the Israeli government for enabling their rampages.
“We demand that the US State Department hold the Israeli settlers who killed Saif accountable for their crimes. We demand justice,” Saifollah’s family in the U.S. said in a statement.
Born and raised in Tampa, Saif, as loved ones called him, was visiting family for the summer in the West Bank when Israeli settlers beat him to death in a pogrom on the village. The Israeli lynch mob then prevented an ambulance and paramedics from reaching him for more than two hours to deliberately ensure his slow death, according to eyewitnesses cited in the family’s statement.
This was a “kind, hard-working, and deeply respected young man working to build his dreams,” the statement said, decrying the “unimaginable nightmare and injustice that no family should ever have to face.”
USCMO sends our prayers of condolences to the family and loved ones of Saifollah Musallet. He sought only to protect the lives and property of the threatened and oppressed – a truehearted act of valor and heroic sacrifice that we hope will deliver him into the honored ranks of the shuhada’, the witnesses for truth, in the Hereafter. May God bless our young brother Saifollah Musallet, have mercy on him, accept him and his sacrifice, and admit him into His High Garden of Paradise.
USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal said today in a statement:
“We call on President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, and Attorney General Bondi to end their shameful silence about the murder of American citizen and Florida resident Saif Musallet by Israeli settlers backed by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank last Friday.
“President Trump and his administration must punish the direct perpetrators of this murder, as well as the indirect ones in the Israeli government who are encouraging, arming, unleashing, and covering for these Israeli settler pogroms – and the president should accomplish this by any and all means available to our nation.
“We cannot and should not allow for the murder of our citizens at the hands of foreign perpetrators, individuals, military personnel, and the foreign Israeli state itself without imposing swift and dire consequences on all the guilty parties.
“This should include sanctions, withholding aid and arms, withholding diplomatic protection, requiring the extradition to the U.S. of the perpetrators, and using our own force capacities if necessary to ensure our citizens’ safety in an increasingly lawless Israeli society.”
USCMO added:
“Sadly, the refusal of the Trump administration–like the Biden administration and other White Houses before it–to do their duty on behalf of this young American and his family is the latest example of Washington’s shamefully long history of refusing to stand up for U.S. citizens murdered by Israelis, even though some of the Israelis perpetrating these crimes against U.S. citizens may be Americans themselves.
“Instead, our officials – who claim as the U.S. State Department did late Friday that it ‘has no higher priority than the safety and security of US citizens overseas’ – cringe in political fear behind a blatant falsehood: that the Israeli government can be trusted to investigate its own crimes.
“We know how that fiction ends. Virtually no Israeli investigations of settlers’ or soldiers’ violence against Palestinians or those who seek to help them, no matter how overwhelmingly witnessed or well documented, come to criminal charges.
“From the Israeli attack on the U.S. Navy ship the USS Liberty to the crushing American peace activist young Rachel Corrie to the assassination famed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, our government did nothing about any of these Israeli atrocities against Americans – U.S. citizens and military personnel.
“U.S. officials and lawmakers are stoking Israel’s attacks on American citizens in Palestine and the broader Palestinian population by refusing to speak out against such violence. If our political leaders will not even speak up for Palestinian-Americans slaughtered by Israel, then no Palestinians are safe.
“In the last four years alone, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 9 U.S. citizens in cold blood. Not one of these incidents led to criminal charges against any Israeli perpetrator of murder by the so-called Israeli justice system. In fact, what is now undeniably clear is that the U.S. government will protect the Israeli apartheid system even when it kills Americans.
“Young Saifollah Musallet’s lynching is a direct Israeli challenge – in an alarmingly growing recent list of them – to President Trump. Is he finally going to be sincere about putting American citizens’ welfare and rights first? Or is he going to genuflect yet again before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel First war hawks influencing our government?
“How long will our presidents permit these foreign agents to cow our political leaders, who then open the gates for them to run roughshod over the American people, our laws, and our national interests?
“The Israeli government’s impunity – murdering, maiming, destroying, kidnapping, raping, and warmongering across Palestinian territory – is made right here in America. And it should end here in America now, if only our president and members of Congress find the will to put ‘we the people’ first.”
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