The pro-Israel community has long struggled against media
coverage that distorts or misrepresents facts. While these efforts are often
dismissed as partisan “hasbara” designed to make Israel look better than it
deserves, fact-checking has become rather fashionable during the divisive US
election campaign that ended – to the surprise and shock of the unsuspecting
mainstream media – with Donald Trump’s victory. Yet, in these times of Trump,
fact-checking is usually employed to discredit the new US administration and
its supporters. I don’t really have a problem with this, but at the same time,
I can’t help noticing that what is now widely called “the resistance” to the
Trump administration is hardly ever thought worthy of fact-checking, no matter
how bizarre the claims and “narratives” are that emanate from associated groups
or individuals.
A recent
Washington Post article on Linda Sarsour is
a good case in point: it’s an amazing
puff
piece that presents Sarsour as “one of the highest-profile Muslim American
activists in the country” who is bravely enduring “an onslaught of personal
attacks through social media and conservative news outlets.” According to the
paper’s “reporter” Michael Alison Chandler, the ambitious Sarsour – who
once
wanted to become “the first hijabi mayor of New York City” and who now
plans to write a book and is even contemplating “a possible bid for Congress”
– is being smeared by “critics [who]
have attempted to tie her to terrorist groups, called her anti-Semitic and
accused her of infiltrating the liberal movement.”
Needless to say, the people who vilify poor Linda Sarsour so
unfairly in turn richly deserve to be vilified by Sarsour and her supporters. Thus,
Chandler allows Sarsour to airily dismiss a vile tweet she posted in 2011
fantasizing about Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali “asking 4 an a$$
whippin’” and expressing the “wish” to “take their vaginas away” because “they
don’t deserve to be women.” All Sarsour has to do now is to shrug off her
vicious outburst as “stupid” and to dismiss it as simply a reflection of her
being “a brash New Yorker.” An open threat against Brigitte Gabriel also
posted by
Sarsour remained unmentioned; likewise,
her
declaration that “White women” were regrettably slow to understand “that we
do not need to be saved by them” was politely ignored now that Sarsour so
obviously enjoys the fawning praise heaped on her by a whole lot of “White
women.” And it is surely safer to admire Sarsour, given that she recently asked
her fans to pray in support of her and then re-tweeted one of the heartfelt
prayers: “#IPrayForLinda May God fortify her and strike down her enemies where
they stand.”
While Washington Post readers weren’t told anything
about fervent prayers to “strike down” Linda Sarsour’s “enemies,” they did
learn that Sarsour regards Gabriel and Hirsi Ali as “notorious Islamophobes who
are working for the right wing” and that the Southern Poverty Law Center
largely agrees with Sarsour’s views, considering her a victim of bigoted efforts
to vilify American Muslims.
Since obviously only truly terrible people would criticize
Sarsour, the
Washington Post’s Chandler apparently saw no reason to explain
that “many” of Sarsour’s “accusers” suspect her of advocating Sharia because
she posted
several
tweets extolling the supposed virtues of Islamic Sharia law. And even
though a
Snopes article
published almost two weeks before Chandler’s piece shows that Sarsour avoided a
direct answer to the
question
if she would ever “vote for Sharia Law in the United States,” Sarsour is simply
allowed to claim that “she does not think sharia law should supplant American
laws.”
Washington Post readers are assured that just “like many other
U.S. Muslims,” Sarsour supposedly regards Sharia only “as a guide” for her “private
religious practice:” “I don’t eat pork […] “I don’t drink alcohol. I pray five
times a day.” Later on Sarsour acknowledges that “[t]here are Muslims and
regimes that oppress women,” but she immediately adds: “I believe that my
religion is an empowering religion […] I wear hijab by choice.”
Of course, Sarsour can wear her hijab by choice only because
she is living in a country that is not governed by Sharia law. In countries
where Sharia law is enforced, not even
feminist
Swedish politicians dare to choose not to wear a hijab. And in countries
where Sharia law is enforced, even non-Muslims
don’t
have necessarily the choice to eat pork, while Muslims who might fancy a drink
risk heavy lashing or even a
death
sentence.
Sarsour may regard Sharia law only “as a guide” for her
“private religious practice,” but she knows full well that in countries where
it is enforced, it results in horrendous
oppression
and human rights
violations.
So why not hold Sarsour to her own standards: since
she believes
that “silence makes you complicit,” she should be expected to speak out about
the enforced social conformity and the cruelty that result when Sharia is
actually the law of the land.
Yet, Sarsour has even
claimed that
“shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of
sense.”
Since Sarsour often emphasizes her Palestinian identity, it
is noteworthy that the Palestinians are also very positive about Sharia. The
graphic
below, based on
surveys
by Pew, illustrates what Sharia means for Palestinians – maybe the next
“reporter” tempted to write a puff piece on Sarsour can ask her if she considers
this “reasonable”?
I could also think of several questions that reporters who are
eager to show a skeptical public that the media can be trusted to report
impartially could ask Linda Sarsour.
Sarsour has
suggested
that America is a nation built on “Genocide & slavery,” a comment she later
claimed was “in response to a bigot who told me Islam is evil.” So what does
Sarsour think about the countless horrors perpetrated in the wars of conquest
that spread Islam far beyond its birthplace on the Arabian Peninsula? And what
about
the
fact that Sharia law justifies slavery, in particular the enslavement of
prisoners taken in jihad?
Sarsour has also
opined that “Nothing
is creepier than Zionism.” In other words, as far as Sarsour is concerned,
nothing is creepier than the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. Given
Sarsours’s frequent emphasis on her Palestinians identity and the fact that
she
has relatives and family friends who were (or still are) serving lengthy
prison sentences in Israel – likely for involvement in terrorist activity –,
and given that her brother-in-law was reportedly serving a 12-year sentence
because he was “accused of being an activist in the Hamas,” it would be
interesting to know how Sarsour feels about Hamas: is the Islamist terror group,
with its notorious genocidal
fascist
charter, a lot less “creepy” than Zionism?
There also has been some
speculation
about Sarsour’s potential family connections to the known Hamas supporters
Salah and
Jamil Sarsour – perhaps an enterprising reporter could clear up if there is
anything to these speculations?
Moreover, since Linda Sarsour has
skillfully
used her family to shape her public image, it is certainly legitimate to
ask some related questions. So we know that her brother-in-law was sentenced to
prison in Israel as a Hamas member or supporter; we
also know that in 2004, “her Palestinian
husband, after seven years in America, faced deportation proceedings.” Was her
husband also suspected of being a Hamas supporter or member, and was he
actually deported from the US?
If Sarsour’s husband had spent seven years in America by
2004, he arrived there in 1997. Sarsour, who was born in 1980, was then 17
years old, and we know from an
Al Jazeera profile
of her that, “At 17, still in high school, she had an arranged marriage and
began wearing hijab.” This means that she “had” – or perhaps was forced into –
an arranged marriage with a Palestinian who had just arrived in the US. We also
know from a
2005
article (archived
here) that Sarsour
“met her future husband when he paid her family a visit with his extended family
in tow and a $10,000 dowry.” The article identifies Sarsour’s husband as Maher
Judh from the West Bank town of El-bireh and says that he works in a grocery
store in Brooklyn, indicating that he was apparently not deported in 2004.
In the 2005 article, Sarsour describes her family as a “traditional
Muslim family whose conservative ways were less a result of religion, but more
about maintaining a good standing in the community.” She also seems to see
nothing wrong with her arranged marriage at 17, telling the reporter back then:
“I am 25 years old, married with three kids, and I was married in an arranged
marriage, and that happened right here in Brooklyn […] People always say,
‘What! Most people don’t get married until they are 30,’ and I say ‘not my
people.’”
So apparently, Sarsour felt at the time that it re-affirmed
her Palestinian identity to get married so young in an arranged marriage. She also
seems to have no misgivings about the fact – which she relates in the
Al
Jazeera profile – that her parents sent her to a terrible high school and
deprived her of the chance to attend a program for gifted students because she
“was the first [child of seven] in the family” and for her parents, “it wasn’t
about better. It was about proximity to the house.” However, as noted in a
glowing
New York Times profile
from 2015, Sarsour “grew up helping her mother babysit and shop.”
A girl growing up in America at the end of the 20th century
being denied educational advancement by her parents, who instead use her as a
babysitter for her six siblings and then marry her off at the earliest possible
time would presumably be regarded by most of Sarsour’s feminist admirers as a
very tragic case. As much as I disagree with Sarsour’s politics, I think one
can only admire her for the tenaciousness with which she avoided her apparent
destiny of a life restricted to being an obedient wife who would bear her
husband children and perhaps eventually find some sort of low-level job. At the
same time, I think Sarsour has good reason to “sometimes … feel duplicitous” because
of what she
reportedly called “her
internal quest to prove she can be both progressive and traditional.”
The
Washington Post identifies
the author of the puff piece on Sarsour as a “reporter” who “writes about
families, gender and religion.” Sarsour is certainly a fascinating person to
write about for someone focusing on these issues – pity that Michael Alison
Chandler took the easy way out and chose to simply add to the growing list of
tributes that are ultimately only slightly more sophisticated versions of the
“prayer” Sarsour liked so much: “#IPrayForLinda May God fortify her and strike
down her enemies where they stand.”
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please
donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
