On June 1, the City University of New York (CUNY) will honor
Linda Sarsour by hosting her as a speaker at the commencement ceremony of the
CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. While Sarsour has been
described
as “an arsonist in our midst,” criticism of the decision to invite the
controversial activist was firmly
rejected
by CUNY chancellor James B. Milliken, who wrote that Sarsour was chosen “because
of her involvement in public health issues in New York City and her position as
a leader on women’s issues, including her role as co-chair of the recent
Women’s March in Washington.” The chancellor also highlighted that “Ms. Sarsour
has been recognized by President Obama at the White House as a ‘Champion of
Change’ and was recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 leaders and Fortune
magazine’s 50 global leaders.”
In short, as far as CUNY is concerned, it is fully justified
to ignore all criticism of Sarsour and to present her as a role model for the
university’s graduates.
As Michael D. Cohen of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
acknowledged when he recently denounced Sarsour as “an arsonist in our midst,”
she is “a brilliant tactician who manipulates the media to gain attention and
sympathy for her cause.” One might add that the media love to be
manipulated
by her, without asking tough questions about what exactly Sarsour’s “cause” is
and how she pursues it.
During one of the recent controversies, Sarsour
declared
that she wants to be judged by her own words, but it is abundantly clear that
she also wants people to ignore plenty of her own words that actually tell us a
lot about Sarsour’s “cause” and her activism.
So let’s look at a small sample of those of Sarsour’s own
words that are arguably very revealing, even though she will lash out at
anybody who quotes them to her.
Indeed, Sarsour was recently recorded
berating
a student who asked her about her
notorious
tweet from 2011, when she declared that prominent women’s right activist
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and strident Islam critic Brigitte Gabriel “don’t deserve to be
women;” therefore, Sarsour wished she “could take their vaginas away.” If we
take Sarsour’s response to the student who asked about this tweet seriously,
White men (capital W, please!) have no business being disturbed by her vile
outburst – an answer that reflects the divisive identity politics Sarsour often
employs
when it suits her, while calling for unity and solidarity when this seems more
opportune.
But as the Dartmouth students who enthusiastically applauded
Sarsour’s put-down of their impertinent White male fellow student illustrated,
many people are all too willing to ignore an obscene six-year-old tweet posted
when Sarsour was almost 31 – not, as she falsely claimed, in her twenties.
Moreover, in spring 2011, Sarsour
reportedly
already served as director of the Arab American Association of New York; she
was also about to be named “a fellow at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of
Public Service Women of Color Policy Network” and boasted about her excellent
access to the Obama administration.
And soon enough, Sarsour would also boast about being
victorious over Hirsi Ali. In fall 2012, Sarsour was still jealously
wondering “What does Ayaan Hirsi Ali got
that I ain’t got? Front page covers and shit. #MuslimRage;” but by the spring
of 2014, Sarsour was able to celebrate a blow against her nemesis, and she jubilantly
announced on Twitter: “Online activism
WINS again. @BrandeisU does the right thing and rescinds honorary degree 2
hatemonger Ayaan Hirsi Ali;” she also
added:
“Hats off 2 @BrandeisU 4 rescinding honorary degree 2 Ayaan Hirsi Ali. U have
restored integrity of your institution;” and she
thanked the university’s president: “Thank
you @PresidentFred for making the right choice today and rescinding honorary
degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We are all very grateful.”
Isn’t it deeply ironic that CUNY would so strongly defend
its decision to honor Sarsour who celebrated so enthusiastically when she and
other activists succeeded in denying a similar honor to Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
Sarsour’s “#MuslimRage” was apparently not diminished by the
fact that Hirsi Ali established a
foundation that has been
working since 2007 “to end honor violence [including Female Genital Mutilation]
that shames, hurts or kills thousands of women and girls in the US each year,
and puts millions more at risk;” the foundation also promotes “the belief that
there is no culture, tradition or religion that justifies violence against
women and girls.”
But very different from Hirsi Ali, Sarsour is eager to
defend the conservative traditions of Muslim societies, even when they are
clearly harmful to women. Sarsour has
asserted
that “shariah law is reasonable,” ignoring the
widespread
and
well-documented
human rights abuses
committed
in Muslim majority states in the name of
sharia.
Sarsour has even gone so far as to
praise
Saudi Arabia – where women are completely
dependent
on the whims of their male guardians: “10 weeks of PAID maternity leave in
Saudi Arabia. Yes PAID. And ur worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame.”
Since Sarsour often emphasizes her Palestinian Muslim
identity, it is also interesting to note how Palestinians view sharia.
As documented in a Pew survey from 2013,
89% of Palestinians want sharia
law; 66% endorse the death penalty for Muslims who convert to another religion;
76% support mutilation as a punishment for theft, and a shocking 84% want
adulterers stoned to death. The survey also shows that less than half (about
45%) of Palestinian Muslims reject so-called “honor killings” as never
justified, and 87% insist that a wife must always obey her husband.
Given that CUNY has explicitly stated that they want to
honor Sarsour as a “leader on women’s issues,” it is also noteworthy that she
has repeatedly defended arranged marriages like her own, in which her parents married
her off at the age of 17. In late 2007, Sarsour
told Al
Arabiya News: “Every year, we see more than a hundred arranged marriages in
our community alone […] In our community […] you not only have to find a spouse
who is Arab and Muslim; that person also needs to be Palestinian and from the
same village as you.” According to the reporter, “Women like Linda accept being
set-up because they don’t really believe in ‘love story weddings’.” And as
Sarsour reportedly added to explain the benefits of arranged marriages: “If I
fight with my husband, I can always run to my father because he is the one who
chose him for me.”
But Sarsour has also defended the practice recently: in an
interview
with the
Mecca Post on March 8, 2017, which begins with a related
question, Sarsour answered by asserting: “I feel I have become mature much
earlier in life than may be other sisters who are still in high school or in
college.”
Well, maybe CUNY should start a “Sarsour Program for
Arranged Marriages” to benefit female students in their last year of high
school?
The Mecca Post interview with Sarsour includes also
plenty of other interesting material. She dismisses her critics as “right wing
supremacists” who “engaged in alternative facts and false accusations” and
asserts that “there really is nothing that they said that really is true.” She
also confidently claims Jesus was “a Palestinian Jewish refugee” who is “very
co-essential to us Muslims” but misunderstood by many “who call themselves
Christians.” She then proceeds to press Islam’s founder into the service of her
agenda, breathlessly describing Muhammad as her “inspiration”:
“he was an activist he was a human
rights activist, he stood up for the poor, he wanted to stand up against
tyrants and oppressors, he loved animals he loved earth and taking care of the
earth, he talked about environmental justice […] He talked about racial
justice, and uplifting people regardless of what colour their skin was. […] I
also think about Islamophobia now, the man who experienced the most
Islamophobia they did not call it Islamophobia 1400 years ago was our beloved
Prophet (SAW).”
One really is left to wonder if Sarsour is too naïve to
realize that if she transforms Islam’s founder into a 21st century social
justice warrior, she ultimately legitimizes those who employ the norms of our
time to denounce him for his marriage to an underage girl (which was then
common and unfortunately
remains
accepted in some countries); similarly, by the standards of our time, the
supremely successful
warlord,
who founded not just a faith, but also an empire, committed numerous
atrocities.
But when it comes to anything that has to do with Islam,
Sarsour is an ardent advocate of double standards. She will denounce Hirsi Ali
as a “hatemonger” while uncritically embracing a group like the Nation of Islam
(NOI), which,
according
to the the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “has maintained a consistent record of
anti-Semitism and racism since its founding in the 1930s.” The ADL considers
veteran NOI leader Louis Farrakhan as “the leading anti-Semite in America;” the
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) provided a similarly unequivocal condemnation,
denouncing “the
deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric” of Farrakhan and other NOI
leaders, whose conduct “earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of
organized hate.”
Yet, in 2012, Sarsour
embraced
the NOI as “an integral part” of “the history of Islam in America,”
emphasizing that “Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Nation
of Islam - we are #Muslim, we are all part of one ummah, one family. #Islam.”
Two years later, Sarsour
insisted that it
was not possible to “learn or teach about the history of Islam in America
without talking about the Nation of Islam (NOI).”
As I have recently
documented,
Sarsour joined two other leading activists at a major rally organized by
Farrakhan and his associates in 2015, where she delivered a strident speech
that echoed Farrakhan’s antisemitic efforts to blame Jews for problems and
hardships experienced by African-Americans. Sarsour also seems to
share
some of Farrakhan’s bigoted views on the malignant Jewish influence in America,
even though she often claims that she firmly opposes antisemitism. In this
context it is important to realize that Sarsour apparently does not accept
common definitions of antisemitism and has instead
endorsed (#73) the truly
Orwellian
re-definition that veteran anti-Israel activist Ali Abunimah
published
in fall 2012, reflecting his
preposterous
view that Zionism is “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence
today”
and that support for Zionism “is
not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”
Perhaps CUNY doesn’t care much about Sarsour’s pronounced
hostility to the world’s only Jewish state, but one would think they should
care about this scene which happened in New York and was
witnessed
by Michael D. Cohen of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
“Last September, I stood along with
many of my colleagues at a New York City Council Public Hearing on that body’s
resolution to officially condemn the BDS movement — a hearing at which all
those in favor, including myself, were shouted down as “Jewish pigs” and
“Zionist filth” from provocateurs strategically placed in the audience. It was
Linda Sarsour who was at the forefront — manipulating the camera shots and
sound bites. It was Linda Sarsour who sat for hours listening with great
satisfaction to the libelous rants and screamed obscenities alleging that
Israelis murder Palestinian babies. It was Sarsour who nodded approvingly and
congratulated individuals who were kicked out of the hearing room for being out
of order, for walking in front of individuals providing testimony in support of
the resolution, and for shouting down our supporters with anti-Semitic slurs —
all in the name of protecting free speech.”
So much more material could be cited to show how little
Sarsour deserves to be held up as a role model for graduates of a respected
American university, but let me just conclude with this: when Sarsour addresses
her audience at the commencement ceremony of the CUNY Graduate School of Public
Health and Health Policy and says she is honored to do so, remember that she
also
recently
said she was “honored” to share a stage with
convicted
terrorist murderer and
confessed
US immigration fraudster Rasmea Odeh.
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.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
