By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Last week, Women’s March organizer and leftist darling
Linda Sarsour spoke before the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). There,
she called for a “jihad” against President Trump, specifying that she hoped
Allah would accept her “word of truth in front of a tyrant or leader” as a
“form of jihad.” Sarsour was playing a double game, naturally: She used the
word “jihad” because she knew it would generate headlines and because she knew
that “jihad” means more than any mere mental struggle. In fact, Sarsour led off
her speech by paying tribute to Siraj Wajjah, her “favorite person in the
room.” Wajjah was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, a witness on behalf of the Blind Sheikh terrorist, and a man who has
repeatedly embraced the notion of violent jihad. Sarsour, too, explicitly
rejected assimilation. Sarsour is also friends with Islamist terrorist Rasmeah
Odeh, took a picture with former Hamas operative Salah Sarsour, and brags about
relatives in prison in Israel.
Sarsour’s two-faced approach to “Islamophobia”
demonstrates her extremism. While she complains in the pages of the Washington Post about “attacks from
xenophobes and the conservative media,” she was far more explicit on Twitter
about her perceived enemies: “white supremacists & right wing Zionists,”
whom she said were even paying moderate Muslims who oppose Sarsour’s
radicalism. “Zionist” is the ultimate insult in the Sarsour pantheon: She has
stated in the past that Zionists cannot be feminists. She has also stated that
anti-radical Islamic activists such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of Islamic
female genital mutilation, should have their vaginas removed. Sarsour is a big
fan, however, of Saudi Arabia’s maternity-leave policies, even if women aren’t
allowed to drive.
The group before which Sarsour was speaking, ISNA, has
its own issues with terrorist associations. ISNA was founded by Muslim
Brotherhood members and was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007
Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial; ISNA actually shared an address with
the Holy Land Foundation. One of the founders of the group was Sami Al-Arian,
who would later be deported to Turkey thanks to his aid to terrorist groups.
For years, the head of the ISNA Political Awareness Committee was led by
Abdurahman Alamoudi, who would be convicted on terror charges.
Suffice it to say that neither Sarsour nor ISNA has a
clean record with regard to “jihad.”
The double game being played by some supposedly
Westernized Muslim institutions in the West became clear when I appeared on Fox
News last Friday evening with Dana Perino and Hassan Shibly, a spokesperson for
the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR was recently listed as a
terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates; like ISNA, CAIR was listed as an
unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, with significant
links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
During the interview, I stated some of the facts about
Sarsour; Shibly quickly complained that I was attacking Sarsour in her absence.
At that point, I asked Shibly about CAIR’s own associations with terrorism —
and Shibly then accused me of shifting topics.
He could not escape answering one critical question,
however: Would he condemn the Muslim Brotherhood? Shibly declined to do so,
claiming that CAIR did not condemn “political organizations,” stating that I
would not denounce the KKK — which, to his surprise, I promptly did. He then
refused to answer whether CAIR would even denounce Hamas. In reality, CAIR has
never denounced Hamas, and a CAIR rally in 2013 featured participants shouting,
“We are Hamas!” Yet Shibly had the gall to claim that “jihad” meant only
“struggle for good.”
Despite all of this, the Democratic party continues to
revere Sarsour, ISNA, CAIR, and other faux moderates in the Muslim community.
As long as radical Muslims are willing to make common cause with other
Democratic identity groups — LGBT, black, female, Hispanic — then Democrats are
willing to overlook their more dangerous aspects. In fact, the Democratic party
has decided that it is a high priority to ensure the presence of radical
Muslims in their coalition — Trump, after all, has targeted radical Islam, and
the grand Axis of Victimhood would be bereft without representatives of that
group, too. Thus, the Chicago Dyke March banned Jews from flying a flag with a
Jewish star on it lest it offend the anti-Semites in the crowd.
The Democratic party’s celebration of Sarsour — both
Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama have praised her to the skies — exposes the
poison that intersectionality injects into the body politic. Sarsour may just
be an activist, but Representative Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), who shares her
views, nearly became head of the Democratic National Committee last year.
Pandering to radicals of all stripes is only possible if
Democrats castigate President Trump and Republicans as a frightening “other” —
how else would they be able to justify jumping into bed with such nefarious
actors? Bound together by the glue of hatred, Sarsour and Sanders and Obama and
Ellison fight next to one another on behalf of the cause. Never mind that
Sarsour’s utopia looks nothing like Sanders’s. As long as they have a common
enemy, they’ll make alliances of convenience.
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