The Hard Conversation Linda Sarsour Needs To Have

Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov has written an excellent piece in the New York Post on faux feminist Linda Sarsour, encouraging her “to have a hard conversation about how she is preaching hatred while claiming to be fighting for equality, and putting women down while saying she’s trying to lift them up.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Women’s March co-organizer Linda Sarsour said in her speech to a Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Chicago on Sunday that she’s “providing a service . . . that I’m allowing the Jewish community to have the real hard conversation that it always needed to be having” about whether it should support Israel.

Thanks! Let me return the favor and encourage Sarsour to have a hard conversation about how she is preaching hatred while claiming to be fighting for equality, and putting women down while saying she’s trying to lift them up.

The Brooklyn-born Sarsour, daughter of Palestinian immigrants, shared the dais Sunday with another darling of the feminist “resistance,” Rasmea Odeh — convicted in Israel of killing two Hebrew University students in a 1969 terrorist attack and of planning an attack on the British Consulate. After her release, Odeh was able to immigrate to the United States by hiding her crime. She’s now being deported to Jordan.

Odeh has become a leftist hero. Sunday night, she and Sarsour embraced, and Sarsour gushed to the audience about feeling “honored and privileged to be here in this space, and honored to be on this stage with Rasmea.”

It’s a curious embrace of terrorism and anti-Semitism from a recipient of a $500,000 taxpayer grant from Mayor de Blasio, as Sarsour’s group, the Arab American Association of New York, was last year. Sarsour, in fact, has been an important ally of de Blasio’s since his election — a role she’s sure to reprise in the mayor’s bid for a second term.

Sarsour said last month feminism is “about the rights of all women.” Yet in the same interview, when asked whether there’s “room for people who support the state of Israel” in the women’s movement, she said: “There can’t be in feminism.” Apparently, Sarsour doesn’t believe all women deserve equal rights — Israeli and Israel-supporting women are an exception. And, by her logic, since she isn’t for the rights of all women, she isn’t a feminist.

In a flattering interview with Ha’aretz, Sarsour advocated a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the Jewish state would no longer exist. And Sarsour once tweeted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.” Meaning that her struggles, whether they’re for Palestinians or women, are just, but the Jewish liberation movement has no right to exist.

In her speech to Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization of extremist Jewish activists dedicated to delegitimizing Israel, Sarsour said, “There’s always been anti-Semitism,” and people must fight it.

She doesn’t seem to grasp that advocating wiping Israel off the map, as she does, is fighting for the continued oppression of Jews, denying their self-determination and taking away their safe haven — nor did she seem to grasp the chutzpah required to make a statement like that after embracing and praising Odeh.

Read the whole thing.

I would just add that we should also encourage Sarsour to “have the real hard conversation with her Muslim community that it always needed to be having” about whether it should support terrorism. Because we have already seen what her takeaway from 911 is – not that the Muslim community needs to take a long hard look at itself and distance itself from the terrorism committed in its name, but rather that they are the victims of “Islamophobia” because of it.

I think Sarsour should be focusing on her own community rather than preaching to a rather misguided section of the Jewish one.