Linda Sarsour went before a Muslim Brotherhood-linked confab this month and called for a jihad against President Trump. Understandably, that caused blowback across the country — its intended purpose.
The call to jihad and the ensuing controversy was by design. First, as a call to action to the Muslim ummah; and, secondly, to smear, defame and libel anyone opposed to this holy war as “fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes.”
Her subsequent dissembling (in the pages of the Washington Post, no less) — is that she didn’t mean this jihad but that jihad (i.e. inner struggle, and in this case, speaking truth to power) — a popular Islamist deception. Sarsour knows exactly what jihad means, and so do the people she supports.
Sarsour wrote (emphasis added, original link):
Most disturbing about this recent defamation campaign is how it is focused on demonizing the legitimate yet widely misunderstood Islamic term I used, “jihad,” which to majority of Muslims and according to religious scholars means “struggle” or “to strive for.” This term has been hijacked by Muslim extremists and right-wing extremists alike, leaving ordinary Muslims to defend our faith and in some cases silenced.
Sarsour spreads the taqiyya (permissible lying) on thick. She asserts that the term jihad “has been hijacked by Muslim extremists and right-wing extremists alike.”
In other words, the victims of jihadist terror have hijacked the term jihad. While jihadis are blowing up our children, airports, buildings, airplanes, concerts, malls, marches, markets, etc., screaming “Allahu akbar!,” we, the victims, have the audacity to call the thing by its rightful name.
There are no passages in the Quran that speak to a spiritual jihad. But there are hundreds calling for holy war. Still, Islamic supremacists such as Sarsour know they can count on the media elites to do their heavy lifting. That the Washington Post would allow Sarsour to deceive, dissemble and disarm the American people against what is the gravest threat to our freedom clearly demonstrates why we are in the terrible state we find ourselves in. And it also shows why Donald Trump was elected President last year, in a triumph the left still cannot get over or accept.
I was the target of the first ISIS attack in the USA — a free speech event in Garland, Texas. I have been the target of a beheading plot by an Islamic cell in Boston. ISIS has issued a death fatwa on my head. One thing I can tell you: the Washington Post has never asked me to explain why I do what I do, or the reasons for my relentless fight for our cherished freedoms. But Linda Sarsour, who proudly stands with terrorists such Rasmea Odeh (a convicted Palestinian jihad murderer) and Siraj Wahhaj (an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombings), is given deference and respect and accolades.
She kicked off her speech to the Muslim Brotherhood-tied group, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), by calling Wahhaj her “favorite person in the room.” According to a 2004 Columbia Graduate School of Journalism article, Sarsour defended her brother in-law, her cousin and at least one friend who had been jailed in Israel for their roles in violent plots against Jews. She knows exactly what she is doing and what she is saying.
The ISNA summit was the perfect venue for her incitement. The Islamic Society of North America was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist funding trial in our nation’s history, the Holy Land Foundation trial.
She told ISNA that Muslims were “struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or in the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”
Where are Muslims struggling against tyrants and rulers? The “struggles” have been to throw off secular rulers like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi, and to install Islamic law. A President who opposes jihad terror is an “Islamophobe.” As for white supremacists, all I can say is, I am a Jew. These inferences to the KKK are absurd. They were routed in the last century. It’s all a ruse.
Sarsour also told ISNA: “Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our community, it is not to assimilate and please any other people and authority,” she said.
“Not to assimilate.” Well, there it is. Muslims are the only immigrant group that comes to the West with a ready-made model of society they believe to be superior, and they work to impose it. Muslims are not assimilating in Europe, and we are witnessing the deterioration and downfall of Europe. No-go zones, near-constant terror attacks, rampant sexual crimes, and utter lawlessness. “Non-assimilation,” in this context, means invasion.
In her Washington Post article, Sarsour complained about a backlash to the “Ground Zero mosque.” What backlash? The only backlash was the Islamic/leftist backlash to our principled stand against it. Americans opposed a victory mosque in a building destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. There was no violence, only a refusal to go quietly into the cold, dark, oppressive night.
Yet our refusal to submit was intolerable and unacceptable to Islamic supremacists and their leftist lapdogs. They still talk about that stinging defeat, even now, in the pages of the Washington Post. Make no mistake, we defeated that mosque, and it was one of the great victories of the counter-jihad movement.
Sarsour goes on to whine about the protest I held against her, calling for the City University of New York (CUNY) to rescind the honor bestowed upon her to keynote its commencement ceremonies. Thousands joined me in protesting Sarsour. She knows.
Sarsour says, “I believe wholeheartedly that we must fight injustice and inequality.” So why doesn’t she fight creed apartheid, gender apartheid, Islamic Jew-hatred, misogyny, honor killings, sanctioned wife-beating, forced marriage, or child marriage? It’s all part of Sharia governance and mores. Why hasn’t Sarsour stood up for victims of honor violence, or planted a grove of trees in their memory, as my organization did?
She goes on to say that the reason she is “subjected to such particularly public vitriol” is that she is “a Palestinian American woman in a hijab who has become a familiar presence and name in American living rooms when it comes to nonviolent resistance and activism.
Public vitriol? That’s mother’s milk to her. She has called for former Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina to be removed, and says Hirsi Ali needs an “a$$ whippin.” She has said that nothing is creepier than Zionism and that Jewish women can’t be feminists.
She avidly supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, an economic boycott of the tiny Jewish state, which mirrors the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Preceding Kristallnacht, the Nazis held several days calling for Germans to boycott Jewish-owned businesses. BDS is no different.
In November 2012 in Baltimore, Sarsour — ever eager to peddle her woeful tale of Islamic victimhood — spoke at a Muslim Public Affairs Council conference entitled “Facing Race: Xenophobic Hate Crimes.” This is the same Council that views the murderous Jew-haters of Hezbollah as members of “a liberation movement” who are “fighting for freedom.”
Sarsour was outraged when a police officer and an FBI agent shot and killed a young black Muslim named Usaama Rahim in Boston on June 2, 2015, when Rahim lunged at them with a military-style knife as they attempted to question him about suspected terror-related activities. Naturally, Sarsour said: “At the end of the day, a Black man was shot on a bus stop on his way to work and we should treat this like any other case of police violence.”
In August 2015 Sarsour spoke out in support of the incarcerated Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Allan, a known recruiter of suicide bombers.
That’s vitriol. There’s more.
Silence her? She speaks anywhere and everywhere. Not only was she invited to keynote CUNY’s Commencement ceremonies, but she is welcomed on other college campuses, as well as on network television and cable news networks. She is invited to lie, libel and whine in the hallowed pages of the Washington Post.
WE are silenced. We are blacklisted. We are banned on college campuses. We are banned from Britain. We cannot publish books because it is too dangerous for a publishing house. We are the hunted ones. Shouting into the wilderness is not freedom of speech.
Linda Sarsour needn’t go to all the trouble of trying to clean up the filth she spews. She needed only two words to explain her rise to the highest echelons in the information battlespace: support for jihad works.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.