With Sarsour, America’s progressives are regressing
LINDA SARSOUR’S apparent call last week for “jihad” against the Trump administration provided American conservatives with a juicy hunk of red meat on which they have been gratefully gnawing ever since.
The Palestinian-American political activist — a rising star on the Democratic party’s left, she was co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington in January — even attracted the attention of the president’s son. Retweeting a Fox News story, Donald Trump Jr asked when the Democratic National Committee would “denounce this activist and democrat [sic] leader”, as his father’s media cheerleaders pounced on what one termed a “particularly vague, yet terrifying, segment” of the speech she had delivered over the July 4 holiday weekend.
Ms Sarsour, who made her name as director of the Arab American Association of New York and is now heavily involved in the city’s Democratic party as well as a close ally of mayor Bill de Blasio, swiftly responded emphasising her commitment to non-violence and drawing a not-too-subtle comparison with Martin Luther King. It is not hard to guess, though, why some of Mr Trump’s most avid supporters are keen to silence one of America’s leading female Muslim voices. “I am their worst nightmare,” Ms Sarsour wrote this week.
On this occasion, Ms Sarsour may have been the victim of a somewhat manufactured frenzy over comments that, while ill-judged, also demonstrated America’s ignorance of Islam. As her defenders noted, “jihad”, the notion of a “struggle”, has a much wider meaning than “holy war”.
Ms Sarsour’s politics are nonetheless troubling and all too familiar. While her leadership of a fundraising campaign in March to repair a desecrated Jewish cemetery in Missouri was admirable, like others who have attained heroic status on the hard left closer to home, Ms Sarsour more often shows a worrying disregard for Jewish sensibilities.
In April, for instance, she addressed a conference of the left-wing and pro-BDS Jewish Voice for Peace, happily appearing alongside Rasmea Odeh. Odeh was convicted in Israel for a 1969 terrorist bombing in which two Hebrew University students died — she spent 10 years in prison before being released in a prisoner exchange in 1980 — and is now being deported from the US for covering up her conviction when she entered the country and later applied for citizenship. None of this, however, appeared to bother Ms Sarsour, who declared herself “honoured to be on this stage with Rasmea”.
A vocal advocate of the BDS movement who declared “nothing is creepier than Zionism”, Ms Sarsour’s support for a one-state solution, charge critics, is little more than a guise for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the Jewish state would no longer exist.
When Ms Sarsour was invited to deliver a graduation address at City University of New York last month, 100 Holocaust survivors wrote to New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, urging him to intervene. “What Linda Sarsour advocates — boycotts against Jewish businesses in Israel and random acts of violence against the innocent — are no different than the things that we personally experienced,” the survivors wrote in their letter. “This is a frightening reality that we hoped we would never see again.”
A particularly pernicious aspect of Ms Sarsour’s activities is her attempt to police the boundaries of the wider progressive movement. In March, she responded to criticism of a women’s manifesto which called for the “decolonisation of Palestine” by pronouncing that there was no place for supporters of Israel in the feminist movement. “You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it,” she suggested.
As the US writer James Kirchik suggested: “Sarsour’s rise, and the celebration of her by progressives as one of their own, demonstrates how clearly and phenomenally Jews and Jewish concerns are being written out of the progressive movement.”
Not only that: Ms Sarsour’s attitude was also somewhat curious given her previous warm words for Saudi Arabia’s record on women’s rights.