CUNY’s platform for a terror sympathizer

Linda Sarsour, recently chosen as the commencement speaker at CUNY’s School of Public Health, has had a good run. Until recently, she’d convinced a lot of people that she stood for progressive liberalism, stood for feminism, stood for dignity, human rights and all of the things that people who favor the liberal left say they stand for, too.

But there’s an old saying: You can’t hide the crazy.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh tried to hide it, and was successful for a little while. Odeh — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist convicted for her role in murdering two Jewish students in a 1969 supermarket bombing in Israel — lied to U.S. immigration about her bloodthirsty past and is now being deported.

But while she was hiding, she worked side by side with Sarsour, who told the public, on April 2, that she was “honored to be on the stage with Rasmea.”

Yes, you can’t hide the crazy — those little slips that betray what Sarsour is thinking about the people she seems to consider her enemies: the Jews. And not just the Jews; Muslims who disagree with her are a target, too. Sarsour, the self-proclaimed feminist, wants to take their sexual organs away, she tells us in a tweet.

“She’s asking 4 an a$$ whippin’. I wish I could take their vaginas away — they don’t deserve to be women.”

But nothing betrays the dark side of Sarsour more than that single image she tweeted of a Palestinian child holding rocks, with a caption she wrote: “The definition of courage. #Palestine.”

Well-meaning progressives like City Councilman Brad Lander have defended Sarsour, claiming she can’t be an anti-Semite. After all, she visited his synagogue. And didn’t she raise money in a well-publicized effort on behalf of a vandalized Jewish cemetery? Of course she did. Sarsour has no lack of affection for dead Jews.

This is the baffling part about CUNY’s invitation, which, if they have a shred of decency, they should withdraw.

Freedom of speech, some say. I applaud freedom of speech. But giving this type of platform — the honor of a commencement address, which every graduating student must attend — to someone who’s an apologist for terrorism is a far cry from freedom of speech. It’s incitement.

One doesn’t have to assemble a bomb to be part of a bombing. One doesn’t have to leave the bomb in a supermarket. Calling up the media afterwards and claiming responsibility is sufficient. Or holding up the bomber and glorifying their actions to impressionable young people. Charles Manson never stuck the physical knives in backs of his victims.

Sarsour has had ample time to clarify (if indeed they need any elucidation) these actions of hers, but she refuses to do so. Instead, Sarsour’s only public response to these issues — all recently raised and highlighted with the arrest of her “homie” Odeh — has been in a video posted on Facebook. Sarsour spends 28 minutes to make her case.

“There have been another coordinated right-wing attack on me and I know you’re all thinking to yourself, like, what’s new here? Like nothing new.”

Actually, I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking it’s taken too long for people to start unmasking what Linda Sarsour is about. And it’s “there has been,” not “there have been.”

Sarsour has no response to those who challenge her frightening pronouncements.

No explanation for the “a$$ whippin’” she wished upon anti-radical-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. No defense of having glorified stones being thrown at Israelis whose crimes were nothing more than being Jewish and having the bad fortune to drive a stone’s throw from a bloodthirsty radical.

Instead, Sarsour casts herself as the victim of religious persecution. Sarsour tells us that she has been embraced by faith leaders across the country. She thanks everyone who has supported her. Her “homies,” she calls them, lest we forget that she’s “street.”

“This work that people like me do is sacrificial work. I could be working in corporate America and doing just quite right . . . . I will not allow anybody to criminalize me based on my faith, I will not allow anybody to criminalize me based on my ethnicity or my national origin.”

But no one is doing that, Linda. People are simply holding up the things you’ve endorsed. And those things are, indeed, criminal.