Since Samuel Tadros first reported for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on prospective International Woman of Courage Award winner Samira Ibrahim’s anti-Semitic, pro-9/11 tweets Wednesday afternoon, some observers have argued that the State Department, as Jeffrey Goldberg writes, “narrowly averted a moral and public relations disaster.” That’s true insofar as you agree that her public statements are odious.

However, it’s instructive to see this from another perspective as well—a perspective that has no problems with anti-Semitism, that celebrates suicide bombings against Israeli civilians as well as 9/11, and sees Hitler not as an embodiment of evil but as a bold visionary, a truth-teller. Unfortunately, this is a perspective all too common in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and it is from this perspective that Ibrahim will be seen as a hero. In other words, the State Department has not averted anything; rather, it has created a monster and given her a stage the size of the Middle East.