Women’s March leader and flagrant anti-Semite Linda Sarsour responded last night to reignited criticism that she is indeed an anti-Semite. In doing so, she was predictably shameless, authoritarian, obfuscating, and deflective.
Sarsour has specifically been criticized for her and fellow Women’s March leader Tamika Mallory’s ties to Louis Farrakhan, who as recently as a month ago compared Jews to “termites.” You may also recall that Sarsour has previously promulgated the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews cannot be loyal because of their “allegiance to Israel.” She has also advocated for Rasmea Odeh, a Jordanian-Palestinian terrorist who killed two Jews in a bombing. Yet she refuses to either defend or distance herself from Farrakhan.
“Instead of coming together [after the Tree of Life shooting] as a country to call out white supremacy and the violence being inspired by this administration — the deflection went to a black man who has no institutional power,” wrote Sarsour in her open letter, referring to Farrakhan. “[T]his is a feature of white supremacy,” she asserted.
But Sarsour’s trick is getting old fast. Instead of distinctly acknowledging that anti-Semitism possibly predates all other forms of racism in human history, she wraps it up in whiteness, insisting that Jews and friends of Jews horrified by Farrakhan and Sarsour’s toxic anti-Semitic rhetoric are really just anti-black instead of pro-Jew.
“Stay focused,” Sarsour wrote toward the end of the letter. “The real threat is white nationalism and white supremacy.”
The subtext here of course is that anyone criticizing her is a white supremacist. Sarsour sounds like an authoritarian trying to gaslight the public because that’s exactly what she is.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop actress and activist Alyssa Milano from wavering in her recent rejection of Sarsour and uncritically sharing the letter. Even Ariel Sobel, the progressive Jewish reporter for the Advocate, who got Milano to denounce the leadership of the Women’s March, wrote of Sarsour’s letter, “There is a ton of deflecting and self-centering. But there is some progress.”
As someone who knows Sobel personally and is deeply familiar with her relentless activism for sex abuse victims, I feel the need to warn her and all other progressive Jews grappling with left-wing anti-Semitism: The Women’s March doesn’t want you.
It doesn’t matter how much you do for the LGBT community, for women, for people of color. The Women’s March leadership will continue to cavort with and glorify anti-Semites, advocate for the abolition of Jewish statehood and, ultimately, of your Jewish identity. The funny thing about intersectionality is that it will always leave you out to dry if the minority group to which you belong does too much to triumph over discrimination. Just ask the Asian-American students who are suing after being unjustly shut out by Harvard’s discriminatory admissions process.
Yes, Sarsour acknowledged Jewish pain. Props to her for realizing that getting continually massacred for centuries sort of sucks. What’s far more important is that she’s also made clear how little she cares about it.
