Linda Sarsour, the Zelig of jihad

Linda Sarsour and friends (among them, notice actress Susan Sarandon)

Linda Sarsour’s social circle is a thing of wonder. This began to become common knowledge not long after she became a public figure on January 21, 2017 – the date of the Women’s March on Washington, of which she was a leading organizer and at which she was a prominent speaker. As we have discovered, Sarsour is chummy with Louis Farrakhan; she enjoys the support and admiration of socialists Bernie Sanders and Van Jones; and she turned out to be a good friend of Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim who lost this summer’s Democratic primary for governor of Michigan.

Imam Siraj Wahhaj

But that was nothing. After the stunning news came, early in August, that a group of Muslims had been operating a camp in the New Mexico desert where they were teaching kids to become school shooters, it turned out that this compound had a Linda Sarsour connection. Specifically, three of the five people who were arrested at the place after a raid by authorities are the children of a Brooklyn imam named Siraj Wahhaj. Who is this imam? Well, for one thing, he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For another thing, he is an old pal of Linda Sarsour, who has mentioned him frequently with affection and gratitude.

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj

In the case of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the son of the imam, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Like his pop, Sonny Boy would appear to be a past master in the fine art of killing innocents. That’s was he busy training those kids in New Mexico to do. The kids, by the way, were found starving and ragged in an underground trailer crammed with weapons and ammo. Also found there were the remains of a three-year-old boy who is believed to have been Wahhaj Junior’s son, whom he apparently abducted from the home of the child’s mother in Georgia.

Leo Hohmann

As Leo Hohmann spelled out in an August 10 article, Siraj Wahhaj – the dad – has close ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Sarsour, as it happens, “has become the face of ISNA.” At an ISNA conference last year, reports Hohmann, “she praised Wahhaj Sr. as her ‘favorite person’ and called on U.S. Muslims to wage political jihad against the Trump administration.” And we quote:

And to my favorite person in this room, that’s mutual, is Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been a mentor, motivator, and encourager of mine. Someone who has taught me to speak truth to power, and not worry about the consequences. Someone who has taught me that we are on this earth to please Allah and only Allah, and that we are not here to please any man or woman on this earth. So I am grateful to you Imam Siraj, and you might think this is weird, but every once in a while, when I get into that deep dark place, Imam Siraj comes and talks to me. And he helps me to emerge out of those places, so I’m grateful to you Imam Siraj, and may Allah bless you and protect you for a long time for our community, because we need you now more than ever.

Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream media, which have been so eager during the last year and a half to promote Sarsour, this self-identified “feminist” in a hijab, would consider her ties to the Taos County jihad camp big news? No, of course you wouldn’t, unless you were an incredible naif. In fact, as expected, the media have all but buried this story. Along with it, they’ve buried the fact that, as Hohmann records, “Wahhaj Sr. was an honored guest at the Clinton State Department and the Obama White House,” that he “was the first Muslim to lead prayer at the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991,” and that he has proclaimed that it is the duty of Muslims “to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran.” (He’s also “called for death to all homosexuals and lesbians,” but that’s hardly surprising from such a devout Muslim.)

Once again, then, Linda Sarsour has dodged scandal. She remains a darling of the American left and of the American media. One wonders what it will take to change that. Maybe if she takes off the hijab?

What creep isn’t pals with Linda Sarsour?

 

Linda Sarsour

We first wrote about Linda Sarsour on April 13 of last year. A few weeks earlier, on the day after President Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March on Washington had turned Linda Sarsour, one of the event’s organizers and lead speakers, into a household name. She was the one in hijab, the one who began her speech with the words “as-salāmu ʿalaykum,” the one who told the crowd that she was “unapologetically Muslim-American,” and the one who vowed: “I will respect the presidency, but I will not respect this President of the United States of America.” Why? Because Trump had “won the election on the backs of Muslims,” a group that had been “suffering in silence for the past fifteen years.”

Women’s March on Washington, January 21, 2017

And what had happened fifteen years earlier? 9/11. “For her,” we noted, “the history of the last fifteen years has been a history not of one barbaric mass murder after another performed in the name of Islam, but of a silent epidemic of cruel, soul-crushing Islamophobia.”

Sarsour, of course, presented herself as a feminist. Soon, however, it emerged that she was a zealous supporter of sharia law. She was also fiercely hostile to women, such as Brigitte Gabriel and the former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are critical of the unequal and often brutal treatment of women under sharia. Unable to answer their charges, Sarsour attacked them personally, tweeting that they were “asking 4 an a$$ whippin’” and that “they don’t deserve to be women.”

Sarsour with Keith Ellison

Reprehensible. Nonetheless, Sarsour enjoys the support of Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, Van Jones, Amnesty International, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a number of other left-wing individuals and institutions. When we caught up with her in November, Time and Glamour had joined the list. We also discovered that in addition to playing a role in the decision of Brandeis University to decide against giving an honorary degree to Hirsi Ali, Sarsour had also influenced New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to stop monitoring mosques – a move that made it possible for at least one jihadist, Saypullo Saipov, to take eight lives.

Abdul El-Sayed

Yet her star continues to climb. Earlier this summer it was reported that Abdul El-Sayed, one of the Democratic candidates for governor of Michigan (he lost the August 7 primary, thank goodness), is close to Sarsour. This didn’t come as a huge surprise. El-Sayed, a Muslim, received the endorsements of two prominent self-identified socialists, Senator Sanders and media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Still, as former prosecutor Ari Lieberman wrote, El-Sayed’s “association with Sarsour should raise alarm bells.”

Louis Farrakhan

For one thing, there’s her enthusiasm for sharia law. For another, she’s “an anti-Semite to her core and is on record making a number of disparaging comments about the ‘Jewish media,’ Zionism and Israel.” Then there’s her “support for Assata Shakur, a murderer who killed a New Jersey state trooper in a 1973 shootout.” (When CNN’s Jake Tapper, a card-carrying liberal, questioned her defense of Shakur, Sarsour “bizarrely accused Tapper of being a member of the ‘alt-right.’”) And let’s not forget “her unabashed support for the unrepentant Judeophobe, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.” Once upon a time Farrakhan was the third rail of American politics; no more, apparently.

“Aspiring Democratic politicians like El-Sayed,” lamented Lieberman, “no longer shy away from toxic bigots like Sarsour. Sadly, they embrace them.” No sooner had El-Sayed lost the primary, however, than another connection to Sarsour made the news. We’ll get to that next time. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, kingmaker?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

There’s always a first time. Never in the history of this site have we felt called upon to revisit a subject only a couple of weeks after writing about it – or him, or her – but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the charismatic 28-year-old who shook up the American political scene by beating a ten-term establishment Democrat, New York’s Joe Crowley, in a primary race for his House seat, has received so much media attention in the wake of her victory that we consider ourselves obliged to update our report on her.

Joe Crowley

As we noted, Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a Democratic-Socialist. Not too many years ago, she would have been considered too far left for a serious career in national politics. After Bernie Sanders, that’s no longer the case. Staggering percentages of millennial Americans tell pollsters that they prefer socialism or Communism to capitalism. It helps that the Soviet Union fell before they were born, and that they’re either uneducated about the reality of socialism or have been fed pro-socialist propaganda by their teachers. So it is that somebody like Ocasio-Cortez is being interviewed on national media – and getting cheers from studio audiences.

Tom Perez

She’s also getting cheers from Democratic Party officials. She hasn’t even been elected to the House yet, but on July 3 Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called her “the future of our party,” and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett tweeted a thumbs-up for the ambitious young woman.

Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t just been collecting endorsements, but handing them out. The Daily Beast reported that her support for Kerri Harris, a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware, and Ayanna Pressley, who is running for Congress from Massachusetts, has caused donations for both campaigns to soar. The same goes for Kaniela Ing and Brent Welder, who are running for Congress from Hawaii and Kansas respectively.

Abdul El-Sayed

One of Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsements has gained particular attention. “Michigan is blessed to have Abdul El-Sayed as a candidate for Governor, and I am proud to support him,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on July 2. Who is El-Sayed? A former public-health director for the city of Detroit, he is a Muslim who, as a college student, was a vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Students Association. At a recent candidates’ forum, he refused to provide a direct answer to a query about sharia law – a perfectly reasonable question given his religious affiliation, and given the fact that courts in Michigan, which has America’s highest concentration of Muslims, is currently facing cases of female genital mutilation and honor killing.

Patrick Colbeck

When El-Sayed’s opponent in the governor’s race, Patrick Colbeck, replied to the question by speaking frankly and critically about sharia law, jihad, and the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed went ballistic, accusing Republicans in general of racism and white supremacy. While Colbeck had made it clear that he was troubled by certain aspects of Islamic doctrine itself but had no personal animus against individual Muslims, a furious El-Sayed called Colbeck an Islamophobe, saying, “Now you may not hate Muslims, but I’ll tell you, Muslims definitely hate you!”

This, then, is a man whose political career Ocasio-Cortez is championing. Need we say more? Well, given the degree of attention she is receiving, and the amount of new information that is coming out about her by the day, we’ll probably find it necessary to revisit this rising socialist star yet again in the very near future.