David Horowitz: “I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. … For it or against it?”
Jumanah Albahri: “For it.”
On May 10, 2010, Jumanah Albahri, an ex-officer of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), admitted during an event put on by Young Americans for Freedom and featuring David Horowitz as a speaker, that she supported a second Holocaust. During the exchange, Albahri also refused to condemn Hamas as a genocidal organization. This chilling exchange has by now made headlines around the country.
Albahri’s blatant support for genocide has sparked a backlash, prompting students to try and get the UC chancellors to condemn her remarks as inflammatory hate speech. The movement has taken the form of a petition directed at UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. (The petition originated in a Facebook group named “Condemn UCSD MSA’s ex-Officer for Supporting 2nd Holocaust.”
Begun on May 13, the group has, in the course of a few days, swelled to nearly 600 members. It provides updates on the situation, including the press releases and statements released by the UCSD MSA, Chancellor Fox, and Albahri herself. Most importantly, of course, it provides a link to the petition asking Chancellor Fox (and potentially the other UC chancellors) to directly condemn Albahri’s pro-Holocaust statement.
On May 15, in a half-hearted damage control scramble, the UCSD MSA released a statement denouncing “all groups or organizations, whether state or non-state actors, who target civilians or target a civilian population to impose collective punishment.” The statement is very vague and non-committal, and does not even mention the incident or the people that elicited it. It then goes into an anti-Israel diatribe and a quote from Malcom X that is totally irrelevant to the situation in question. It is, for all intents and purposes, utterly meaningless.
Albahri, on May 16, released a statement via a new blog she set up titled “For Truth, For Justice, For Peace.” In her statement, Albahri attacks Horowitz as a “seasoned polemicist” who avoided her initial (and irrelevant) question and accuses him of turning the conversation around on her, which, of course, is something one must expect when leaping into these types of discussions. Albahri writes:
Towards the end of the exchange, I became emotional. I could no longer hear Mr. Horowitz speaking and so did not even hear his injection of Hezbollah’s credo of “rounding up” Jews in his last tangent. I could no longer contain my anger at being implicitly and improperly labeled a terrorist, an anti-Semite, and a proponent of genocide. The answer I was coerced into giving grossly misrepresented my beliefs and ideologies.
My answer, “for it,” in the context in which it was said does NOT mean “for” genocide. I was referring to his initial question that asked me for my position on Hamas, a topic that for his own political reasons he was relentless in pursuing. “For it” was not a legitimization of Hezbollah’s or anyone else’s credo for that matter that Jews should be exterminated. In fact, Mr. Horowitz’s intent was to entrap me with his barrage of questions so that he could avoid answering my question, and construe any answer that I would provide as anti-Semitic, genocidal hate speech in order to further his political agenda.
As everyone might have expected, and is sadly typical of the anti-Israel party, Albahri attempted to contort the situation in order to victimize herself. She seeks to turn the matter of supporting genocide into a complicated and multifaceted topic, when in reality it is one of the rare aspects of life that is black and white; you are either for or against it. There is no middle ground.
The claim that Horowitz emotionally abused Albahri is being trumpeted by the so-called “pro-Palestinians,” who have so far only defended and excused Albahri instead of condemning her flagrant support for genocide. And if that’s not enough, Albahri goes on to admit her own ignorance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as expose her own hypocrisy about her support for Hamas:
In addition, Mr. Horowitz asked me to condemn Hamas as a genocidal organization; which to my limited knowledge on the subject, is another unsupported claim made by Mr. Horowitz.
My opinion of Hamas is not as simple as condemn or condone, “for it” or “against it.” I firmly believe that the killing of civilians … is one of the highest crimes in the eyes of God and is morally reprehensible and abhorrent. But I condone Hamas in its ambition to liberate the Palestinian people.
Albahri admits to her own “limited knowledge” while at the same time refuting the claim that Hamas is a genocidal organization. Any simpleton who has ever taken the time to read the Hamas charter or simply research the organization will find numerous statements within the charter blatantly propagating the extermination of Jews everywhere. Clearly, Albahri has yet to perform sufficient research on the conflict to be considered anything in the way of an informed participant. This begs a couple questions: Why did she think herself capable of standing up to David Horowitz, someone with much more experience and knowledge on the subject? Was it Albahri’s way of playing into the rebel stereotype, of standing up to authority despite her lack of credibility of which she is clearly unaware?
As for Albahri’s support of Hamas, she explicitly condemns the murder of innocent civilians and even alludes (barely) to the idea that Hamas is guilty of this. In her own words, killing civilians “is one of the highest crimes of God.” Wouldn’t it then follow that an organization that engages in criminal activity is, by logical extension, a criminal organization? One cannot say the mafia is not a criminal organization when it is plainly guilty of murder and theft. Likewise, Albahri, by her own logic, cannot say that Hamas is not a criminal organization when they engage in what she describes as “one of the highest crimes of God.” But I suppose such logical fallacies matter very little to her.
Albahri, for all her apparent passion for the Palestinian cause, is blind to her own hypocrisy and ignorance. This is true of most bandwagon Muslim radicals and anti-Israelis. While I doubt the sincerity of Albahri’s “apology,” the sincerity of her pro-genocide comment does not matter. Propagation of genocide has absolutely no place in our society, much less in our schools.
This is not acceptable, and it will be stopped. Please sign the petition to UCSD Chancellor Fox today.
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