It seemed like a positive development, which is rare enough coming from the Left. As Rick Moran noted at PJ Media Tuesday, “the Women’s March has forced the resignations of three founding board members who found themselves in trouble for explicit anti-Semitic statements. National co-chairs Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, and Linda Sarsour stepped down, making room for 16 new board members, including three Jewish women, in order to repair relations with activists groups that couldn’t stomach the virulent anti-Semitism of Sarsour and the others.” But don’t break out the hats and hooters just yet: one of the new board members is another venomous anti-Semite, Zahra Billoo of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
According to IPT News, Billoo “matches – perhaps even surpasses – outgoing board member Linda Sarsour’s hatred for Israel and those who support it. Billoo at least is candid enough to admit she doesn’t think the Jewish state should exist (she has not mentioned other countries she wishes would disappear).” Nor has she mentioned the new genocide of the Jews that would inevitably accompany the destruction of the State of Israel. And there’s more: “She repeatedly has compared Israeli soldiers to ISIS terrorists. Being pro-Israel, she has written, is tantamount to being ‘pro-terror, pro-violence, pro-land theft, and pro-apartheid.’”
The IPT correctly notes that “criticizing Israeli leaders, or government policies, is not anti-Semitic. But rejecting even the idea of the state’s existence, is. It’s a view shared by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and at least 25 other nations.”
Amid numerous appalling statements Billoo has made is one in which she said: “I don’t think we can work on civil rights together in the US” if someone supports Israel, because the Israelis, she said, are “baby killers.” Nor has Billoo restricted her victimhood posturing and hatred to Israel; the Jewish state’s chief ally, the United States, has been her target as well. She has accused the FBI of recruiting for the jihad terror group the Islamic State (ISIS): “I’m more afraid of racist Zionists who support Apartheid Israel than of the mentally ill young people the FBI recruits to join ISIS.”
What’s more, despite the fact that the board members that the Women’s March dismissed came under fire for refusing to condemn the racist anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, Billoo also holds the Nation of Islam leader in high esteem. IPT News reports that “she featured a Nation of Islam video on her blog in 2010. Seven months earlier, she felt compelled to share with her Twitter followers that she was “watching Farrakhan church speech, while at the gym.’”
Billoo is also practiced and skillful in advancing the fictional Muslim victimhood narrative. Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, she said: “It’s important to keep in mind that the Trump campaign has already had an unprecedented affect [sic] on Islamophobia. The anti-Muslim sentiment, the attacks on mosques and organizations, and the targeting of individuals is higher today than it was in the months following 9/11, and much of it we attribute to the election cycles themselves, which include the campaign rhetoric, and the policy proposals that were coming forward.”
In reality, however, the whole claim of Muslim victimhood after 9/11 is a scam. Jonathan S. Tobin reported for the Gatestone Institute in December 2017 that “the statistics published by the FBI over the last 17 years refute both the Islamophobia narrative and the claim of a widespread backlash against Muslims in the aftermath of terrorist attacks by Islamists.” The reality is that “the myth of a post-9/11 ‘backlash’ against Muslims is politically motivated and spread by groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which presents itself as a civil rights group, but was founded to serve as a front organization for the terrorist group Hamas. The effort to persuade the public that America is Islamophobic stemmed largely from the aim to shift the narrative about terrorism to that of an Islamist war on the West to one according to which Muslims are terrorized by and in the United States.” Billoo, of course, works for CAIR.
So why would the Women’s March go to all the trouble to replace their vicious anti-Semites with an even more virulently anti-Semitic propagandist? The answer is clear: because they just don’t care about anti-Semitism, but they do care about optics. And this move was from beginning to end all about optics: the feminist group could – and did – receive a wave of favorable publicity for dismissing its last crop of Jew-haters while relying on the ever-compliant establishment media to bury the fact that one of their replacements was someone just as bad. They could enjoy the appearance of rejecting anti-Semitism without actually having to reject it.
No one should be fooled. But many, many will be, especially those who do not wish to face the grim and shocking reality of how anti-Semitic the Left today has become.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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