Racism and Islamophobia help explain the Western world's horror and swift actions in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, speakers agreed in a March 3 discussion organized and livestreamed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

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There is "some inconsistency, to put it mildly, in the way the Western world has reacted to this crime" compared to others, said CAIR deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell. Muslims in China, Kashmir and the Palestinian territories are not seen as heroic when they resist oppressors.

"There are only two differences: white and religion, Muslim," he said later in the program.

No one making this argument considered why seeing Russia – one of the world's nuclear powers, led by a dictator bent on expanding his empire – launch an unprovoked war in Europe might trigger strong reactions in the West. The challenge to NATO allies was never mentioned.

The discussion was just the latest in a campaign by Islamists and their supporters to equate Russia's invasion of Ukraine with the Israel-Palestinian conflict and others.

There are key distinctions that the people pushing this message tend to ignore.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's ambitions in Ukraine are much more consistent with anti-Israel forces than they care to recognize.

Putin does not believe that Ukraine should exist as an independent, democratic country. He gave them two options: surrender or face annihilation.

That's the Palestinian rejectionist formula best exemplified by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Their own charters make it clear that the options for Israeli Jews are to surrender or face unceasing violence.

"Jihad is the solution to liberate Palestine and topple the infidel regimes," say PIJ bylaws. It rejects "any peaceful solution for the Palestinian Cause," and declares "jihad [the] solution and the martyrdom style as the only option for liberation."

The goal is to create "a state of terror, instability and panic in the souls of Zionists, and especially the groups of settlers, and force them to leave their houses."

Hamas's revised principles, which aimed at softening the original charter's blatant anti-Semitism and calls for killing Jews, still reject any peaceful coexistence with Israel: "Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded. … Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea."

In addition, a Jerusalem Post editorial on March 1 notes that there has never been any Ukrainian rocket fire aimed at Russian civilians. "Ukrainians never tried to throw the Russians into the Black Sea" or "arm their people with explosive vests and encourage them to ride buses in Moscow and blow themselves up along with as many innocent passengers as possible."

No serious person can argue that Russia is acting in self-defense. Putin claims that he is freeing Ukraine from its Jewish, yet somehow Nazi, president.

Rather than acknowledge these elements driving Putin's Ukraine war or any role violent Islamists have played in the other conflicts, it's easier to just blame bigotry.

"The people of Ukraine are 'European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed,' while Palestinians are Arab and have a darker complexion," wrote Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, who runs the university's Islamophobia Studies Center.

In an article published on March 2, he argued that Ukraine's heroic resistance against a Russian invasion is a lot like Palestinians fighting Israel, except the world hasn't rallied to support the Palestinians.

"When an officer in Ukraine blows himself and destroys a bridge to prevent the Russian (sic) from advancing, then he is celebrated for this sacrifice. … Palestinians are demonized for merely being Palestinians, and any and all resistance are framed as terrorism."

Again, there are significant and obvious distinctions that must be overlooked to buy this argument.

Vitaly Skakun Volodymyrovych did not try to kill anyone else – soldier or civilian – and by making the ultimate sacrifice, he may have saved his comrades' lives. That's not exactly the agenda jihadi suicide bombers follow.

"When is resistance justified?" Justice for All Washington director Hena Zuberi wondered during the CAIR discussion. "Is it only when the resisters are white? And especially when they're not Muslim?"

When Muslims resist, she said, the West thinks "these are terrorists, and they are rising up against our ally."

The public reaction shows the "embedded Islamophobia" that exists in the world, said executive director of CAIR-Los Angeles Hussam Ayloush. "The life of a Muslim is worth much less" than white, Christian Europeans.

Envy over the world's admiration for Ukrainian grit and courage in the face of overwhelming odds is also growing.

"I dream of the day armed Palestinian resistance to foreign invaders & occupiers in their homeland is treated by American media with the same sympathy & lionization that Ukrainian resistance is rightly portrayed," former Arab American Institute deputy director Omar Baddar tweeted on Feb. 26.

"Islamists and others claim that Americans respond differently when whites or Christians are oppressed than when non-whites and non-Christians suffer. This is both offensive and patently untrue," said Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum. "One example: In 1990, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait not only prompted an outpouring of sympathy for Kuwaitis similar to that now for Ukrainians, but US forces then did something in Kuwait out of the question in Ukraine; they fought the invader and expelled it. Americans fight oppression regardless of skin color or religion."

Zahra Billoo, CAIR's executive director for the San Francisco Bay area, retweeted the message to her followers. During a March 2 panel discussion with Bazian, she made her own attempt to liken the Ukrainian and Palestinian causes.

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"Really resonant for what we're looking at this week, of course, around double standards is how white presenting Ukrainian refugees are being treated versus how black Ukrainian refugees are being treated," said Billoo, who is known for spewing anti-Semitism. "Or frankly, how the Palestinian resistance movement is treated as compared to how the Ukrainian resistance movement is treated. And so, to get to the core of the issue, we have to start to … pull apart the double standards and the hypocrisy."

Billoo and her boss, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, also believe that Israel has no right to exist. Awad made that clear in November when he referred to Tel Aviv as "occupied." And Billoo has flat out acknowledged that "I am not going to legitimize a country that I don't believe has a right to exist. And that's where I am."

That's awfully close to what Vladimir Putin thinks about Ukraine.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Less than four days after a gunman held four Jews hostage inside a Texas synagogue in a doomed attempt to free a convicted terrorist, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) thinks it is ready to renew its campaign to achieve the same objective.

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"It's time to push back," CAIR's Dallas chapter director Faizan Syed wrote on Jan. 19. "The news coverage around Dr. Aafia Siddiqui over the last few days has been inaccurate, one-sided and made to paint a victim of the war on terror as a terrorist. The 'Free Dr. Aafia Campaign' has developed a media and public resource guide to correct the false narrative."

Syed ended his post with the hashtags #FreeAafia #IAmAafia.

Siddiqui is a US-educated Pakistani serving 86 years in prison for attempting to kill US personnel in Afghanistan. She carried sodium cyanide and various other chemicals when she was arrested, along with documents in her handwriting that mentioned a "mass casualty attack … NY city monuments" and "Dirty bomb: Need few oz. radioactive material."

The US personnel who tried to interview her were unaware that she was left unsecured behind a partition in the room. One of the Army personnel put his M4 rifle down. Siddiqui was able to grab it and open fire, said prosecutors. Her shots missed the mark and she was wounded by return fire.

But CAIR and other Islamist groups in the United States say Siddiqui is innocent – a victim of torture during years of secret detention and someone incapable of the attack as described by the government and the witnesses present.

It turns out CAIR's commitment to Siddiqui's cause goes far beyond the seminars and protests that have been reported this week. CAIR is one of the driving forces behind the "Free Dr. Aafia Movement" and is directly raising money for her defense.

"The Free Dr. Aafia Movement is a joint project between CAIR-Texas Austin & DFW and the Elbially Law Firm who legally represents Dr. Aafia Siddiqui," according to the Free Dr. Aafia website, created in August. "Our goal is to create campaigns, build coalitions, and educate the world about Dr. Aafia so we can one day see her released from prison and returned to her children."

"Together, we will free Dr. Aafia Siddiqui!" a donation link says. "Funds are collected through CAIR-TX Austin & DFW for disbursement."

Attorney Marwa Elbially and the Free Aafia campaign issued a statement on Jan. 15 as Malik Faisal Akram held Congregation Beth Israel Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and three other hostages during Shabbat.

"His actions are heinous and wrong," said the statement. "Her case must be addressed through the courts of law. Dr. Aafia and her family are praying for this situation to resolve peacefully."

One hostage was released around 5 p.m. during the standoff. The hostage-taker was shot and killed by law-enforcement agents later that night after Cytron-Walker threw a chair at him, allowing him and two others times to escape.

Syed's post on Wednesday included a link to a "resource guide" to correct what he called a false narrative about her. For example, CAIR and other advocates point to a lack of gun powder residue on Siddiqui's hands after the shooting.

During a December seminar in East Plano, Syed called Siddiqui's case "one of the greatest cases of injustice in US history."

But the Second US Court of Appeals noted that "one of Siddiqui's own witnesses … testified that two rifle shells were recovered from the room, and by a government expert's testimony that the absence of certain forensic evidence from the room was not necessarily inconsistent with the firing of a weapon."

The guide also cites Siddiqui's small build to cast down on whether she could have handled the M4 and switched off its safety in order to open fire. In fact, trial evidence showed that she was trained on handling and shooting firearms while a student in Boston.

Her trial featured testimony from six eyewitnesses, who described the attack consistently in detail. Prosecutors say that "perjury, in this case, was blatant, and it concerned the central issue in this case – whether she attempted to kill members of the Interview Team."

The guide claims there are no "direct, provable links" to Al-Qaida, omitting Siddiqui's 2003 marriage to a nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The CAIR guide does acknowledge her frequent antisemitic outbursts but excuses them by saying "she was mentally impaired and should be understood in the larger context of her overall mental health." It also dismisses the fact that terrorist groups, including ISIS and the Taliban, offered to release American hostages in exchange for Siddiqui's freedom. Those efforts are not due to Siddiqui's status, it says, but are efforts by the terrorists to "gain legitimacy by exploiting the case of Dr. Siddiqui. For news outlets to aid and abet these terrorist organizations by making that link is reprehensible and unethical."

On Sunday, The Washington Post described Siddiqui as "a cause célèbre in Islamist militant circles, with frequent demands for her release."

That description also applies to multiple American-based Islamist groups, such as CAIR and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), which are championing her cause. But the Washington Post has not reported about this domestic Islamist effort to free Siddiqui.

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In addition to the Dallas chapter's leading role in the campaign, CAIR chapters throughout the country have held protests calling for Siddiqui's freedom. At an October rally in New York, two former CAIR officials cast her case in religious terms.

"She carries our faith within her, and our faith has been assaulted when Aafia was assaulted," said Yousef Baig, who used to work in CAIR's Houston office. "Our religion, our book, our faith was desecrated when she was tortured. And our prophet is disappointed because we have not done enough for her."

"Allah is testing us," former CAIR Florida executive director Hassan Shibly told the rally. "What are we doing to stand for our sister, for her family, for all those victims of the United States war of terror against the Muslim world? She is another victim of the US war of terror. And the perpetrators will be held accountable, if not in this life, in the next. [Donald] Rumsfeld, [George H.W.] Bush senior, [Colin] Powell – they are all answering for their deeds at this very moment. And they must answer for each and every Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, every person of color, every person throughout the world whose blood has been shed."

It's one thing to ensure a defendant receives a fair trial in a court of law. It's quite another to reject what courts saw as "overwhelming" evidence about a woman with family ties to Al-Qaida.

Perhaps, someday, CAIR "will be held accountable" for that.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post CAIR revives its campaign to free Aafia Siddiqui appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

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Marc Lamont Hill can make the outrageous claim that Israel poisons Palestinian water and still be invited to speak at fundraisers and other events. Linda Sarsour can repeat the blood libel that Jews and Zionists justify police killings of unarmed black people in America – and worse, are responsible for them – and still get a lucrative Simon & Schuster book deal and serve as an official surrogate for Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.

Her chronic displays of anti-Semitism largely are overlooked by national news outlets.

Fellow Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr can equate Israel with ISIS, a sentiment repeatedly uttered by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter directors Zahra Billoo and Hussam Ayloush, without consequence. Billoo comes right out and says she does not "believe [Israel] has a right to exist."

She's still CAIR's top official in the San Francisco Bay area.

Their obsessive focus on Israel is telling. Syria has spent years engaging in mass murder of hundreds of thousands of its own people and displacing millions more, numbers exponentially greater than Palestinian casualties in all the wars and conflicts with Israel. But thus far, none of these activists have advocated ending these, or any other states. Just the world's lone Jewish state.

And that brings us to a protest held Sunday in front of the White House. A small group met for the anti-Israel group Al-Awda: The Right of Return of Palestinian Refugees' "national rally to support Palestine and protest AIPAC." The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was holding its annual convention a short distance away.

"AIPAC is a terrorist organization," Eric Resnick, who was part of the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace from Cleveland, told the protest. "AIPAC commits war crimes."

Advocacy, when done in support of Israel, is a war crime. He didn't offer any examples.

Another protester held a sign reading, "Stop the genocide, End Israel, Free Palestine."

"Can I get an amen for that?" asked speaker Richard Siegel, identifying the sign-holder as his friend.

The data makes clear there is no genocide targeting Palestinians, whose population has grown by 400 percent in the past 50 years. But the solution Siegel and his friend offer actually would be a genocide. If you "End Israel," you destroy a people and their culture. There is no historical example of that being done without massive death and devastation.

This virtue-signaling ignorance, unfortunately, is not an aberration at anti-Israel protests.

Rare is the anti-Israel gathering that does not feature the chant, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." It was repeated dozens of times during Sunday's Al-Awda protest. It's a not-so-subtle dream of a Palestinian state that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, swallowing all of Israel.

That vision is codified in an updated, supposedly more moderate Hamas charter, a document that unambiguously calls for Israel's annihilation: "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea."

The protest featured a number of D-list speakers, many of whom were introduced by first name only. One, identified as Andre from Baltimore, let his guard slip for a moment, drawing knowing laughs from the crowd.

"We say, 'Down with Israel.' I really want to say 'Death to Israel.' Israel out of occupied Palestine, Palestine for the Palestinian people. Long live Palestine, sisters and brothers."

Another Baltimore resident, Miranda, represented something called Youth Against War and Racism. Yet she offered some bigoted scapegoating of her own, blaming Israel for global woes that are felt here at home. She claimed Israel exists solely for "driving up profits, they're driving up prices." Through its "active genocide against the Palestinian people ... it's actively destroying the lives of people, working people here in the United States."

Don Bryant, from Al-Awda's Cleveland chapter, argued it is not anti-Semitic to deny Jews a country in their ancestral homeland. If anything, "Israel is the anti-Semite here," because Palestinians are a Semitic people and Israel is "bombing the crap outta Palestine."

Israel's bombings in Gaza have followed terrorist attacks, including rockets fired at Israeli communities. The attacks are focused on terrorist infrastructure and often include advanced warnings for civilians to leave the area in an attempt to minimize casualties. No speaker urged Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad to cease firing those rockets at civilians.

Siegel boasted of his past anti-Israel protests outside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "because Holocaust education basically serves Zionism ... the way Holocaust education is presented, it's presented in such a way that presents the Jews as the ultimate victims and presents Israel as the solution."

Future protests should be held at the museum instead of in front of the White House, said Eric Resnick, representing the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace.

"We need to move this rally to the Holocaust museum and use it to tell the story of the Nakba," meaning catastrophe – how Palestinians refer to Israel's creation. "Because when those people say 'Never Again,' they don't mean 'Never Again' to anyone, anywhere else. They just mean 'Never Again' to Jews. And they also mean the Jews can be as mean and as nasty and commit as many crimes as they want to because they were victims once."

The museum's website offers direct evidence proving he is wrong.

Siegel, meanwhile, likened secular Zionism to a cult.

"It's almost like we're inventing a new Jewish religion based on Christianity that poses the Jews as Jesus, Auschwitz as the cross and Israel as the resurrection."

Later, protesters marched toward the convention center to protest the AIPAC convention. There, a man was videotaped shouting that "the Holocaust will come back to you ... you gonna get burned if you don't give us the land."

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

The post Anti-Israel activists don't care about the facts appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Despite a long record of anti-Semitic speech and alleged radical connections, Linda Sarsour manages to enjoy a reputation as a "civil rights activist" and "community organizer."

Simon & Schuster thought well enough of her to publish her memoir this week.

Video: IPT News

In this video, the Investigative Project on Terrorism examines the gap between the flowery hype aimed at driving Sarsour's book sales and the uglier reality about her message.

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

The post Is Linda Sarsour anti-Israel? Her book says something else appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

"It doesn't matter to me who you are," she said. "Come to the aid of people who are the most broken in our country, and that's the thing that I never just understood. I never went to a movement and asked people to fill out a form and say, 'Please tell me all your political views.' I mean, that's not how it works."

But that's exactly what she did.

Less than three years ago, Sarsour, who believes "nothing is creepier than Zionism," told an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference that the fight against what she called a "Muslim registry" didn't have room for people who don't support anti-Israel campaigns. "We have limits to the type of friendships that we're looking for right now," she said, and those limits involve people who "have been steadfast, courageous, have been standing up and protecting their own communities, those who have taken the risk to stand up and say, 'We are with the Palestinian people, we unequivocally support BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctioning Israel] when it comes to Palestinian human rights and have been attacked viciously by the very people who are telling you that they're about to stand on the front line of the Muslim registry program.'"

For anyone else?

"No thank you, sisters and brothers."

She drew similar restrictions around people in the feminist movement just a year later in an interview with The Nation.

"It just doesn't make any sense for someone to say, 'Is there room for people who support the State of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?' There can't be in feminism," said Sarsour. "You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There's just no way around it."

NYU Linda Sarsour should talk with this Linda Sarsour.

Sarsour warned her audience against forces that seek to divide Jews and Muslims, and Jews and black people.

"So you ever wonder why somebody would want to figure out how to pin up Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans?" she asked. "Who benefits from that? Who benefits from dividing these communities? Who benefits from dividing black people from Jews – by the way, there are black Jews, let's be clear. Who benefits from the divisions? Not us. Not Jewish people. Not Muslims. We don't benefit. In fact, you know what that does? It's divide and conquer. It actually makes us all vulnerable. So I don't play into that."

At no time did Sarsour acknowledge her own contributions to dividing Jews from Muslims and from black people.

Her 2016 AMP speech, for example, included her frustration at "Muslims willing to sell Palestine just for a little acceptance and nod from the white man and white power in these United States of America."

Last September, she blamed Jews for police shootings of unarmed black people because of an Anti-Defamation League program that takes police executives to Israel to learn about fighting terrorism and riots. The ADL is the most prominent Jewish organization in the United States.

To Sarsour, this leads directly to "what? Stop and frisk, killing unarmed black people across the country."

She made a similar assertion during a speech in 2015 at the 20th anniversary of avowed anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March.

"The same people who justify the massacres of Palestinian people and call it collateral damage are the same people who justify the murder of black young men and women," she said.

On Monday, the same person accused others of trying to divide Jews and black people.

She also claimed to stand by women in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are fighting compulsory hijab laws. If she doesn't say it often, it's because she's already got too much on her plate, she said. And she endorsed equality for gays, lesbians and transgender people.

"What's so radical about believing that LGBTQIA people deserve to be safe in every space that they're in?" she asked. "What's so radical about that?"

There is indeed a place in the Middle East where LGBTQ people can live safely and can serve openly in the military – and that's Israel. Sarsour doesn't talk about that reality, and Israel-haters dismiss it as "pinkwashing," a transparent and superficial decision that is not rooted in equality but a scheme to make Israel look good.

But contrast that with Palestinian public opinion. A 2013 Pew poll found 93% of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that society should not accept homosexuality, while 4% thought it should. The question didn't go as far as gay marriage- just whether society should accept people.

Sarsour didn't address this or any other way that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority serve as obstacles to the peace she says she wants. She twice described herself as "a visionary" on Monday night but received no challenging questions except for those shouted from the audience. The moderator's final question: "What gives you hope?"

We hope her audience didn't fall for this attempt to soften Sarsour's image as accepting and inclusive.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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