The New York Times has published a lot of ridiculous articles in its day, but this is one of the most ridiculous ever. It portrays Linda Sarsour, who has led a charmed life as a darling of the Leftist intelligentsia, as the poor victim not just of the sinister “alt-right,” but of “Russian trolls,” no less. They supposedly spread material about Sarsour that was “inflammatory and based on falsehoods.” The problem the Times’ Ellen Barry has here, however, is that the allegedly “inflammatory and based on falsehoods” things about Sarsour that she adduces here are actually true.
Is she a “radical Islamist”? Well, she hasn’t flown any planes into skyscrapers, but on September 22, 2011, Sarsour tweeted: “shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense. People just know the basics.” Her position didn’t change over time. On May 12, 2015, she tweeted: “If you are still paying interest than Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America. #justsaying.” And on April 10, 2016, Sarsour tweeted about Sharia again: “Sharia Law is misunderstood & has been pushed as some evil Muslim agenda.”
Is Sarsour a “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign”? She has said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism” and has equated it with “racism.” She is an enthusiastic supporter of the “Palestinian” jihad against Israel, and has even claimed that feminists cannot and must not support Israel. And as for ISIS, she did make the ISIS signal. She did it while claiming that it meant more than support for ISIS, but one wonders whether all the ISIS supporters who saw the photo and were encouraged by it read her explanation, which doesn’t disavow ISIS anyway, despite the fact that the whole world at this point knows that the upraised index finger is ISIS’ favored signal. Is She anti-U.S.? Well, she has called for jihad against the U.S. government.
She also called for jihad against Trump, although this article tries to give the impression that this claim was a product of the Russian troll farm. Sure, jihad has other meanings, but everyone knows that jihad terrorists think of what they do as jihad, and it was the height of irresponsibility for Sarsour to use this language.
But she has the New York Times covering for her, so she has nothing to worry about. The Times dutifully reports on her imaginings of a “deranged person” coming for her, but of course has never said a word about very real people trying to murder Pamela Geller, one of Sarsour’s bête noires according to this Times article, and me. Hey, she is on the correct side, so her imaginary death threats are much worse than real murder attempts, plots and threats against political undesirables.
“How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step,” by Ellen Barry, New York Times, September 18, 2022:
…As one of the four co-chairs of the Women’s March, Ms. Sarsour came with a track record — and with baggage.
The daughter of a Palestinian American shopkeeper in Crown Heights, she had risen to prominence as a voice for the rights of Muslims after 9/11. In 2015, when she was 35, a New York Times profile anointed her — a “Brooklyn Homegirl in a Hijab” — as something rare, a potential Arab American candidate for elected office….
That week, Russian amplifier accounts began circulating posts that focused on Ms. Sarsour, many of them inflammatory and based on falsehoods, claiming she was a radical Islamist, “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign.”…
When she was invited to appear as a graduation speaker at the City University of New York’s graduate school of public health, the furor began weeks in advance. It caught the attention of the far-right polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos, who traveled to New York for a protest that attracted, as a Times reporter wrote, “a strange mix, including right-leaning Jews and Zionists, commentators like Pamela Geller, and some members of the alt-right.”
“Linda Sarsour is a Shariah-loving, terrorist-embracing, Jew-hating, ticking time bomb of progressive horror,” Mr. Yiannopoulos told the crowd.
Ms. Sarsour recalls the period leading up to the graduation speech as particularly stressful. As it approached, she had visions of a figure coming out of the shadows to kill her, “some poor, like, deranged person who was consumed by the dark corners of the internet, who would be fueled by hate.”
Russian troll accounts were part of that clamor; beginning more than a month before her speech, a handful of amplifier accounts managed by Russia’s largest military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., circulated expressions of outrage at her being selected, often hashtagged #CancelSarsour….
When @TEN_GOP tweeted, “linda sarsour openly calls for muslims to wage jihad against trump, please look into this matter,” it received 6,222 retweets and 6,549 likes….
