A Proud Socialist

Born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York, Linda Sarsour is a Palestinian-American community activist who has served as executive director of the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY) since 2005. She is also a board member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York (MDCNY), and a member of the Justice League NYC. She proudly identifies herself as “a Socialist” and as a “card-carrying” member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Compassion for Saddam Hussein

When American troops took a disheveled and pathetic-looking Saddam Hussein into custody in December 2003, Sarsour lamented the capture of the Iraqi president because he was viewed as a hero by so many Palestinians. “I think he’s done a lot of things he shouldn’t have done,” said Sarsour, “but I was hurt. My Arab pride was hurt. Palestinians are under so much oppression and no other Arab country ever helped them.”

Defending & Honoring Known & Convicted Terrorists

During a 2008 question-and-answer session at New York University with White House terrorism adviser John Brennan, Sarsour lamented that “the PATRIOT Act is now going to be reauthorized.” Moreover, she depicted the unjustified arrest of Muslim terror suspects as an all-too-frequent occurrence: “Looking at cases of Fahad Hashmi, Aafia Siddiqui, Siraj Matin (sic), these are things that are happening every day in our community.” But as the Investigative Project on Terrorism points out: “The record does little to bolster Sarsour’s argument. Hashmi pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaida. Siddiqui, known as “Lady al-Qaida,” was convicted of attempting to assault and murder American officers in Afghanistan. Prosecutors say she grabbed an Army officer’s M-4 rifle and fired it at another officer and other members of a U.S. interview team at an Afghan police compound in July 2008. And the Second District Court of Appeals upheld Matin Siraj’s conviction in connection to a plot to blow up the Herald Square subway station.”

In August 2015, Sarsour tweeted support for the incarcerated Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Allan, a known recruiter of suicide bombers.

On August 12, 2017 in Chicago, Sarsour attended a farewell party for Rasmea Odeh, the former Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who famously masterminded a 1969 bombing that killed two Jews is a Jerusalem food market, and who was scheduled for imminent deportation from the United States on charges of immigration fraud.

Supporter of BDS and Its Hamas Agenda

An outspoken critic of Israel, Sarsour supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

At the Islamic Society of North America‘s national convention in September 2018, for instance, she stated: “I am an unapologetic pro-BDS, one-state solution supporting resistance supporter here in the U.S.”

Contempt for Israel, Zionism, & Jews

Vis-a-vis the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Sarsour favors a one-state solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. She made clear her opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state when she tweeted in October 2012 that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

Falsely maintaining that “Palestine existed before the State of Israel,” Sarsour seeks to help “bring back a Palestinian State for the Palestinian people.” To advance this agenda, Sarsour has tweeted images of fraudulent maps claiming to depict the “Palestinian loss of land” that supposedly occurred between 1946 and 2000.

In October 2015, Sarsour posted on Twitter a photo of a young Palestinian boy clutching two stones as he stared down a group of Israeli soldiers, and labeled it “The definition of courage.” When numerous Twitter users, including Queens Councilman Rory Lancman, subsequently criticized Sarsour’s controversial post, she tweeted in response: “The Zionist trolls are out to play. Bring it. You will never silence me.”

During a March 2019 press conference, videographer Matthew Perdie asked Sarsour if she believed that the state of Israel had a right to exist. “We’ll answer questions later, after the press conference,” Sarsour responded, adding, “I’ll be happy to answer that.” But when Perdie caught up with Sarsour following the press conference and repeated the question to her, Sarsour ignored him and refused to answer. Soon, several men in Sarsour’s entourage began physically pushing the videographer and asking him questions such as: “Why are you here?” and “Do you work for Israel?”

During an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference on November 28, 2019, Sarsour stated that Israel “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.”

In a speech which she delivered in Chicago at the “12th Annual Conference for Palestine in the U.S.,” Sarsour questioned how Zionists could be opposed to the separation of family members at the U.S.-Mexico border and the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, if they were supportive of Israel:

“Ask them this: How can you be against white supremacy in the United States of America and the idea of living in a supremacist state based on race and class but then you support a state like Israel that is built on supremacy; that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else. How do you then not support the caging of children at the U.S.-Mexican border, but then you support the detainment and the detention of Palestinian children in Palestine? How does that work, sisters and brothers?”

While endorsing a number of different anti-Israel strategies employed by activists, Sarsour in February 2020 said: “If you are on the side of the oppressor, or you are defending the oppressor or you are actually trying to humanize the oppressor, then that’s a problem, sisters and brothers, and we gotta be able to say that is not the position of the Muslim-American community.” As the Clarion Project subsequently noted: “Dehumanization was a classic Nazi tactic used during World War II to turn the German people against the Jews, who were referred to as rats and vermin.” Shortly after Sarsour had delivered her comments, the United Nations published a blacklist of Israeli businesses situated in Jewish areas located beyond the 1967 lines in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

Denouncing Anti-Islamist Women

Sarsour has condemned the prominent anti-Islamists Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the latter of whom was raised as a Muslim and was subjected to female genital mutilation. “I wish I could take their vaginas away — they don’t deserve to be women,” said Sarsour in on March 8, 2011.

Supporter of “Occupy Wall Street”

In October 2011, Sarsour, who holds free-market economics in low regard, expressed, on behalf of “Muslim New Yorkers,” “solidarity and support” for the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement.

Portraying America As Racist & Islamophobic

During a February 23, 2012 interview with Russia TV, Sarsour explained that contemporary Islamophobia is essentially a modern-day expression of the same type of hatred that enabled America to carry out atrocities in the past. “This has happened throughout the history of our country,” she said. “Our country was based on, you know, genocide on native Americans, based on slavery, racial profiling has existed for centuries in this community.”

In an opinion piece which she co-authored for Al-Jazeera English on March 22, 2012, Sarsour wrote that “[t]he value of Arab life — whether nameless Palestinian children bombed by American-funded fighter jets or American youth profiled, questioned and incarcerated for frequenting a particular mosque — is spiraling downwards rapidly in the U.S. and at a more accelerated rate in the Arab World.”

Over the years, Sarsour’s activism has extended also to racial matters within the United States. For instance, when the black, hoodie-donning Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by a “white Hispanic” man in an infamous 2012 altercation, Sarsour penned an April 2012 article titled “My Hijab Is My Hoodie” and declared herself “among the millions mourning the killing of Trayvon.” “Blacks in America continue to face racism on a daily basis,” she wrote, “from the workplace to interactions with law enforcement. And yet racism against African-Americans is publicly acknowledged as unacceptable…. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for Muslims in America. Bigotry against Muslims is quite acceptable. From media pundits to elected officials to presidential hopefuls, spewing misinformation and hatred about Muslims and Islam has been normalized. In America, terrorism has become synonymous with Arabs and Muslims.”

In the same piece, Sarsour likened the brutal March 21, 2012 murder of 32-year-old Shaima Alawadi — an Iraqi-American woman who was beaten to death in her own home — to that of Trayvon Martin. Most notably, Sarsour emphasized the fact that Alawadi’s killer had left a note saying “Go Back to your country, you terrorist” beside the woman’s body. But Sarsour’s narrative depicting Alawadi as a tragic victim of anti-Muslim bias in the United States fell apart when investigators later learned that the victim’s husband, Kassim Alhimidi, had forged the note in an effort to obscure the fact that he himself had murdered his wife in an honor killing (for which he was ultimately sentenced to 26 years in prison).

Also in “My Hijab Is My Hoodie,”Sarsour wrote: “According to a report released by the FBI in 2011, anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by nearly 50% in 2010. The latest statistics show a jump from 107 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2009 to 160 in 2010.” Yet Sarsour made no mention of the fact that while this was technically a 50% increase, it was hardly what could be characterized as an epidemic in a nation of 310 million people. Nor did she point out that the anti-Muslim hate-crime count of 2010 was in fact consistent with the normal, slightly fluctuating incidence of such events in other years—e.g., 155 in 2002, 149 in 2003, and 156 in 2004. Equally noteworthy is the fact that when the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes had dropped from 156 in 2006 to 115 in 2007—and from 481 in 2001 (the year of the 9/11 attacks) to 155 in 2002—she did not suggest that bigotry against Muslims was steeply declining.

In the aftermath of an August 2014 incident where a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri had shot and killed a violent black criminal named Michael Brown, Sarsour co-founded the group Muslims For Ferguson, to draw a parallel between the respective forms of oppression allegedly suffered by black and Muslim Americans.

In December 2015, Sarsour wrote the foreword to a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) petition that said: “Islamophobia is on the rise in America. Since the tragic Paris attacks and San Bernardino shootings, there have been more reports of Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats, and violence targeting American Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim, and Islamic institutions than during any other period of time since the 9/11 terror attacks.” “Please sign [CAIR’s] petition,” wrote Sarsour. “Call on the Republican Party to demonstrate leadership within the conservative movement by denouncing Islamophobia.”

In 2016, Sarsour established Rebuild With Love, a project to raise money for the reconstruction of eight black churches that had been “burned to the ground” in the days following the racist shooting of nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina the previous year. Characterizing the burnings as “attacks on Black culture, Black religion and Black lives,” Sarsour said: “As Muslims we know the importance of protecting the vulnerable” from “intimidation” and violence.

Accuses CIA of Orchestrating Terror Plot in Order to Defame Islam

In May 2012 Sarsour tweeted that the so-called “underwear bomber,” an al-Qaeda operative who on Christmas Day 2009 had tried to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger jet in mid-flight, was actually a CIA agent participating in America’s “war on Islam.”

Condemns Republican Lawmakers for Suggesting That Muslim Brotherhood Was Seeking Political Influence

Sarsour was outraged when, in June 2012, five Republican lawmakers (most prominently, Rep. Michele Bachmann) sent letters to the inspectors general at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, and State, asking that they investigate whether the Muslim Brotherhood—the ideological wellspring from which such terrorist outfits as al Qaeda and Hamas first emerged—was gaining undue influence over U.S. government officials. One letter, noting that Huma Abedin‘s position as a close aide to Hillary Clinton “affords her routine access to the secretary [of state] and to policymaking,” expressed concern over the fact that Abedin and several of her family members were “connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.” Sarsour became part of the controversy when some individuals (including a Tea Party activist) who served with her on a Brooklyn neighborhood advisory panel asked — upon learning that members of Sarsour’s family had previously been arrested on charges that they had aided and abetted Hamas — that she be removed from the panel. In reaction to these events, Sarsour denied that she had any ties to Hamas or to other radical Islamic organizations and said: “[For] Michele Bachmann and some people of the Tea Party movement — the fact that we are Muslim means we are disloyal to our country and have hidden agendas…. Michele Bachmann, [Congressman] Peter King and their colleagues are trying to further marginalize Muslim Americans from civic engagement and political life. I have news for them: It’s not working.”

Ties to Radical Islamist Organizations

In November 2012 in Baltimore, Sarsour spoke at a Muslim Public Affairs Council conference titled “Facing Race: Xenophobic Hate Crimes.”

In September 2013 the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presented Sarsour with its first “American Muslim of the Year” award. The following year, CAIR invited Sarsour to its 20th Annual Banquet, where she affectionately referred to CAIR executive director Nihad Awad as “Uncle Nihad.”

According to CounterJihad.com, Sarsour “has attended numerous rallies sponsored by Al-Awda, promoted and solicited donations for their events, and … spoken at their rallies.” Sarsour has also solicited donations for the Hamas-affiliated Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

In November 2015, Sarsour was a featured speaker at the 21st anniversary banquet of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ [CAIR’s] San Francisco Bay Area chapter.

In June 2016, Sarsour spoke at a Grand Iftar Fundraising Dinner in Falls Church, Virginia, sponsored by Islamic Relief USA (IR-USA). Six months later, she spoke at an IR-USA fundraising dinner “to benefit the people of Palestine.”

In September 2016, Sarsour was a featured speaker at the Islamic Society of North America‘s 53rd annual convention in Rosemont, Illinois.

In October 2016, Sarsour spoke at an event sponsored by the University of North Carolina chapter of the Muslim Students Association, to honor the memory of three Muslim students who had been killed in Chapel Hill in February 2015.

In November 2016, Sarsour spoke at the annual conference of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), where, as the Investigative Project on Terrorism puts it, she: (a) “lashed out at Jews who extended a hand of friendship and solidarity over concerns that increasing hostility toward Muslims in America might lead to draconian government action”; and (b) “lashed out at fellow Muslims who accepted the gesture and joined in a new inter-faith dialogue.” Said Sarsour at the conference:

“We have limits to the type of friendships that we’re looking for right now, and I want to be friends with those whom I know 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. No thank you, sisters and brothers.”

In December 2016 in Chicago, Sarsour spoke at the annual (jointly held) convention of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America, where she claimed that modern-day American Muslims suffer much greater hardship and indignity than the black slaves of yesteryear: “The sacrifice [that] the black Muslim slaves went through in this country is nothing compared to Islamaphobia [sic] today.” Also at that event, Sarsour posed for a picture with Salah Sarsour (no verifiable relation), who: (a) is a member of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee; (b) is a board member of American Muslims for Palestine; (c) is closely affiliated with the Holy Land Foundation; and (d) was jailed by Israel in the 1990s because of his fundraising activities for Hamas.

Sarsour spoke at a CAIR-Georgia fundraising banquet in February 2017, and was the keynote speaker at the annual dinner of CAIR’s Philadelphia chapter on March 11, 2017.

In July 2017, Sarsour was a featured speaker at the 54th Annual Convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). She began her speech by thanking her “favorite person in this room … Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been a mentor, motivator, and encourager of mine.” She made no mention of Wahhaj’s numerous ties to Islamic terrorism. Also during her address, Sarsour lamented “the potential chaos” that the administration of President Donald Trump would likely inflict “on our community”; stated that “we [Muslims] are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad … but here in the United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House”; and said that “when I wake up in the morning, and I remember who is sitting in the White House, I am outraged.” “I hope,” Sarsour expanded, “that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad.” Counseling against Muslim assimilation into Western culture, Sarsour declared: “Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our community. It is not to assimilate and to please any other people in authority. And our top priority … is to please Allah, and only Allah.”

Also during Sarsour’s speech to ISNA, she made the following remarks:

“Every right-wing media outlet in the country. Every right-wing Zionist outlet in the country engaged in coordinated attacks against me to discredit my leadership.”

“There are people and Palestinians and solidarity activists who have been working on the issue of BDS [Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions] for a long time. Because I am privileged to have a platform, I have been able to have our country reckon with this conversation about what does it mean for a Muslim or a Palestinian-American to be part of the resistance, and to be working with allies who are now taking up the cause of BDS.”

“[T]errorism should never be framed as a conversation that should be just had with Muslims in a country where white supremacists have killed more people since 9/11 than Muslims have.”

“We have to get to the root of the problem when it comes to terrorism. The root of the problem doesn’t come from within the Muslim community – it comes from a politicized foreign policy of war on our people.”

At the Islamic Society of North America’s national convention in September 2018, Sarsour stated that if American Muslims were not sufficiently engaged in advocating in favor of the Palestinian cause and against Israel, “you … are complicit in the occupation of Palestinians, in the murder of Palestinian protesters.” And “if you’re on the side of the oppressor, or you’re defending the oppressor, or you’re actually trying to humanize the oppressor,” she added, “then that’s a problem, sisters and brothers, and we got to be able to say: that is not the position of the Muslim American community.” Also at the ISNA convention, Sarsour said: “I am an unapologetic pro-BDS, one-state solution supporting resistance supporter here in the U.S.”

During an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference on November 28, 2019, Sarsour stated that Israel “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.”

Supporting Bill de Blasio

In 2013 Sarsour campaigned for New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio. After de Blasio was elected, his office repeatedly featured Sarsour in press releases supporting the mayor’s positions on education and other matters. Moreover, his Mayor’s Fund pledged $500,000 to AAANY in 2016.

Pressing for Change in Police and School Practices in NYC

As the head of AAANY, Sarsour played a central role in pressuring the New York Police Department to terminate its secret surveillance of Muslim mosques and organizations suspected of promoting extremism or terrorism, and to curtail its use of “stop-and-frisk” anti-crime measures. In 2011 she worked in conjunction with Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition to advance the passage of the Community Safety Act (which expanded the definition of bias-based profiling and created an independent inspector general to review police policy in New York City). Sarsour also succeeded in pressuring City Hall to close New York’s public schools for the observance of the Islamic holidays Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

In April 2014, Sarsour celebrated the de Blasio administration’s announcement that it was disbanding the NYPD’s Demographics Unit, which, in an effort to detect budding terror threats, had been tasked with tracking the daily lives of Muslims and the content of the sermons that were delivered at mosques not only in New York City but in surrounding areas as well (including some mosques in New Jersey). As USA Today reported: “[The Unit] assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Plainclothes officers infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons, and cataloged Muslims in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.” “The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community,” said Sarsour. “Those documents, they showed where we live. That’s the cafe where I eat. That’s where I pray. That’s where I buy my groceries. They were able to see their entire lives on those maps. And it completely messed with the psyche of the community.”

On October 31, 2017, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a 29-year-old Muslim immigrant and ISIS supporter from Uzbekistan, used a rental truck to mow down and kill eight people (and injure at least twelve others) in a busy New York City bike path as an act of jihad. Saipov was reported to have been a worshiper at Masjid Omar Mosque in Paterson, New Jersey, which was one of the mosques that the NYPD surveillance program had previously (prior to 2014) targeted because of its extremist teachings.

In April 2015 Sarsour co-chaired the March2Justice, a 250-mile protest march from New York to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the evils of racial profiling and police brutality, and to the need for increased government spending on social-welfare programs. The march was led by the Justice League NYC.

Supporting Al Sharpton

In August 2014, Sarsour publicly supported a demonstration where Al Sharpton led marchers across the Verrazano Bridge to protest the recent death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old African American who died shortly after having resisted several white police officers’ efforts to arrest him for illegally selling “loosies,” single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. Moreover, Sarsour’s AAANY organized busloads of people to join the rally.

Falsely Claiming to Be the Victim of a Hate Crime

In early September 2014, Sarsour grossly misrepresented the nature of a run-in she had with Brian Boshell, a 45-year-old mentally ill homeless man who was sleeping on the pavement outside of AAANY’s headquarters in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, thereby blocking the entryway to the office. Because Boshell had a 25-year history of incoherent public outbursts that had previously resulted in at least 56 arrests plus another 34 minor convictions, his psychological infirmity was well known to members of the local community. On this particular day (September 3), Boshell became belligerent when either Sarsour or another AAANY employee called police to remove him from the entryway. “You are cutting people’s heads off, sharmoota,” he allegedly shouted at Sarsour. “I’m going to cut off your head and see how your people will feel, you Arab bitch.” Soon after the incident, Sarsour informed her 18,000 followers on Twitter that she had just been the victim of a hate crime, while on Facebook she referred to Boshell, a white man, as a “bigoted drunk” who had accosted her.

When Sarsour subsequently retold her story to NYPD deputy commissioners at a Manhattan forum about police-community relations, a hate-crimes unit was promptly dispatched to investigate the incident. Moreover, Boshell was arrested and charged with a number of counts including attempted assault as a hate crime; he was held on $20,000 bail and faced the possibility of being sentenced to seven years in prison if convicted. A few days later, Sarsour told MSNBC interviewer Melissa Harris-Perry that “if [Boshell] was African-American, you better believe he wouldn’t be walking in our streets right now.” But the notion that Sarsour was unaware of Boshell’s long history of unprovoked behavioral explosions having nothing whatsoever to do with bigoted impulses was not believable to a number of local residents. One 30-year resident of Bay Ridge, for instance, told National Review Online: “Instead of an incident with a drunk man, [Sarsour] is using this as her final proof of Islamaphobia in America…. Brian [Boshell] has a 25-year history of outbursts … There is a lot that’s questionable about [Sarsour] not knowing who he was.”

Praising Sharia While Criticizing America

In a November 2014 tweet, Sarsour derided critics of Sharia Law in Saudi Arabia for “worrying about women driving” — i.e., the fact that religious custom in that country bars women from driving automobiles. Much more significant, she explained, was the fact that Saudi women receive “10 weeks of PAID maternity leave.” “Puts us to shame,” Sarsour added.

In a February 2015 appearance on Rachel Maddow‘s television program, Sarsour lamented that a nationwide epidemic of “Islamophobia” was responsible for “anti-Sharia bills trying to ban us [Muslims] from practicing our faith,” “mosques being vandalized,” and Muslim “kids being executed” in the United States.

On May 12, 2015, for instance, Sarsour posted a Twitter message lauding the fact that Sharia forbids money lenders from charging interest on their loans: “You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound [sic] nice, doesn’t it?” That same day, she also tweeted: “If you are still paying interest than [sic] Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America.”

Defending a Muslim Who Attempted to Kill Police

Sarsour was outraged when a police officer and an FBI agent shot and killed a 26-year-old Muslim man named Usaama Rahim in Boston on June 2, 2015, when Rahim lunged at them with a military-style knife as they attempted to question him about suspected terrorism-related activities. The incident occurred approximately two hours after Rahim, who was under 24-hour surveillance by the FBI, had engaged in a phone conversation about carrying out attacks against police officers. When House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul subsequently announced that Rahim had been “communicating with and spreading ISIS propaganda online,” Sarsour complained that McCaul’s charges “have added a national security component to divide and conquer the movement.” “At the end of the day,” she added, “a Black man was shot on a bus stop on his way to work and we should treat this like any other case of police violence. All we want is answers to our questions.”

Alliance with Jeremiah Wright & Louis Farrakhan

In October 2015 as well, Sarsour joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright on stage during the 20th Anniversary commemoration of Louis Farrakhan‘s famous Million Man March.

Rejecting Calls for Muslim Assimilation

On Melissa Harris-Perry‘s television program on December 12, 2015, Sarsour lamented the allegedly long list of “attacks on [Muslim] individuals and on mosques” that had been perpetrated by Americans who — by misperceiving all Muslims as potential terrorists — were themselves “engaging in terrorism against the innocent [Muslim] community that has nothing to do with [terrorism].” Sarsour also scoffed at the notion of Muslim integration into American society: “We can’t change who we are. This is how we look [with Muslim attire]. We can’t integrate and assimilate…. We’re gonna look like this when we walk out into the streets of our cities when we’re traveling in this country.”

Angered by Calls Encouraging Muslims to “Root Out” Extremists in Their Communities

In December 2015 as well, Sarsour was angered by President Barack Obama’s request that American Muslims help “root out” Islamic extremism in their communities. “We would never ask any other faith community to stand up and condemn acts of violence committed by people within their groups,” she said. “The fact that this is only directed at the Muslim community is something that I personally can’t accept.”

Co-founder of MPOWER Change

Also in 2015, Sarsour co-founded MPOWER Change, “an online organization that enables [Muslims] to respond [to key events] in rapid, nationwide, coordinated ways as a community.”

Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement

Sarsour is, as the New York Times puts it, “deeply involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.” “I have committed myself wholeheartedly to #BlackLivesMatter,” says Sarsour, “because when Black lives matter all lives will matter, including Muslim lives.” In July 2015, she wrote a Huffington Post piece titled “I Am Muslim and I Am Black Lives Matter,” wherein she depicted African Americans as victims of intransigent and pernicious societal racism. Some excerpts include the following:

“Black lives don’t matter. We need to own that as the current reality for millions of Black Americans. Every 28 hours a police officer, security guard, or [George] Zimmerman-type vigilante kills a Black person, most of who are unarmed. Black children can be kicked out of pools and physically harassed by police while their white counterparts watch. Black women can be murdered, raped, beat with utter silence from the general public. Black communities across the country are most often deprived of basic housing standards, quality education and funding, and access to quality healthcare. Black communities suffer from high unemployment and mass incarceration for the same crimes whites commit.”

Black communities know all too well bombings of Black churches, witnessed the burning of crosses on their front lawns and lynching of their brethren. But you would think we would move on as a nation, we would reflect and own the brutality and domestic terror that we have inflicted and stand up once and for all for the right for ALL people to live, work, and worship in peace. BUT no. Here we are in the 21st century where White supremacists can walk into gudwaras and kill innocent Sikhs, stage armed protests in front of Islamic centers, burn down entire mosques to ashes like in Joplin, Missouri, kill three innocent Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, NC, and an Islamophobe can run over a Muslim teen in Kansas City. [P]olice killings of unarmed Black people almost on the daily [sic], and a young white man can walk into a historical Black church on the 193rd anniversary of a slave rebellion and kill nine people.”

Ties to President Barack Obama

In 2011, the Obama Administration honored Sarsour as a “champion of change.”

As of April 2016, Sarsour had visited the Obama White House on seven different occasions.

Supporting Bernie Sanders & the Democratic Party in 2016

In 2016 Sarsour supported Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

In May 2016, Sarsour announced that she would be attending the Democratic National Convention in July as an at-large delegate.

Leading the Anti-Trump Movement

In March 2016, when MDCNY announced its plan to protest Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s upcoming appearance at the New York State Republican Party’s Gala in Manhattan, Sarsour said: “MDCNY plans to mobilize our communities to protest against the hateful, bigoted, racist, and xenophobic Trump candidacy. The NYS Republican Party’s embrace of this candidate shows just how out of touch they are with the millions of Muslim, Black, Latinx, immigrant, women, and other New Yorkers who stand for inclusion and unity over fear and hatred. Their celebration of Donald Trump reinforces what we already know—the Party is only concerned with appealing to the small sliver of the population that shares this bigoted worldview.”

Sarsour was one of the principal organizers of the massive “Women’s March on Washington” which was held on January 21, 2017, to protest the agendas of the newly elected U.S. president, Donald Trump. Sarsour then spent the next 32 months serving as a board member in the Women’s March movement.

In January 2017 as well, Sarsour agreed to serve as the lead plaintiff in CAIR’s lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for a temporary halt to immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries that were hotbeds of terrorism.

While participating in a “Day Without A Woman” demonstration — to protest the allegedly anti-female policies of President Trump — in front of Trump Tower in New York City on March 8, 2017, Sarsour was arrested for refusing to comply with a police request that she and her comrades disperse from the vicinity.

In December 2017, Sarsour was a plaintiff in a lawsuit that attorney Shereef Akeel filed against U.S. President Donald Trump and two members of his cabinet. Condemning “the Trump Administration’s regular and vulgar attacks against Islam and Muslims,” and its “multipronged attempt to demonize Islam and marginalize Muslims in the United States,” the suit challenged an executive order by which Trump was seeking to temporarily suspend all travel visas to the United States for people hailing from six Muslim-majority countries that were hotbeds of Islamic terrorism. Other plaintiffs in the case included such notables as Rashida Tlaib, Nihad Awad, and Dawud Walid.

Portraying the Prophet Muhammad As a “Human Rights Activist” & Victim of “Islamophobia”

During a May 2016 panel discussion at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, Sarsour described of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Mohammad, in a manner that bore virtually no resemblance to reality: “Our prophet was a racial justice activist, a human rights activist, a feminist in his own right. He was a man that cared about the environment. He cared about animal rights.… He was also the first victim of Islamophobia.”

Sarsour revisited this theme in a speech which she delivered in California in December 2018, saying: “I went to public school. My parents couldn’t afford to send seven children to Islamic school … As I grew older, I realized that I got cheated out of my Islamic education. You know what I feel like I got cheated out of? Nobody told me that my beloved Prophet Muhammad was an activist. He was a human rights activist.”

Political Aspirations

In 2016, Sarsour announced that she was planning to run for a seat on the New York City Council in 2017.

Sarsour’s ISIS Salute

On January 24, 2017, a photograph of Sarsour making what was interpreted by some observers as the one-finger ISIS salute, began to appear on various Internet websites. In anticipation of those who would claim that Sarsour’s gesture was something other than an ISIS salute, Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer wrote the following:

“Linda Sarsour … is clearly making the sign of allegiance to the Islamic State in this photo: the upraised index finger. The signal of the index finger held up is, of course, used in myriad contexts, and Muslims in general have used it as a sign of allegiance to tawhid, Islam’s absolute monotheism. However, in recent years it has become very much associated with allegiance to jihad groups, particularly the Islamic State. This signal has been known to be a sign of allegiance to the Islamic State for almost as long as there has been an Islamic State. It has been described as the group’s ‘ubiquitous hand signal.’ “It strains credulity to think that a Muslim as committed and informed as Linda Sarsour in January 2017 would not know its significance as a sign of support for the Islamic State. Her defenders will no doubt heap scorn upon those who note this, and say it’s just a universal sign of being Muslim. To affirm that is to ignore a multitude of photographs of jihadis and news stories that have been published over the last three years. Linda Sarsour, in making this gesture, had to know what she was implying, and how Muslims the world over would understand it. She also could count on the credulity and willful ignorance of her Leftist allies to make sure that she would suffer no damage to her role as a civil rights heroine.”

Sarsour’s defenders, meanwhile, pointed out that Sarsour had previously condemned ISIS, as in this August 23, 2015 tweet: “ISIS are a cancer of this earth. They need to be deleted.”

Defending the Hijab

In a January 2017 video explaining that the hijab worn by Muslim women is not by any means a symbol of anti-female oppression, Sarsour said: “When I wasn’t wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.”

Identifying Herself As a “Woman of Color”

In an April 2017 interview, Sarsour identified herself as a woman “of color.” Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds, said Sarsour, had inspired her to become a high-school teacher, a profession through which she herself could, in turn, “inspir[e] young people of color like me, to show them their potential.” Sarsour also told the interviewer that although Middle-Easterners are categorized as “white” by the U.S. Census Bureau, being identified as a person “of color” is “important in the political climate that we are in, because it allows for us to understand where we fit in in the larger political landscape. We fit in with marginalized groups, who oftentimes are other people of color.”

Allegations of Sexual Abuse in Sarsour’s Brooklyn Office

In December 2017, Asmi Fathelbab, a woman who had worked in Sarsour’s Brooklyn office in 2009, stepped forward and claimed that she had been sexually abused by a male in that office during that time. Fathelbab also alleged that when she reported the abuse to Sarsour, the latter bullied her into silence and ridiculed her weight problem. Speaking to The Daily Caller, Fathelbab said that a Muslim man, Majed Seif, who lived in the building where Sarsour’s office was located, would repeatedly rub himself on her body against her will. “He would pin me against the wall and rub his crotch on me,” Fathelbab said. “It was disgusting… You have no idea what it was like to stand up and feel that behind you.” But when Fathelbab told Sarsour about the abuse, Sarsour allegedly called her a “liar” and told her that “something like this didn’t happen to women who looked like me.”

Getting no satisfaction from Sarsour, Fathelbab subsequently went to the AAANY’s board president, Ahmad Jaber, to expose what Seif had done. However, Jaber likewise did not believe the allegations against this “God-fearing man [who was] always at the mosque.” Fathelbab said that once Sarsour learned that her employee had taken her complaint to a higher-up, Sarsour “told me I’d never work in NYC ever again.” “She’s kept her word,“ Fathelbab added. “She had me fired from other jobs when she found out where I worked. She has kept me from obtaining any sort of steady employment for almost a decade.” “She oversaw an environment unsafe and abusive to women,” Fathelbab continued. “Women who put her on a pedestal for women’s rights and empowerment deserve to know how she really treats us.” Two other AAANY employees corroborated Fathelbab’s abuse claims with The Daily Caller and noted that Sarsour had used intimidation to silence the woman.

Supporting Chelsea Manning

On January 13, 2018, Sarsour publicly endorsed the Democratic political campaign of convicted military leaker and transgender activist Chelsea Manning, who was seeking a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland. As the Washington Free Beacon explained: “Manning, a transsexual formerly known as Private First Class Bradley Manning, was convicted back in 2010 for 22 offenses, including violations of the Espionage Act, after turning over hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. In order to avoid the death penalty, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 charges. Manning would then be found guilty of other charges that led to a 35-year sentence in a military prison … Manning served seven years of that sentence before it was commuted by [President] Obama.” When declaring her support for Manning, Sarsour tweeted: “If you are cool with Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio running for Senate in Arizona but up in arms that Chelsea Manning is running in Maryland – you my friend are a HYPOCRITE. #GoChelsea.” Sarsour’s point was that just as Manning had received a presidential pardon from Obama, Arpaio in 2017 had received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump for violations he had committed in the course of his strict enforcement of immigration laws.

Defending a Muslim Multiple Murderer

In February 2019, Sarsour came to the defense of Domineque Hakim Marcelle Ray, a Muslim man who had spent 20 years on death row for having murdered two teenage boys (one of whom was only 13) and a 15-year-old girl named Tiffany Harville (whom Ray raped and then stabbed in the head). On February 8, Sarsour tweeted: “Domineque Hakim Marcel Ray was executed by the State of Alabama & denied his request to have his imam present. His final request was to AT LEAST have a proper Muslim burial. We can help make that happen.”

Sarsour Is Dismissed from the Board of The Women’s March

In September 2019, the Women’s March movement dismissed Sarsour from its board, due to the negative publicity and controversy generated by her repeated anti-Semitic remarks. At that point, Sarsour became a campaign surrogate for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Other Jew-Haters in Sarsour’s Family

* In a 2004 article that appeared on the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism website, Sarsour acknowledged that a friend of hers as well as her (Sarsour’s) cousin were both serving long sentences (99 years and 25 years, respectively) in Israeli jails because of their efforts to recruit jihadists to murder Israeli Jews. Moreover, she revealed that her brother-in-law was serving a 12-year sentence in Israel because of his affiliation with Hamas.

* Sarsour’s husband, Maher Judeh (a.k.a., Maher Abo Tamer), mourned the 1998 death of the Hamas “master terrorists” Adel and Imad Awadallah; praised the late Palestinian Authority police officer Amjad Sukkari, who in January 2016 had carried out a shooting attack at a checkpoint in Israel, as a hero; has expressed support for the terrorist organization Fatah; and has lauded the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Habash.

* Over the years, Linda Sarsour’s brother, Diya Sarsour, has posted numerous anti-Semitic tweets. For example, in November 2012 he wrote that “Fox [News] is run by a bunch of Jews,” and “Their [sic] a bunch of pro Romney red jews in there [at Fox].” When the Hostess snacks company filed for bankruptcy that same month, Diya Sarsour tweeted: “Obviously hostess was going to eventually go out of business. They don’t make kosher snacks. Wasn’t gonna be long before the jews got to em.”

Additional Information on Sarsour

* Sarsour has received the YWCA USA’s “Women of Distinction Award for Advocacy and Civic Engagement,” and the Hala Maksoud Leadership Award from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

* The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center, a Jordanian think tank, once named Sarsour as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

* In November 2017, Sarsour received one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year” Awards.

* In December 2019, Elle magazine included Sarsour in its list of “20 Women of Color in Politics to Watch in 2020.”