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Rachel Wahba

Willful ignorance, not the Hijab, is the problem

Not all Muslims are Islamists. Let’s get that out of the way.

Rumi, his love Shams, Hafiz, and the mystics would be forced to escape their spiritually strangled native lands today.

The problem is Islamic Ideology and Islamists who cry death to Israel, curse the West, subjugate their women under Sharia and make life hell for anyone who deviates from the most sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-anyone not Muslim or the right kind of Muslim.

We need to listen to the words of Islamic leaders running the Muslim world; “There is no Islam that is not Political.”

This brand of Islam has nothing to do with spirituality, freedom or democracy, and everything to do with power, control, and brutal oppression. This is the brand of Islam controlling Arab nations today that too many of us wish to willfully ignore.

Linda Sarsour’s influence on the progressive community is useful in understanding this trend of willful ignorance in liberal communities, including the Jewish world today.

Sarsour’s hijab is not the problem. The hijab fittings that infiltrated the Women’s March she co-organized in D.C was a cover-up of much more than the head.

Orthodox Jewish women cover their heads and many are feminists. The same goes for the hijab in America when it is a choice. It is a problem when it is not a choice.

Given that Sarsour does not speak up against the blatant oppression of women in Islamic countries, her hijab fittings are more about support for Islamic ideology than acceptance of Muslims and their religious practices in America.

As her Muslim Brotherhood Hamas driven ideology was exposed on social media, she manipulated a fundraiser for vandalized Jewish graves in St. Louis, Missouri.

A group of Jewish educators and organizations were moved to lead a campaign of support for her. Instead of doing their homework.

Are we that gullible, that needy, that afraid to lose progressive credentials? That reputable Jewish journals like The Forward would go so far as to tell us “not to listen to her words?”

Where is this marriage of mostly well-meaning progressives and Israel hating, women oppressing, gay murdering, Hamas loving systems being made? Since when is waking up to Islamic oppression a “phobia” and an affront to intersectionality?

Have these Jewish educators supporting Sarsour confronted her crude attacks against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who suffered genital mutilation and lost so much, a woman who risks her life as she continues to try to bring to light the dark night forced upon women in countries operating under Sharia today? Why isn’t Hirsi Ali’s documentary The Honor Diaries more widely distributed than fraudulent claims of feminism?

That Sarsour, in solidarity with Rasmeah Odeh, a convicted terrorist who murdered Jews in a Jerusalem supermarket, are keynote speakers at the annual “A Jewish Voice for Peace” is no surprise. Progressive Jewish educators need to connect the dots instead of telling us to “ignore her words.”

The brilliantly articulate fast talking Sarsour,friendof the LGBTQ community, does not speak out against the torture and murder of gays in Islamic countries or the “honor killings” of women.

Her silence makes her an apologist for crimes against women, gays, lesbians, transgender, Jews, Christians, and all religious minorities under Islam. Her silence matters.

Her Brooklyn-ese “There is nothing creepier than Zionism” echoes the vow from Islamic leaders all over the Arab world to destroy Israel.  Her words matter.

That she was honored by Obama as a “human rights activist” is cringe-worthy. This is a woman whose tweets (Hirsi Ali “doesn’t’ deserve to have a vagina”), have a lot in common with the late-night tweeting of a certain president of the United States she “resists.”

How about resisting Islamic ideology, the institutionalized oppression of women, minority groups, and ethnic cleansing?

Over two thousand five hundred years of Jewish communities in what became Arab lands has been brutally brought to an end by Islamists.Churches filled with worshippers are torched by Islamists in Egypt. Coptic Christians, too many of them to expel as the Jews were, live in fear in Egypt.Women are stoned in public for disobeying men in Afghanistan.Women dressed “immodestly” in the Iran of the mullahs are dragged off the streets and beaten. Gay men and lesbians are subjected to torture and gruesome deaths.Christian girls are kidnapped, raped, and traded, by Islamic militants in Africa.The Yazidi woman and girls…

The horrors cannot be contained in this post.

Willful ignorance is a big problem.

About the Author
Rachel Wahba is a San Francisco Bay Area based writer, psychotherapist and the co-founder of Olivia Travel. An Egyptian-Iraqi Jew, Rachel was born in India and grew up stateless in Japan. The many dimensions of her exile and displacement are a constant theme in her professional work as well as her activism as an advisory board member for JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa).