The Women’s March last week finally edged out its anti-Semitic leaders — only to tap new board members who are just as extreme.
Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland alienated donors and the grassroots with their unapologetic embrace of Louis Farrakhan, despite his notorious anti-Semitism. Rival groups sprang up and donations slowed. Sarsour & Co. didn’t even organize a march on Washington this year.
So now they’re stepping aside — but not letting go. The new board included Zahra Billoo, who has tweeted that “apartheid Israel kills children as a hobby” and that she see no “difference between American youth leaving the country to join isis or idf . . . both are murderous, war crime committing terrorist entity.” That’s ISIS and the Israeli Defense Force, the law-bound army of a democratic US ally.
An instant outcry led the new board to vote her out, but its members still include:
Charlene Carruthers, who in 2018 after a trip to the Middle East, dropped an extended Twitter rant about the “massacre in Gaza,” adding that she is “afraid . . . to speak out against the Israeli occupation [because she’s] witnessed the consequences”
Samia Assad, a Palestinian activist with the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice, retweeted a video with the caption “Israel = worse than the devil.” In a “Voice of Santa Fe” podcast, she ranted that, under President Trump, “[Muslims] are going to be targeted like no other time in history . . . I feel like I’m in Nazi Germany.”
Rinku Sen penned a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed complaining of America’s acceptance of the “supremacist aspects of Zionism.” She also called Zionism — the movement that created a country whose population consists of at least 30% Sephardic Jews and 20% non-Jews, including Muslims — as a “movement that claims all of the land from Iraq to Egypt for Ashkenazi (white) Jews”
This is no course correction: The Israel-haters have colonized the Women’s March, and they’re not letting go.