Egyptian women protest sexual assault at demo
Egyptian women protest sexual assault at demoReuters

First Lady Michelle Obama and the U.S. State Department this Friday honor 10 women with the Int’l Women of Courage Award - including one who tweeted her joy about Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on America.

Samira Ibrahim, a 25-year-old women's rights activist, was a participant in the January 25 Revolution demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square that brought down the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and eventually morphed into the region wide Arab Spring uprisings. She was among the protesters who were violently dispersed, and she and other women were beaten, subjected to electric shocks, strip searched and videotaped by the soldiers.

Sexual assault of women has not ended, despite changes in the Egyptian administration, and women in Cairo recently held another protest in Tahrir Square, this time against the regime of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi, over similar issues. Moreover, during the violence in Tahrir Square, a number of female journalists -- among them at least one American television network correspondent -- were sexually assaulted, and there were reports that at least one was raped.

According to the U.S. State Department Ibrahim and six other women were also “subjected by the Egyptian military to forced virginity tests in March 2011.” The military claimed the tests were carried out to protect the soldiers from subsequent charges of rape. The doctor who carried out the tests was subsequently charged but eventually freed, an act that prompted Ibrahim to vow she would take the case to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

But the State Department left out a few other items in Ibrahim’s biography, which Breitbart journalist Samuel Tadros dug up and included in his own report.

The young Egyptian woman to be honored by the First Lady and Secretary of State John Kerry has no problem tweeting her anti-Semitic feelings about Jews, for example: A tweet on the Saudi royals called them “dirtier than the Jews.”

She loves Hitler: “I have discovered with the passage of days that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.”

Nor does she hide her hatred of the nation that now plans to grant her its highest honor to the fairer sex, tweeting that she hopes for a re-enactment of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attack on the United States, and that  “every year come[s] with America burning.”

A tweet about a suicide bombing in Israel was equally venomous: “Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.”

Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large for Breibart News, dryly pointed out the current frantic scramble to spin away Ibrahim’s vicious attitude with the claim that her Twitter account was “stolen” in the past came only “after being outed” -- a quite a long time after the alleged theft took place. 

Surely her tweets, posted on a public social networking website, were noted long before, however: such “brave” comments made by an Egyptian woman victimized by security police in the face of the Arab Spring must have at least raised eyebrows, if not made headlines.  No?

Perhaps it required an honor from the U.S. Secretary of State and America’s First Lady to highlight them properly at center stage.