It’s said that politics makes strange bedfellows. Or as author Harlan Ellison phrased it, everyone’s entitled to their own door to hell, as long as they don’t slam my foot in it. These maxims come to mind as my phone rings and someone questions me about attending the Linda Sarsour Protest at CUNY on May 25th.
Organized by activist Pam Geller, this protest is the only one addressing the travesty of CUNY pretending that Sarsour’s scheduled commencement speech at their Graduate School of Public Health on June 1 has anything to do with free speech. Or that anything in Sarsour’s doctrine is even vaguely in concert with public health and health policy. It’s as absurd as the notion of Mengele lecturing on medical ethics to students of homoeopathy.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that Sarsour’s cunning has bought her some Jewish friends whose goal is to make her seem kosher; far-left Jewish liberals who see only Sarsour's eagerness to raise money for American Jewish cemeteries and are willing to look beyond her Tweets, which celebrate filling Israeli cemeteries with new bodies. The problem isn’t short-sighted feminists who accept Sarsour as their new spokesmodel despite her advocacy of Sharia law, which would strip these feminists—and all women—of rights even females on the Mayflower possessed. The problem isn’t politicians who allow Sarsour to fundraise for their re-election campaigns and then excuse her fetish for murderers as “just her opinion.”
No, the problem is the complacency of the right and intelligent middle. The problem is the hush that's fallen over those who know better but turn a blind eye as this advocate of terrorism is tacitly legitimized by CUNY.
The problem is the deafening silence.
Pam Geller is not being silent. And the speakers who will address the crowd in front of CUNY on May 25th won’t be silent. While everyone else who understands the danger that Sarsour poses seems content with hand wringing and forelock tugging and issuing notes of tepid criticism, there are a few good people willing to actually stand up.
I look around as Sarsour, this blood-thirsty wolf in a liberal sheep’s clothing, is given a pass by those who “disagree with what she says but feel she has the right to say it.” And I can either shake my head with disgust and disbelief or stand up with these other speakers.
I may not agree with everyone who speaks before or after me. I may take issue with some of their beliefs. But their beliefs don’t call for my death by stoning or the other “progressive” tactics of Linda Sarsour’s beloved Intifada. If a pair of silly female rabbis can forgive Sarsour’s romantic view of terrorism and excuse her Tweeted fantasies of “taking Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina away” as “a little mean,” I can surely stand with Milo Yiannopoulos and everyone else from the LGBT community and other walks of life who understand that Sarsour’s political agenda, if successful, would place all of our collective heads in the basket of Jihad.
My personal public health and policy requires that I keep my head.