RUTHFULLY YOURS

Whatever else you can say about Jumanah Albahri, you’ve got to admit she’s got chutzpah.

The new letter is a tour de force of self-righteous victimhood, demonstrating that Albahri has been a dutiful and attentive student of her Islamic supremacist and Leftist mentors, since both camps make such liberal use of this tactic. She begins with a double ad hominem, as the girl who endorsed genocide of the Jews complained that the Guardian’s “abysmal coverage of Justice in Palestine Week and the Horowitz fiasco reeks of Hearstian and Horowitzian journalism.”

Hearstian, i.e., yellow journalism a la William Randolph Hearst. Horowitzian, as in David Horowitz, the man who exposed her as a proponent of organized mass murder. Jumanah would have us believe that the real villain is Horowitz, whom we are to see as an irresponsible yellow journalist, not the girl who endorsed genocide. For Jumanah herself is a poor victim of biased reporting: she complains that the Guardian didn’t quote her statement that purports to clarify her pro-genocide remarks: “My opinion of Hamas is not as simple as condemn or condone, for it or against it. I firmly believe that the killing of civilians, even as collateral damage regardless of creed, politics, sexuality, nationality or ethnicity is one of the highest crimes in the eyes of God and is morally reprehensible and abhorrent.”

High-sounding words, but empty ones without an explicit avowal that Jumanah Albahri includes Israeli civilians in her definition of civilian. For many jihadists have declared that there are no civilians in Israel, and that consequently every Israeli citizen was a military target. Jumanah Albahri is probably aware of this, since it is not a fringe view among supporters of the Palestinian cause, and so she could have done her own cause a favor by spelling this out – unless, of course, she preferred to leave it ambiguous.

Albahri then goes on to make a claim about Hamas that is flatly false: “Hamas,” she says, “(regardless of its designation as a terrorist organization by Israel and the U.S.) is neither genocidal nor Holocaust-denying.” Yet Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV in 2008 featured a Muslim cleric, Sa‘d Abu Jleidan, saying that the jihad against the Jews would continue “until their annihilation.” She claims that Hamas “calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state where people of all religions can coexist in peace” – yet the Hamas Charter contains an epigraph from the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Albahri doesn’t mention that the Jews that would remain in the Palestinian state that Hamas envisions would not be equal citizens, but subjugated dhimmis, in accord with classic strictures of Islamic law that Hamas spokesmen have spoken about wanting to revive.

The Jumanah turns on David Horowitz with more empty ad hominens, claiming that he was “not invited to present any argument or engage in constructive dialogue — rather, he was brought because of his reputation for racism and hatemongering against Arabs and Muslims.” And the primary victim of this racism and hatemongering? Why, Jumanah Imad Albahri herself, of course: “If anyone can claim alienation or marginalization, it’s me. For the university to allow him to set foot on my campus using my student fees is a slap in my face and a slap in the face of all other non-Jewish minorities on this campus. Need more proof? Google this article: ‘Guns Don’t Kill Black People, Other Blacks Do.’ Tell me: Who needs to apologize now?”

Uh, that would still be the girl who endorsed genocide, Jumanah.

But no, for her it is all the fault of the Jewish-controlled media, that ever-present invention of Nazi and Palestinian paranoia: “The voices of the Palestinian people have been silenced by the mainstream media for too long,” Jumanah asserts, “and I refuse to silence my own voice to appease the twisted politics of the pro-Israel communities on and off campus.”

Clearly Jumanah Albahri’s voice is not silenced. The more she talks, however, the more her allies and supporters may wish it were.