RUTHFULLY YOURS

You can tell a lot about someone by looking at those he admires. Over at The Weekly Standard, Samuel Tadros has a melancholy piece ^[1] about some of the people the Obama administration admires. Tomorrow, March 8, our new secretary of State, John Kerry, aided by First Lady Michelle Obama, will be honoring ten women with the “International Women of Courage Award,” an honor given to “women around the globe who have shown exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for women’s rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk.”

Gosh. “Women’s rights and empowerment.” We’re for that, right? (Right?) But look a little closer. “Five of these awards,” Mr. Tadros reports,

are being given to women from Muslim-majority countries, underscoring the unique plight of women in those countries. The only problem is that one of the women to be recognized is an anti-Semite and supports the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Gosh redux. Here we have Samira Ibrahim ^[2], whom the State Department’s profile ^[3] commends for having been “among seven women subjected by the Egyptian military to forced virginity tests in March 2011″ — it’s a sort of distinction — and for having been “arrested while in high school for writing a paper that criticized Arab leaders’ insincere support to the Palestinian cause.”

But when Ms. Ibrahim is not having forced virginity tests or deploring insincere support for the “Palestinian cause,” she finds time to espouse ideas that have nothing to do with women’s “rights and empowerment” and a lot to do with anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist sentiments. Take a look her Twitter postings ^[4]. Mr. Tadros quotes a post from last July: After five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed in a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim rejoiced: “An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.” How’s that for “women’s rights and empowerment”?

Mr. Tadros quotes several other Twitter postings, including this little bijoux about A. 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.

And then there are her views on 9/11. As Mr. Tadors notes, when a mob was attacking the United States embassy in Cairo on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, Ibrahim wrote on Twitter: “Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.” You won’t find this posting on her account because, Mr. Tadors reports, “she deleted it a couple of hours later, but not before a screen shot ^[5] was saved by an Egyptian activist.”

So why are Michelle Obama and John Kerry honoring this woman? Why? Mr. Tadros is quite right: “The decision to honor Ibrahim reflects poorly on the State Department, which is either incapable of doing the minimum amount of research required to find out who she is, or does not care that the secretary of state and First Lady are about to honor an anti-Semite who longs for violence against Americans.”

The ceremony is scheduled for tomorrow, March 8. Were I in Washington, I would be tempted to picket it.