One might think that such a woman would be a strong advocate of women's rights, but Sarsour is also a devout Muslim and proponent of sharia - Islamic law based on the Koran and the Hadiths - which only someone steeped in Orwellian newspeak could see as being compatible with women's rights.
It's not that under sharia women have no rights. They do. They have the right to be beaten and raped by their husbands. They have the right to marry the man chosen for them by their families. They have the right to be prohibited from marrying outside the Muslim faith. They have the right to inherit only half of what a man can inherit, or to have their court testimony count less than that of a man. They have the right to marry only one man who himself may marry four women. In short, they have the right not to have any rights.
Their rights are certainly not the sort most women in the West would wish to have, and it's therefore odd that this woman would be praised as a champion of women's rights. But that's not all there is to say about Ms. Sarsour. Ben Shapiro gives us a fuller description of the lady:
Sarsour, who was called a “Champion of Change” by the Obama White House, has a long history of speaking kindly of shariah law and terrorists. Sarsour stated that underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a CIA agent; she supports attacks on the Israeli Defense Force; she stated that “the sacrifice the black Muslims slaves went through in this country is nothing compared to Islamophobia today”; she stated that Brigitte Gabriel and victim of Islamic genital mutilation Ayaan Hirsi Ali didn’t deserve to be called women, explaining, ‘I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don’t deserve to be women.”Indeed. Well, Ms. Sarsour recently made news when she gave a speech in which she began by praising a known terrorist sympathizer and then called for "jihad" against the White House which, she averred, was occupied by "fascists", "white supremacists", "islamophobes" and other nefarious types.
This from a woman who adheres to a form of Islam that wishes to impose sharia on everyone in the world, which sees itself as the supreme and only truth, and which allows for the oppression, if not murder, of anyone who disagrees. How is that not just a variety of the fascist, supremacist, phobia she thinks resides in the White House?
Sharia, Sarsour has claimed, is nothing more than refraining from alcohol and pork and following the Islamic way. Apparently, following the Islamic way includes, inter multi alia, being disingenuous about what sharia really is. She doesn't mention, for example, that under sharia homosexuals are to be executed, women can be beaten for going out of the house without being properly covered or without their male guardian's permission. They can also be stoned to death for adultery and flogged for lesser offenses.
Under sharia in Saudi Arabia women aren't allowed to drive cars. A joke in Israel, a nation she despises, has it that more women fly F-15s in Israel than drive cars in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, under sharia there would be no freedom of religion - apostates from Islam can be killed - no freedom of speech, and no separation of church and state.
If a white Western male advocated for women what sharia demands of women he'd be treated with utter contempt, but when a Muslim advocates these things, explicitly or implicitly, he/she is invited by good progressives to lead marches for women and to speak at conferences and commencement services. Logical and moral consistency is perhaps not a prerequisite to being a progressive nor a feminist:
She recalls that during the Lebanese Civil War, Islamic militants launched an assault on a Lebanese military base near her family's house and destroyed her home. Gabriel, who was ten years old at the time, was injured by shrapnel in the attack. She says that she and her parents were forced to live underground in all that remained, an 8-by-10-foot (2.4 by 3.0 m) bomb shelter for seven years, with only a small kerosene heater, no sanitary systems, no electricity or running water, and little food. She says she had to crawl in a roadside ditch to a spring for water to evade Muslim snipers.Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and lived under Islamic law until she managed to escape as a young woman to Holland. Read her memoir Infidel or her call for an Islamic Reformation titled Heretic and you'll wonder why any woman who wants to be treated not as property but as a human being equal under the law to men could possibly sympathize with sharia or Linda Sarsour.
At one point in the spring of 1978, a bomb explosion caused her and her parents to become trapped in the shelter for two days. They were eventually rescued by three Christian militia fighters, one of whom befriended Gabriel but was later killed by a land mine.
Gabriel wrote that in 1978 a stranger warned her family of an impending attack by the Islamic militias on all Christians. She says that her life was saved when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in Operation Litani. Later, when her mother was seriously injured and taken to an Israeli hospital, Gabriel was surprised by the humanity shown by the Israelis, in contrast to the constant propaganda against the Jews she saw as a child. She is quoted as saying of her experience:I was amazed that the Israelis were providing medical treatment to Palestinian and Muslim gunmen...These Palestinians and Muslims were sworn, mortal enemies, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of Jews. Yet, Israeli doctors and nurses worked feverishly to save their lives. Each patient was treated solely according to the nature of his or her injury. The doctor treated my mother before he treated an Israeli soldier lying next to her because her injury was more severe than his. The Israelis did not see religion, political affiliation, or nationality. They saw only people in need, and they helped.
