Canadian Mayor wants Sarsour removed from panel

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IPT News

Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman wants to stop anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour from participating in an event hosted in the Canadian city on Friday, CBC reports.

Sarsour is set to speak at an event entitled, “Sorry Not Sorry: Unapologetically Working for Social Justice,” hosted by the Canadian Muslim Women’s Institute and the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg.

“Mayor Bowman does not feel it is appropriate to provide this individual a public platform to further propagate anti-Semitic views and hate,” Bowman’s office said in a statement.

During a city hall event on Tuesday, Bowman accused Sarsour of stoking “racialized identity politics” and said that “she has continually attacked the foundation of the state of Israel’s right to exist.”

“It’s less about the speaker than the social planning council providing that platform and the message it sends to the Jewish community and the community as a whole,” Bowman added.

The mayor’s comments were supported by several Winnipeg organizations including the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg and B’nai Brith Canada – a national advocacy organization on behalf of Canadian Jewry.

B’nai Brith Canada originally called on the event organizers to retract Sarsour’s invitation.

“She’s used her platform to promulgate views that are highly problematic, including charges of dual loyalty to Jews who are considered sufficiently too supportive of the state of Israel,” Ran Ukashi, a national director at B’nai Brith Canada, said last month.

Accusations of dual allegiances among Jews have resurfaced in the national spotlight after U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s recent string of anti-Semitic comments.

Last month, Sarsour led a group of Islamist activists to lobby on Capitol Hill against a resolution condemning anti-Semitic statements from Omar – despite the resolution failing to mention Omar by name.

Sarsour has a long track record of making extremist comments and refuses to condemn Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s Jew-hating sermons. She not only is a vocal critic of Israel’s policies – she despises the very principle that led to the Jewish state’s emergence in 1948.

“Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she famously wrote on Twitter. Zionists who failed to meet her threshold for sufficient support for Palestinians could not be feminists, she said.

“I am an unapologetic pro-BDS, one-state solution supporting resistance supporter here in the U.S.,” she told the Islamic Association of North America (ISNA) convention last September, the IPT exclusively reported.

“One-state solution” supporters are clearly advocating for the destruction of the Jewish state by calling for one bi-national state with a majority Arab population.

During the ISNA event, Sarsour also blamed Jews for police shootings of unarmed black people because of an Anti-Defamation League program that takes police executives to Israel to learn about fighting terrorism and riots. The ADL is the most prominent Jewish organization in the United States.

Now, prominent Canadian Jewish organizations are working hard to prevent Sarsour from having a platform to spew divisive rhetoric. Local politicians across North America should follow Mayor Bowman’s lead.

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