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Steven Emerson,
Executive Director
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February 18, 2019
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IPT
Exclusive: Virginia Democratic Candidate's Anti-Semitic Diatribe Has a
Radical Past
by Abha Shankar
IPT News
February 18, 2019
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A Virginia General Assembly candidate has apologized for past social media posts excoriating Jews
and Israel. But Ibraheem Samirah continues to shade his involvement with
groups which would like to see Israel eliminated, a sentiment that was
prominent in his life.
In a Feb. 8 apology, Samirah, the Democratic nominee for Virginia's 86th
House of Delegates district, expressed remorse for his "ill-chosen
words" that "added pain to the Jewish community." A special
election in Samirah's race will be held Tuesday.
Samirah dismissed the widespread condemnation of his posts as a
"slander campaign" that "is using 5-year-old Facebook posts
from my impassioned college days, posts that upon reflection and with the
of [sic] blessing of time, I sincerely regret and apologize for."
He is 27 years old.
The posts, first published Feb. 7 by Big League Politics, claimed that
sending money to Israel was "worse" than sending money to the Ku
Klux Klan and wishing that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would
burn in hell.
"Ariel Sharon, burn. Burn a million times for every innocent soul
you killed. Hell is excited to have you," Samirah wrote after Sharon
died in 2014.
To show he's not an anti-Semite, Samirah's apology mentioned that he is
a co-founder of American University's Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter. But JVP is a
rabidly anti-Israel group that championed the case of a convicted Palestinian terrorist.
Samirah's campus activism also includes work with the virulently
anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The SJP is a
radical student organization active
on approximately 200 U.S. college campuses. Since its establishment
in 2010, SJP chapters have campaigned for divestment from Israel, which it smears as an apartheid state, and accuses of ethnic cleansing.
Samirah participated in a 2016 SJP protest at Boston University against
an Israel Peace Week festival sponsored by Boston University Hillel and BU
Students for Israel.
He accused festival organizers of using "fun things
to cover up very horrible, terrible crimes against humanity."
"They are blindly supporting Israel, so we came to expose that
reality," Samirah said. "On top of that, we came to expose the
reality internationally for the Palestinian people living under occupation,
as related to us here in BU."
Samirah has supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting
Israel and was the listed contact person in a 2016 JVP campaign
"calling for local and state governments to end contracts with
Hewlett-Packard (HP)" because of the company's work in Israel.
The BDS movement describes itself as "a Palestinian-led movement
for freedom, justice, and equality" that uses a strategy of boycotts,
divestment, and sanctions to challenge "international support for
Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism." But it is considered inherently anti-Semitic because many of its advocates
have called for Israel's destruction and because it singles out the world's
only Jewish state while ignoring human rights abuses of far greater magnitude
in other countries, especially in Muslim-majority states.
Samirah, who was born in Chicago and calls himself a "second generation Palestinian
refugee," has described the significant role his father has played in
shaping his views. The family had to leave the United States when he was a
child after his father was "was seen as a security threat for being
Muslim and an activist," Samirah said in an April 2017 interview with a Boston University publication
His father was merely "registering Muslim Americans to vote and
lobbying politicians for Muslim needs" but because of rising
Islamophobia after 9/11, he "was informed he was a threat to national
security," Samirah said.
In fact, Sabri Ibrahim Samirah (also known as Sabri Ibrahim) was
a senior leader of a now-defunct Hamas network in the U.S. called the "Palestine Committee."
The "Palestine Committee" was created by the Muslim
Brotherhood to support Hamas politically and financially in the United
States. Sabri Ibrahim, was chairman of the Palestine Committee's main propaganda
arm, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). He served on the board of the American Muslim Society
(AMS), which was another name for the IAP, from at least 1993-2002.
The IAP issued Hamas press releases and communiques and published the
Hamas charter, which called for Israel's destruction and the murder of
Jews. It also sponsored annual conventions and other events that included
senior Hamas leaders as speakers.
In 1996 testimony before the United States Senate Foreign
Relations' Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, Investigative
Project on Terrorism Executive Director Steven Emerson noted that Sabri
Ibrahim hosted the IAP-sponsored "Jerusalem Festival"
two years earlier in Chicago. The event celebrated the "eighth year of
the [Palestinian] Intifada." A bazaar featured radical pro-Hamas
publications and the main auditorium played songs of revolution and
speeches by the Hamas leadership in the United States and overseas.
"In Chicago ... which we will permit ourselves to call the Muslim
capital of America," Ibrahim said in a speech, "... and in the
shadows of the memory of the martyrs who gave their blood for Palestine ...
and in the passage of six years' imprisonment of the Sheikh of the
intifadah, Ahmed Yassin [the founder of Hamas who had been imprisoned for
directing the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers] in almost the
second year following the arrest of a member of our own community, Muhammad
Salah ... we the Islamic Association for Palestine send them a deeply felt
greeting, and to ... the mujahideen ... all of you have gathered here
today."
Sabri Ibrahim also led several summer retreats for local Muslim children.
In one such retreat – captured on videotape – the children, several wearing
T-shirts with American basketball team insignias, sat around a campfire
singing Arabic chants praising Hamas leader Ahmed Yasin, jihad and armed
struggle against the Jews. "With daggers in our hands we burst forth
to strike ... (against) our enemies," one chant said. Another stanza
listed the names of Hamas heroes Ahmed Yasin, Abdullah Azzam, and Iz ad-Din
al-Qassam. The Hamas military wing is named after al-Qassam.
Sabri Ibrahim's pro-Hamas, anti-Israel stance hasn't changed with time.
"We are ready to sacrifice all we have for Palestine. Long Live
Palestine," he said at an April 2014 American Muslims for Palestine
(AMP) conference. The IPT first identified at least five AMP officials and
speakers who worked in the Hamas-supporting Palestine Committee. "We
have a mission here [in the U.S.] also to support the struggle of our
people back there in order to achieve a free land in the Muslim world,
without dictators and without corruption."
Ibraheem Samirah's apology was vague and stands amid a lifetime immersed
in intense anti-Israel sentiment. If he hopes to ever be a genuine
representative of the people, he needs to explain exactly how his thinking
has changed.
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