Thank
You, Zahra Billoo
IPT News
December 10, 2018
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first of your friends to like this.
 You read that
headline right. Thank you to Zahra Billoo, the radical Islamist director of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) San Francisco Bay Area chapter.
We still think she's filled with a blinding hate toward Israel and those who support it.
Our gratitude should not be taken as a change of heart. She's no fan of
ours, either.
But real honesty is rare, and Billoo displayed it during a recent
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference. AMP is a rabidly anti-Israel organization with numerous links to a U.S.-based Hamas support network
that operated during the 1990s and into the 2000s.
"Talking at AMP let's be real and call it apartheid Israel. Right?
Because that is what it is," Billoo told her AMP audience last month.
"And I am clear about I am not going to legitimize a country that I
don't believe has a right to exist. And that's where I am."
Billoo does not believe Israel has a right to exist. While it's honest,
it's also a horrible statement that demands the elimination of a nation, of
the Israeli people and their culture. That's genocide. And that's not good.
But contrast Billoo's direct statement with the controversy surrounding CNN's firing of Marc Lamont Hill. Hill gave a United
Nations speech calling for a "free Palestine from the river to the
sea." The geographic reality is that a Palestinian state stretching
from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea envelops and replaces
Israel.
It was not, Hill later insisted, "a call to destroy anything or anyone.
It was a call for justice, both in Israel and the West Bank/Gaza." He
supports Palestinian self-determination, and claims he is merely
"critical of Israeli policy and practice."
 The day Hill was
fired, Billoo took to Twitter to repeat the slogan that prompted CNN
to fire him: "From the river to the sea, #Palestine will be
free," she wrote. We know she means it as a call to destroy Israel
because she told AMP she doesn't believe the country has a right to exist.
It's not clear whether there is any other country in the world she feels
should be eliminated other than the one Jewish state.
But Hill's spin is exposed by his solution to the conflict:
"a single bi-national democratic state that encompasses Israel, the
West Bank, and Gaza." If it encompasses Israel, it replaces Israel.
That's what Hill wants, even if he's more cryptic in his language. Billoo
comes right out and says it. Most others try to use softer language to
describe the same outcome.
He stuck by his sugar coated message when a critic called him out.
As we reported in October, Hill is open to Palestinian
violence if it helps them achieve their goals. He warned another
Palestinian advocacy group not to adopt "a civil rights tradition
which romanticizes nonviolence" and he accused Israel of poisoning
Palestinians' water.
Hill is not alone in trying to soften calls for Israel's destruction by
advocating for a one-state solution. Billoo's boss, CAIR Executive Director
Nihad Awad, echoed Hill's message in a Huffington Post article
Friday.
"Recognizing the suffering of the Palestinian people is not an act
of bigotry," Awad wrote with Edward Ahmed Mitchell. "Neither is
calling on Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in a democratic state with
equal rights."
And who better to define anti-Semitism than Awad, a member of an
Islamist lobbying group founded by members of a U.S.-based Hamas support
network? He was a member of Palestine Committee, which the Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals described as created by the Muslim Brotherhood and
directed "to support Hamas from abroad." Awad participated in
committee meetings. And when CAIR was created in 1994, the Palestine
Committee included it among the groups under its umbrella.
When the FBI cut CAIR off from outreach efforts in 2008, it said it
was due to concerns about "a connection between CAIR or its executives
and HAMAS. Awad is the only executive director CAIR has had.
No doubt Billoo would deny being a Jew-hater simply because she opposes
the existence of a Jewish state. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg
actually argued that opposing a homeland and a refuge for Jews
is not anti-Semitism.
It is to the U.S. State Department. Since 2010, its definition of anti-Semitism includes, "Denying the
Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the
right to exist."
And "one-state" advocates like Billoo and Hill have little to
say about the fate of Israel's 6.2
million Jewish citizens in their utopian vision. It seems to be
accepted on faith that everyone would get along and peace would reign. It
might be good to hear what Muslim state in the world today offers an example
of this happy co-existence between Jews and a Muslim majority.
The real outcome of "a single bi-national democratic state that
encompasses Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza" is "a
bloodbath," counters University of Chicago evolutionary biologist
and author Jerry Coyne. "Many Palestinians are trained from birth to
hate Jews, to think that killing them is a good deed, and to believe that
dying in that attempt makes you a martyr. You'd have to be foolish to think
that a Palestinian-Jewish 'one state' solution, or the 'right of return' (a
'right' that's untenable) is a viable solution. It's a recipe for civil war
... and a bloodbath in which both Arabs and Jews would die, but the state
would end up as Palestine. That is why this particular form of anti-Zionism
is indeed anti-Semitism."
So while Billoo is being honest about saying she doesn't think Israel
has a right to exist, she joins Hill in engaging in anti-Semitism.
Related Topics: Media, Zahra
Billoo, CAIR,
American
Muslims for Palestine, anti-Semitism,
from
the river to the sea, Marc
Lamont Hill, Nihad
Awad, Palestine
Committee, Hamas,
Jerry
Coyne
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