Posted by Robert Spencer
May 18th, 2010
Jumanah Imad Albahri, the Muslim student at the University of California at San Diego who last week endorsed a new genocide of Jews, has now issued a statement – and as is characteristic also of jihadist communiqués these days, it’s a masterpiece of disingenuousness and attempts to claim victim status.
Albahri started out by saying – apparently unequivocally – that she wasn’t for what she said she was for last week:
“Allow me to begin by stating that I do NOT condone murder, I do NOT condone genocide, and I do NOT condone racism under any circumstance whatsoever against Jews or anyone else.” And what’s more, “these accusations are lies that I refuse to allow David Horowitz and his allies to perpetuate in their irresponsible and hateful smear campaign against those who disagree with or differ from them.”
Lies? What lies? It’s useful at this point to recall how Jumanah Albahri rocketed to fame in the first place: it all started when David Horowitz, during the question-and-answer period after his talk at UCSD, asked Albahri: “The head of Hizballah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or Against it?” Albahri, enunciating her words clearly and forcefully, responded with a forthright endorsement of genocide: “For it.”
But now that she has become the poster child for Islamic neo-Nazism, the idea that she condones genocide is a “lie” and David Horowitz is perpetrating a “smear campaign.”
Poor Jumanah, smeared by her own words!
Albahri’s disingenuousness and finger-pointing only increases as her statement goes on. She dismisses as “ridiculous” the charge that she is anti-Semitic. Why? Because, Jumanah Albahri piously informs us, “I am a Semite.”
Very well. Let’s not waste our time arguing over nomenclature. Albahri is herself a Semite, and so could not be anti-Semitic? Fine. Allow me, then, to pose the question in a slightly different way: is Jumanah Albahri a Jew-hater? Would it be reasonable to think that she is, after her avowal of the fact that she wants to see the Jews gather in Israel so that Muslims don’t have to hunt them down elsewhere? Or would that be “ridiculous”?
Displaying her own fine grasp of the ridiculous, Albahri goes on to portray David Horowitz as the real villain of the piece: the problem, you see, is not that she endorsed genocide, but that “Mr. Horowitz spent an hour indiscriminately attacking liberals, students, Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians, utilizing verbiage that completely departed from an academic tone and delved into hate speech—especially labeling groups and individuals that support Palestinian rights ‘terrorists.’” One might think that given Albahri’s own endorsement of mass murder on a global scale, she might be more understanding about Horowitz’s use of the word “terrorists,” but she is apparently not that self-reflective.
After several paragraphs of puffery, filled with ad hominem attacks against David Horowitz and Palestinian claims to victim status, Albahri finally offers an explanation of how a poor victim soul such as she was manipulated by the demonic Horowitz into endorsing genocide:
“Towards the end of the exchange, I became emotional. I could no longer hear Mr. Horowitz speaking and so did not even hear his injection of Hezbollah’s credo of ‘rounding up’ Jews in his last tangent. I could no longer contain my anger at being implicitly and improperly labeled a terrorist, an anti-Semite, and a proponent of genocide. The answer I was coerced into giving grossly misrepresented my beliefs and ideologies.”
Those who are tempted to believe Albahri’s claim that she was “coerced” into saying she favored the mass murder of Jews should at this point watch the video again. Watching it makes it impossible to believe that she could not hear what Horowitz was saying, or that she was coerced in any way into answering the way she did. Perhaps sensing this, she goes on to attempt yet another explanation: she did say it, but she didn’t mean it:
My answer, “for it,” in the context in which it was said does NOT mean “for” genocide. I was referring to his initial question that asked me for my position on Hamas, a topic that for his own political reasons he was relentless in pursuing. “For it” was not a legitimization of Hezbollah’s or anyone else’s credo for that matter that Jews should be exterminated. In fact, Mr. Horowitz’s intent was to entrap me with his barrage of questions so that he could avoid answering my question, and construe any answer that I would provide as anti-Semitic, genocidal hate speech in order to further his political agenda.
Here again, watching the video makes this position impossible to sustain. Horowitz formulated his question clearly and pointedly. Albahri shows no signs of confusion or disorientation, and answers Horowitz’s question as deliberately and forcefully as he asked it.
And so finally, does Jumanah Albahri condemn Hamas? She does not. “My opinion of Hamas,” she explains, “is not as simple as condemn or condone, ‘for it’ or ‘against it.’” She opposes “the killing of civilians,” without explaining whether she endorses the common Muslim view that there are no civilians in Israel, and concludes:
“I condone Hamas in its ambition to liberate the Palestinian people. I condone Hamas as the duly elected representative government of the Palestinian people granted governance in an election overseen by our ex-President Jimmy Carter; and characterized as fair, open, and fully democratic. I condone Hamas in its desire to end the inhumane siege of the Gazan people. I condone Hamas in its struggle to free the 10,000 Palestinian men, women, and children unjustly locked away in Israeli prisons.”
Albahri sums up: “It seems that in Mr. Horowitz’s logic, my support of freedom, peace, and justice makes me a ‘terrorist.’”
No, Jumanah. Your support of genocidal Jew-haters makes you a terrorist, or at very least a terrorist sympathizer.
Meanwhile, the UC-San Diego chapter of the Muslim Student Association also felt it necessary to issue a “clarification,” but their entry only muddied the waters further – and raised questions about the prevalence of Islamic anti-Semitism and supremacism among Muslims in the United States.
The Muslim Student Association is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamic organization that is dedicated (in its own words as recorded in a captured internal document) to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” And so it is perhaps not surprising that the MSA’s press release reeks of disingenuousness and damage control, but doesn’t get around to condemning Hamas and Hizballah (as Horowitz had asked Albahri to do), or even to condemning Albahri’s endorsement of genocide.
The USCD MSA did manage to condemn “all groups or organizations, whether state or non-state actors, who target civilians or target a civilian population to impose collective punishment.” Was it condemning attacks like September 11, or the July 7, 2005 bombings in London? Not necessarily. Once again, jihadists have said that “there are no civilians in Israel.” Thus a genocide of Jews there would not, according to this twisted logic, constitute the targeting of a civilian population. And it did seem as if the MSA had Israel in mind, since after explaining how the Koran forbade killing anyone “unjustly,” the MSA statement added: “It is for this very reason that MSA has organized events such as our annual Justice in Palestine Week.”
That sentence makes it clear that the MSA meant in its statement to condemn alleged Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians. They were not condemning Hamas or Hizballah, any more than did Jumanah Albahri.
The MSA statement is full of such weaseling. It quotes the Koran’s condemnation of one who “kills a human being unjustly” (5:32), without getting around to explaining what would constitute a just killing of another human being. It also condemns “the loss of all innocent lives, as well as all groups, whether state or non-state actors, that advocate and perpetuate the killing of innocent civilians.”
Then at last we get to some particulars: “Specifically, we condemn all Palestinian factions that have rejoiced in the killing of innocent Israeli civilians just as much as we condemn the indiscriminate murder of hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians during Israeli military aggression. We reject the current apartheid system in Palestine-Israel that discriminates against people based on their ethnicity and race.”
The key word in that passage is “innocent.” Many Muslims consider no non-Muslim to be innocent, in accord with the Koran’s picture of them as being always and everywhere in bad faith — and even larger numbers of Muslims consider no Israeli to be innocent. Thus to condemn the killing of innocent civilians in Israel is quite possibly to condemn no killing at all.
And that’s not surprising. Genocidal statements are common from Muslim leaders today. On January 29, Palestinian Authority TV broadcast a mosque sermon saying: “The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them, until the tree and the stone will speak and say…‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah — there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews. Thus, this land will be liberated only by means of Jihad.”
If that jihad involves Muslims murdering Jews en masse, then what’s to prevent a pious young lady like Jumanah Imad Albahri from believing that genocide is a good thing?
To see the timeline of the Truthful Girl saga, click here.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, is available now from Regnery Publishing, and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).
