Abraham Foxman, the National Director Emeritus of the ADL, called Linda Sarsour a “bigot” who should not have received an invitation to speak at the commencement ceremony of CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health.
In an interview with The Algemeiner Journal, Foxman said, “She’s a champion of equal rights, except when it comes to Jewish rights. She plays that game, ‘I love Jews, I don’t like Zionists.’ Well, I’ve got news for her. Every Jew who’s a Jew prays to Jerusalem, says ‘If I forget you, Jerusalem.’ So this is a throwback to 1948… You can be an advocate of the Palestinian liberation movement without being an enemy of Jewish liberation,” Foxman stressed. But that, he continued, is not the case with Sarsour. “She is an enemy of Jewish sovereignty and Jewish liberation. She’s a bigot, and she shouldn’t have been invited [to CUNY].”
Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) praised Foxman who served for nearly three decades as the ADL’s National Director. “Abe Foxman has the guts and the insight to say what the currently politicized ADL seems to be carefully avoiding. Not a peep out of them on Sarsour. Their silence is deafening and shameful… The normalization of terrorism should be unacceptable to everyone, especially our elected officials and community leaders. Speak up or accept that you are contributing to the problem!”
Sarsour has close ties with Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine convicted by an Israeli court for her role in the murder of two students, Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe, in a Jerusalem supermarket bombing. Odeh, who has spoken alongside Sarsour, is currently being deported for falsifying information when she immigrated to the United States.
Sarsour also glorified rock throwing by Arab children at Israelis calling it “the definition of courage.”
