Update On UCSD MSA Member Who Admitted She Wants A Second Holocaust

You may remember my piece from a few days ago about a Muslim Students Association member at UCSD named Jumanah Imad Albahri who had the above exchange with author and speaker David Horowitz in which she refused to condemn Hamas or Hezbollah and said she was for a second Holocaust.

After I wrote the piece, I received an e-mail from one of Ms. Albahri's professors, Anita Casavantes Bradford in which she defended Ms. Albahri, claiming that her student had been manipulated into the exchange by Horowitz, was allegedly friendly with some Jews on campus and definitely did not support a second Holocaust.

While I politely pointed out to Professor Bradford that the above video clearly shows that David Horowitz merely asked her directly to unequivocally condemn genocidal organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah ( something she was clearly unwilling to do), I mentioned that the best way for Ms. Albahri to clarify her views would be to issue a statement condemning these groups and state her real views on the matter. I wrote Professor Bradford that if such a statement was forthcoming, I would post a link to it here on my website.

Today, I got an email from Professor Bradford directing me to this blogpost by Jumanah Imad Albahri which was supposed to clarify things.

Unfortunately it does, and it reveals an astonishing ignorance as well as a moral relativism that is simply indefensible. And no,she still refuses to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah. I suggest you read the whole thing ( at least while it's still up), but I will go over the more relevant bits here:

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.”

In fact, the Palestinian movement has always made heroes out of those who deliberately target innocent people. That includes those who murder children.... and even murderers like Salakh Khalaf, who headed the Black September group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and later tortured to death two American diplomats in the Sudan in 1973 on Arafat's orders, Cleo Allen Noel and George Curtis Moore - and later had a street, several buildings and a child's soccer field named after him by the Palestinian Authority.

I asked Mr. Horowitz to explain the purported connection between UCSD’s MSA and “Jihadist Terrorist Networks.” His pamphlet did not mention the organization; rather it focused on other groups like UCI’s MSU and Berkley and LA’s MSA chapters, and offered supporting grounds that can be characterized as shaky at best, with sources that had little credibility. He chose not to engage my question (his opening arguments were the verbatim generalizations made in the pamphlet, though my question asked for specifics) but instead decided to subject me to an interrogation because of my headscarf and Palestinian kuffiyeh. The fact that Mr. Horowitz claimed on a respected national cable news network that the MSA receives forty thousand dollars to put on Justice in Palestine Week, speaks volumes to his status as a gross exaggerator who should not be trusted to deliver opinions on anything.

Actually, David Horowitz has documented quite thoroughly extensive links between the MSA and the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, although Ms. Albahri's chapter may or may not be receiving largess from the Ikhwan or its sympathizers. And it's not just him. I suggest also that interested readers do a search on 'Muslim Brotherhood' and 'Muslim Students Association' and settle in for a few hours of highly informative reading.

Insofar as my references to Hitler and the Nazi Youth programs: it was Mr. Horowitz who spent a substantial amount of time referring to the MSA as the “Hitler Youth” and its Justice in Palestine Week as “Hitler Youth Week”— pejorative titles that as a human being, a student of history, and a person of faith, I find disgusting. I uttered them in a sarcastic manner only to point out the ridiculous and slanderous nature of Mr. Horowitz’s labels—Nazis sought the extermination of anyone who was not “white,” and this racial category excludes the vast majority of the Muslim population.

Actually, Ms. Albahri is either ignorant or simply dissembling about the links between the Nazis and the Palestinian/Arab cause.Certainly she's no student of history.



The top Palestinian leader of the era, Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, was an intimate of Hitler and an ally of the Nazis who advocated genocide of every Jew in Palestine and in fact numerous pogroms and massacres of Jews, such as the one in Hebron in 1929 were carried out on his direct orders. During WWII. Husseini, like most other Arab leaders aligned with the Nazi cause, and Husseini spent much of the war translating 'Mein Kampf' into Arabic (where Hitler's book, whose title translates into Arabic as 'My Jihad' remains a best seller), making radio broadcasts in Arabic for the Nazi cause, recruiting Muslim SS troops for the Nazis in places like Bosnia and Albania and planning strategy with the Muslim Brotherhood for a Nazi-Arab alliance with Hitler and Himmler to coincide with a Nazi breathrough in Egypt. The pro-Nazi regime which took over in Iraq was part of this strategy, which also included detailed plans worked out by Husseini and Adolph Eichmann for a death camp for the Jews of Palestine and the Middle East located in Shechem (AKA Nablus).

As a personal note, I directly heard from a friend of my father's who fought with Montgomery and the British 8th Army at El Alamein about how Cairo was decked out with Nazi flags and banners by the Egyptians to welcome the Nazi armies when the 8th Army marched back into the city after winning the battle. I would classify this as anecdotal except for the fact that this little historical detail has been confirmed by numerous others.

According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the SS helped finance al-Husseini's efforts in Palestine . And Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini shortly before WWII and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin.

After the war, Husseini moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but the Mufti was never tried because there was no way to extradite him and because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if a 'hero' like Husseini was treated as a war criminal.The Arab nations, particularly Syria, Egypt and Iraq also became havens for a number of Nazi ex-officers, technicians and scientists.

Husseini's nephew, the Egyptian born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat continued his uncle's sordid legacy and always referred to the Mufti as 'our national hero.'

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.

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.

I am not a member of Hamas, nor have I ever given support to Hamas, nor do I agree their actions or stances wholesale, but I refused to offer Mr. Horowitz a blanket condemnation of Hamas that night. I felt that doing so would be a blanket condemnation of the Palestinian cause. I refused to throw the baby (the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people) out with the bathwater (Hamas.) In addition, Mr. Horowitz asked me to condemn Hamas as a genocidal organization; which to my limited knowledge on the subject, is another unsupported claim made by Mr. Horowitz.

Limited knowledge? Unsupported claim? After all the statements Hamas has made on the subject, not to mention their actions, is she serious? Perhaps Ms. Albahri needs to be reminded that Hamas has even codified its mission to kill all Jews worldwide in its Martyr's Oath, which all members swear to uphold. The Oath also quotes the Islamic scripture from the Hadith Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6985, which quotes the very words of Mohammed on the subject: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him."

Is Ms. Albari expecting us to believe that she is unaware of the Oath and the hadith quoted? If she really is that clueless, she needs to do some serious soul searching.

And then there's this:

..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.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. Like Ms. Albahri, I agree that Hamas is the duly elected government of the Palestinian people, and by a comfortable majority. But what does that say about a majority of the Palestinian people, that they would enthusiastically endorse a genocidal organization who makes no secret of their aims? The Nazis, after all, were also democratically elected.

Why would any rational person expect Israel to make any sort of peace with that kind of regime?

What does it say about Ms. Albahri's belief system that she pines for the release of terrorists like Marwan Barghouti, who was convicted of five counts of murder in an Israeli civilian court like most of the inmates locked up in Israeli prisons? What does it say about her moral structure that she would want people like these released as 'freedom fighters'?

When it comes to genocidal, murderous organizations, you simply can't pick and choose the parts you like. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, kind to animals and to many of his human associates. The Nazis provided full employment in Germany,restored its national pride and rid it of the hated Versailles Treaty.

Just like Ms. Albahri, many Germans might have had paid a little lip service to qualms about the regime's excesses, but they justified supporting the Nazis because because they agreed with 'the greater goal' - and because, deep down, they agreed with the agenda.

That kind of position is not only intellectually bankrupt but morally indefensible and despicable.

Whether she realizes it or not, Ms. Albahri was pegged exactly right by David Horowitz. She's simply a Jew hater who perhaps has found a few 'diversity' minded individuals who are willing to overlook the clear message of the positions she advocates and allow her to mask her sentiments. You can't support groups that make murdering Jews a major policy goal in any way without being a Jew hater.

And truthfully, I have absolutely no problem with Ms. Albahri hating Jews. But I do wish she'd either own it or simply understand that she's become, in the memorable phrase of Vladimir Lenin, a useful idiot, a foot soldier for causes whose real agenda she chooses to remain clueless about.

It's one or the other.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Addendum: Anita Casavantes Bradford wrote to tell me that she is not a professor, but a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in her last year of her dissertation and thus is a TA, not a professor. She wanted that clarified because she didn't want anyone to think she was misrepresenting herself.

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