Taxpayer-Funded College Hosts Sharia-Loving Commencement Speaker With Ties To Terror Group
by Eric Owens
Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour will be this year’s commencement speaker at the taxpayer-funded City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.
“I am delighted to confirm that Linda Sarsour will indeed speak at our June 1 commencement at the Apollo Theater,” said Barbara Aaron, chief of staff to CUNY Graduate School of Public Health dean Ayman El-Mohandes, in a statement sent to The Daily Caller.
Sarsour, one of the main organizers behind January’s Women’s March on Washington, is the former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.
In December 2016, Sarsour spoke at the 15th annual convention of the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America.
While there, she posed for a picture with Salah Sarsour, a member of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and former Hamas operative who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s because of his alleged work for the terrorist group. (RELATED: Women’s March Organizer Recently Met Ex-Hamas Operative, Has Family Ties To Terror Group)
The U.S. government designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995.
The FBI has alleged that Salah Sarsour, who resides in Milwaukee, raised money for Hamas during that period.
In 2001, the FBI named Salah Sarsour as a money man for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a Texas-based group that served as a financial conduit for Hamas.
Linda Sarsour has suggested that she is not related to Salah Sarsour. However, Linda Sarsour has other family ties to alleged Hamas operatives. In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, she acknowledged that she has cousins serving prison time in Israel because of their work for Hamas.
Linda Sarsour maintains that she has no connection to Hamas. She told the Times in 2012 that she would not have been appointed as an Obama “Champion of Change” if she had.
Linda Sarsour also has close ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In 2009, the civil rights group was listed by the U.S. government as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme that provided funding to the terror group Hamas.
In a now-deleted 2011 tweet, Sarsour once expressed the desire to “take away” a Muslim critic’s vagina.
Brigitte Gabriel is an anti-Muslim activist who founded ACT for America.
Hirsi Ali is a women’s rights advocate, a victim of female genital mutilation and a very vocal critic of Islam.
In 2014, Sarsour also gave a defense of Sharia Law, claiming that it consists of not eating pork, refraining from alcohol and following Islamic teachings.
In one tweet she wrote that sharia law is “reasonable.” Another showed that she favorably compared Saudi Arabia to the U.S. because Saudi Arabia grants women paid maternity leave. She downplayed the regime’s prohibition against women driving as no big deal.
Last month, during an International Women’s Day protest which she co-organized, Sarsour was arrested outside Trump Tower in New York City.
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