Just hours before presenting her with the prestigious Women of Courage Award US State Department withdrew its plans to include Egyptian activist Samira Ibrahim among the recipients. The outcry against the award for her arose out of her anti-American, ant-Israel, anti-Semitic tweets that were so vile that the State Department could hardly ignore them. According to their website, the presentation of the award has been “deferred”.
According to the Weekly Standard, the story was reported as follows: “On Twitter, Ibrahim is quite blunt regarding her views. On July 18 of last year, after five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim jubilantly tweeted: ‘An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.’
” Ibrahim frequently uses Twitter to air her anti-Semitic views. Last August 4, commenting on demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, she described the ruling Al Saud family as ‘dirtier than the Jews.’ Seventeen days later she tweeted in reference to Adolf Hitler: ‘I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place, except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.’
” Ibrahim holds other repellent views as well. As a mob was attacking the United States embassy in Cairo on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, pulling down the American flag and raising the flag of Al Qaeda, Ibrahim wrote on twitter: ‘Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.’ Possibly fearing the consequences of her tweet, she deleted it a couple of hours later, but not before a screen shot was saved by an Egyptian activist.
“Just today, apparently after having been warned that her vicious tweets might cause her trouble during her visit to the U.S., she has written on twitter: “My account has been previously stolen and any tweet on racism and hatred is not me.” However, in the past she never made any mention of her account being “stolen.” The record of her anti-Semitic tweets is still available online.”
But it should be noted that ibahim’s first reaction to the news that the award had been deferred was, “I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America under pressure from the U.S. government for previous statements hostile to Zionism”
State Department Spokewoman said that it was her understanding that Ibrahim was now on her way back to Egypt.
The State Department got it right this time. Thank you.
———— Ilana Freedman
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Original Story:
First Lady Michelle Obama, State Deptartment
to Give Award to Honor Egyptian 9/11 Fan
By Chana Ya’ar
First Lady Michelle Obama and the U.S. State Department this Friday honor 10 women with the Int’l Women of Courage Award – including one who tweeted her joy about Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on America.
Samira Ibrahim, a 25-year-old women’s rights activist, was a participant in the January 25 Revolution demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that brought down the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and eventually morphed into the region wide Arab Spring uprisings. She was among the protesters who were violently dispersed, and she and other women were beaten, subjected to electric shocks, strip searched and videotaped by the soldiers.
Sexual assault of women has not ended, despite changes in the Egyptian administration, and women in Cairo recently held another protest in Tahrir Square, this time against the regime of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi, over similar issues. Moreover, during the violence in Tahrir Square, a number of female journalists — among them at least one American television network correspondent – were sexually assaulted, and there were reports that at least one was raped.
According to the U.S. State Department Ibrahim and six other women were also “subjected by the Egyptian military to forced virginity tests in March 2011.” The military claimed the tests were carried out to protect the soldiers from subsequent charges of rape. The doctor who carried out the tests was subsequently charged but eventually freed, an act that prompted Ibrahim to vow she would take the case to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
But the State Department left out a few other items in Ibrahim’s biography, which Breitbart journalist Samuel Tadros dug up and included in his own report.
The young Egyptian woman to be honored by the First Lady and Secretary of State John Kerry has no problem tweeting her anti-Semitic feelings about Jews, for example: A tweet on the Saudi royals called them “dirtier than the Jews.”
[She also tweeted a quote from Hitler:] “I have discovered with the passage of days that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.”
Nor does she hide her hatred of the nation that now plans to grant her its highest honor to the fairer sex, tweeting that she hopes for a re-enactment of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attack on the United States, and that “every year come[s] with America burning.”
A tweet about a suicide bombing in Israel was equally venomous: “Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.”
Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large for Breibart News, dryly pointed out the current frantic scramble to spin away Ibrahim’s vicious attitude with the claim that her Twitter account was “stolen” in the past came only “after being outed” — a quite a long time after the alleged theft took place.
Surely her tweets, posted on a public social networking website, were noted long before, however: such “brave” comments made by an Egyptian woman victimized by security police in the face of the Arab Spring must have at least raised eyebrows, if not made headlines. No?
Perhaps it required an honor from the U.S. Secretary of State and America’s First Lady to highlight them properly at center stage.
Read the original article here.