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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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Oh, that isn’t a direct quote, but it might as well have been.

BuzzKill BuzzFeed, the same outfit which, still employs disgraced ‘journalist’ Jason Leopold,¹ and is owned by NBC Universal, decided to give a guest column to Leen Dweik and Rose Asaf, the two Palestinian sympathizers who aggressively accosted Chelsea Clinton Mezvinsky, to explain their actions and motivations. A rational observer would have expected that Miss Dweik and Miss Asaf would have taken the opportunity to smooth things over, considering the mostly negative reaction they received. Well, said rational observer would have been wrong.

Opinion: We Confronted Chelsea Clinton At The Christchurch Vigil. Here’s Why.
The activists who confronted Chelsea Clinton at the vigil for victims of the Christchurch massacre explain their actions.

Leen Dweik and Rose Asaf | BuzzFeed Contributors | Posted on March 16, 2019, at 7:17 p.m. ET

Yesterday we posted a video of Leen confronting Chelsea Clinton at a vigil for the victims of the white supremacist New Zealand mosque massacre. Today, we woke up to over 100,000 people talking about it on Twitter. Needless to say, this is not what we expected.

We went to the vigil for one reason: to grieve the loss of innocent lives that were stolen from this world by vile hatred. We wanted to join our friends and colleagues in a time of heartbreak and agony, to remember the 49 Muslims who were murdered for being Muslim. As a Jewish American-Israeli and a Palestinian Muslim, we understand far too well the consequences of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and white supremacy. And as activists who are unafraid to speak the truth, we know we have a duty to call out any bigotry wherever it exists.

We did a double take when we first noticed Chelsea Clinton was at the vigil. Just weeks before this tragedy, we bore witness to a bigoted, anti-Muslim mob coming after Rep. Ilhan Omar for speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country. As people in unwavering solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and human rights, we were profoundly disappointed when Chelsea Clinton used her platform to fan those flames. We believe that Ilhan Omar did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo, but the way many people chose to criticize Omar made her vulnerable to anti-Muslim hatred and death threats.

We were shocked when Clinton arrived at the vigil, given that she had not yet apologized to Rep. Omar for the public vilification against her. We thought it was inappropriate for her to show up to a vigil for a community she had so recently stoked hatred against. We were not alone in feeling uncomfortable — many students were dismayed to see her there.

There’s more at the original.

Mrs Mezvinsky is hardly a conservative, and she neither said nor wrote anything which could be considered Islamophobic or anti-Muslim. Rather, she tweeted:

Co-signed as an American. We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) February 11, 2019

How, I have to ask, does the statement “We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism,” constitute Islamophobia? How is it critical of Muslims in general? It states that anti-Semitism should not be tolerated, from anyone.

Of course, the proximate cause were the anti-Semitic statements of Representative Ilhan Omar Hirsi (D-MN 5^th District), and Mrs Hirsi is Muslim, and a refugee from Somalia. The ladies who accosted Mrs Mezvinsky conflated criticism of anti-Semitism in a statement by a Muslim woman as constituting Islamophobia itself.

One would assume from Mrs Mezvinsky’s attendance at a vigil for victims of the Christchurch massacre that she was genuinely appalled by the killings. That hardly sounds like someone who has a problem with Muslims. But, for Misses Dweik and Asaf, it didn’t matter:

(W)hen we saw Chelsea, we saw an opportunity to have her ear and confront her on her false charge of anti-Semitism against our only Black, Muslim, Somali, and refugee member of Congress. We took our chance to speak truth to power. Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of antisemitism, showing no regard for Rep. Omar and the hatred being directed at her.

Of course, Mrs Hirsi’s statements were anti-Semitic, and the Democrats leading the House of Representatives clearly saw it as thus. They rather clumsily drafted a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, and then faced a rebellion from some of the further left members of their own caucus, who insisted that any resolution had to condemn all forms of bigotry, so as not to single out only anti-Semitism and the members of the caucus who are, in fact, anti-Semitic.

Many have said it was unfair to connect Chelsea’s words to the massacre in Christchurch. To them, we say that anti-Muslim bigotry must be addressed wherever it exists. This is not about left and right. This is about people who do and do not have power, and how those with power use it. A global environment of hatred and vilification against Muslims created this killer. Spurred on by professional bigots, anti-Muslim hate now permeates our culture and politics, and everyone, as a matter of urgency, should consider the role they play in enabling it. That includes Chelsea Clinton.

Did the perpetrator, who left some long, rambling manifesto, mention Mrs Mezvinsky’s statement? In a country about as far from the United States as it’s possible to get, how probable is it that he ever saw it?² She said nothing at all about Muslims, but simply condemned anti-Semitism in general.

When Misses Dweik and Asaf say that “anti-Muslim bigotry must be addressed wherever it exists,” they have clearly said that they see condemnations of anti-Semitism as being anti-Muslim, and that condemning hatred against Jews constitutes “vilification against Muslims.”

Of course, they don’t want to be seen as anti-Semitic themselves:

We know that our only safety is through solidarity. The fight against anti-Muslim bigotry is the fight against anti-Semitism is the fight against racism is the fight against white supremacy. When someone attacks one of us, they attack all of us.

If the authors actually believed that, they’d have been condemning Mrs Hirsi’s statements, not Mrs Mezvinsky’s.

But they don’t believe that, not in the slightest.

This is a chronic problem for the Palestinian sympathizers, which the authors stated they were: their support for the Palestinians inevitably turns to anti-Semitism, even though one of them tells us she is a “Jewish American-Israeli.” You can tell this when that Jewish American-Israeli cannot even see that condemnation of anti-Semitism does not mean hatred toward Muslims.

The authors could have simply accepted the heavily pregnant Mrs Mezvinsky’s presence quietly, and seen her as simply at the vigil as showing support for the victims of the massacre. That they could not do that, that they could not behave like civilized human beings, shows us just what they are.
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¹ – Despite a serious round of layoffs, BuzzFeed still lists Jason Leopold as “a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News,” though his author page does not list any posts with his byline, or even sharing a byline, dated later than February 5, 2019. His Twitter page still lists him as working at BuzzFeed.
² – He had access to the internet, but how likely is it that he followed the daughter of a President who served two decades ago and a twice failed presidential candidate?
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