If you needed any further evidence of terrifying Obama State Department incompetence after the Benghazi debacle, the Samira Ibrahim saga should do it. She was due to be honored by Secretary of State John Kerry and First Lady Michelle Obama today, for speaking up against the terrible abuse of forced “virginity tests” administered by the Egyptian military.
As laudable as this crusade might be, it apparently never occurred to one person in the immense staffs of Kerry, his predecessor Hillary Clinton, the First Lady (whose entourage is big enough to make Saudi royalty blush) or anyone at State to investigate what else Ibrahim might have been saying, even though they were admittedly aware of the rather obvious clue that she wrote a high-school paper that “criticized Arab leaders’ insincere support for the Palestinian cause.”
It turns out she’s a raving anti-Semitic loon and terrorist sympathizer, whose Twitter feed included references to “dirty Jews,” praise for Adolph Hitler, and a touching wish that “every year come with America burning” on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. When a bus bomb killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, Ibrahim chirped, “Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.”
Skeptical writers and bloggers, notably the Weekly Standard, did the State Department’s job for them, just hours before Ibrahim was to receive her reward. She responded with a lame effort to claim her Twitter account had been “hacked” (for months, years, without this tech-savvy global activist noticing? By hackers who sheepishly deleted her 9/11 Tweet when it seemed a bit much, even for her?) Naturally, the clown act at the State Department lapped this up like cream and stood by her… then they announced they would postpone her award while they reviewed the case… until she apparently couldn’t control herself any more, and blurted, “I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America regarding my previous anti-Zionist statements under pressure from American government, therefore they withdrew the award.”
The charitable take on all this is the one I offered above: Kerry, Clinton, Obama, and their teeming hordes of sequestration-proof aides never thought to review the full spectrum of Ibrahim’s rhetoric, in their desperate haste to find a few passably progressive Muslim heroines they could hang medals from. The uncharitable take is that they knew, but didn’t care, and somehow talked themselves into believing it would never get out.
“We, as a department, became aware very late in the process about Samira Ibrahim’s alleged public comments,” gurgled State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Thursday. Who on Earth thinks that excuse is acceptable… even if it had turned out that Ibrahim’s account was hacked for years, without her ever noticing or commenting upon it until a few hours ago?
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