There’s a theme that emerges when defending the atrocities of Hamas and its supporters: “You made us do it.” And the next step beyond that is the suggestion that the crimes committed by Hamas and its supporters were really a form of entrapment by Israel.
You see this argument in the suggestion that Israel deliberately lowered its guard to allow Hamas to kill, rape and kidnap Israelis.
And you see it in Linda Sarsour, a politically influential Islamist and the godmother of Islamist antisemitism in America, arguing that the kidnap posters are a Jewish conspiracy to make her side look like the heartless evil monsters that they are.
“I will remind all of you good people that are here,” Linda Sarsour, one of Obama’s champions for change, a top Democrat activist and the co-founder of MPower Change, told a pro-Hamas rally outside Grand Central Station. “That there are provocateurs all across the city. And what they’re waiting for you to do is to waste your energy ripping down their little posters so they can record you and try to get you fired.”
Then Linda Sarsour launched into a deranged Jew-hating Goebbelsian rant.
“So when you go home, they have their little people all over the place, trust me I know them, I got a radar for them... you think they’re ordinary people, trust me when I tell you they are everywhere. They’re on your college campus, they’re outside the supermarket, they’re outside Grand Central Station,” she said.
The idea that posters of kidnapped Israelis are a trick to get Hamas supporters to show who they are by ripping them off is a species of pathological antisemitism. To what extent does Linda Sarsour actually believe it and to what extent is she recognizing that there is no point in asking her side to exercise even basic tactical decency?
They’re too far gone to be expected to restrain themselves from tearing down posters of kidnapped kids for any reason other than the belief that the Jews want them to do it.
