Milo Yiannopoulos And Pam Geller Headline Anti-Sarsour Protest
Image by Facebook
As the rain poured down in New York City, right-wing firebrands Milo Yiannopoulos and Pamela Geller led a demonstration against Linda Sarsour’s invitation to speak at a CUNY commencement ceremony in a rally that featured anti-Islam rhetoric and drew fierce counter-protest.
“Linda Sarsour supports this ideology that oppresses women, subjugates women, gender apartheid, honor killings,” said Geller, as she stood on a platform near Times Square. “Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”
“Linda Sarsour is a Sharia-embracing, terrorist-embracing, Jew-hating ticking time-bomb of progressive horror,” said Yiannopoulos, the ex-Breitbart editor who resigned after past remarks about pedophilia caused a scandal.
As the speakers denounced Sarsour, counter-protesters shouted slogans of “no fascism” and “no KKK.” Geller dismissed them as “lily white snowflakes.” Geller also led her backers in the singing of “Am Yisrael Chai,” an anthem affirming Israeli identity.
Sarsour, a Muslim civil rights activist who organized the January Women’s March, will deliver a commencement address next week to graduates of the city university’s public health school.
Her past statements defending Saudi Arabia’s women rights records and Islamic regulations known as Sharia law led to controversy surrounding her appearance at the graduation event.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
