February 13
GUEST: Zahra Billoo, civil rights attorney, board member of the National Lawyers Guild, and executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), talks about Muslim rights and why she was removed from the Women's March board.An Interview with Ousted Women's March Board Member
We have all talked about a united front against all forms of racism and discrimination. The Women's March seemed to be that combination, at least for a while. From three to five million people marched in the US against war and for universal human rights. The NYC march was so big that parts of the city were completely shut down. At the supposed end of the march, we ran into tens of thousands who had not yet begun. The Woman's March in NYC was simply too big to organize.
What followed was much less inspiring. The new board of the Women's March decided that it didn't want one of the original members because she had criticized Israel. Zahra Billoo, a Palestinian American, was ousted.
PEP stands for "progressive except for Palestine," and is a fitting acronym for how the Women's March lost its way. The human rights of Palestinian women in the US and in the Holy Land cannot be left out to satisfy a few influential Zionists. There are no ethnicities that are undeserving. We don't have an "untouchable" class for Muslims. In fact, to suggest that the rights of Palestinian women don't count is the essence of the racism and discrimination that the march was supposed to oppose.
Zionism is the embodiment of racism, the demand that only Jews in the Holy Land deserve our respect and support. Half the people living in the region are not Jewish. Are their rights somehow nonexistent?
In the end, the Women's March was destroyed by the very racism it was created to overcome.
