On cue, those who’d hate to see the mainstreaming of Palestinians anywhere in America have begun to attack Aboushi. It began, as so many of these smear campaigns do, at FrontPage Magazine. The website, edited by well-known islamophobe David Horowitz, is home to all sort of virulent anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian dreck. Horowitz has, among other accomplishments, created lists of university professors he deemed anti-American and anti-Israel, largely for simply teaching the subject with some nuance. He's also behind “Islamofacism week” efforts on university campuses.
It was no surprise, then, that his website would publish a hatchet job article on Aboushi alledging that he is anti-Semitic and involved with clandestine terrorist activity. Of course the article, typical of the sort, was filled with wild exaggeration, outright lies, and the sort of guilt by association that is more embarrassing for the author than for the target. It stops just short of telling you that Aboushi’s sister’s boyfriend’s neighbor’s dog once urinated on a fire hydrant a block from a Jewish community center and thus, Aboushi is an anti-Semite.
Among the outlandish accusations in the FrontPage piece was the claim that Aboushi was anti-Semitic for tweeting an image of a Palestinian woman standing outside her house, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem, after she'd been evicted so Israeli settlers could take it. Even the State Department deplored such actions by Israel as violations of their obligations. The author even went so far as to try to connect Aboushi to a speaker who the INS charged with being part of a terrorist group. How can the the INS, which dealt with immigration and doesn’t exist anymore, charge people with involvement in terrorism? By doing this in 1988, years before Aboushi was even born, and violating constitutional rights. Perhaps most insidious was the claim that Aboushi was anti-Semitic for using the term Nakba, which Palestinians use to describe the period of their expulsion and disposession from 1947 to 1949. Well, the author probably never learned that it was likely Israeli military who propelled the term into its modern usage. So there you go, the Israeli military is anti-Semitic too.
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