Another Women's March Canceled over 'Drastic' Drop in Support
I’m pretty sure the Women’s March leaders probably don’t think they have a lot to learn from conservative media, and the feeling is reciprocal.
I’ll say this much, though: Had the group’s members listened to what we’ve been saying for a while, they wouldn’t be canceling marches left and right.
The Baton Rouge chapter of the National Organization for Women announced on Saturday that it wouldn’t be holding the 2019 edition of the Women’s March in New Orleans as a “controversy is dampening efforts of sister marches to fundraise,” according to a Facebook post by the group.
While the issue wasn’t mentioned by name, the post seemed to tacitly imply that two major exposés of anti-Semitism within the leadership of Women’s March were responsible for the cancellation.
“Due to several issues we have decided it is necessary to cancel the 2019 Women’s March in New Orleans,” the message read.
“Many of the sister marches have asked the leaders of Women’s March, Inc. to resign but as of today, they have yet to do so.
“The controversy is dampening efforts of sister marches to fundraise, enlist involvement, find sponsors and attendee numbers have drastically declined this year. New Orleans is no exception,” it continued.
“However, this does not mean the end of our momentum in Louisiana. It’s time to look past the marching and look towards a new stage of the movement.”
According to the Washington Times, the move comes as major marches in Chicago and Humboldt County, California, were also being scrapped.
The reason is hardly any surprise, of course. In December, two major news outlets — The New York Times and the Jewish periodical Tablet — both raised issues with anti-Semitism in the leadership of the Women’s March movement.
While this was no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention, the depth of the problem — and the fact that it had existed long before a single pink hat with cat ears had been knitted — ought to have stunned everybody.
The Tablet exposé, published about two weeks earlier than The Times’ piece, included some very serious allegations regarding Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, two of the March’s most visible figures.
“According to several sources, it was there — in the first hours of the first meeting for what would become the Women’s March — that something happened that was so shameful to many of those who witnessed it, they chose to bury it like a family secret. Almost two years would pass before anyone present would speak about it,” the piece read.
“It was there that, as the women were opening up about their backgrounds and personal investments in creating a resistance movement to Trump, Perez and Mallory allegedly first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade. These are canards popularized by ‘The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,’ a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam — ‘the bible of the new anti-Semitism,’ according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., who noted in 1992: ‘Among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.’”
The association with Farrakhan took on special resonance since Mallory had long been criticized for her relationship with Farrakhan, who she’d called “the GOAT” (“Greatest of All Time”) on social media.
During a June event, Mallory also seemed to intimate the very existence of the state of Israel was a “human rights crime.”
Mallory didn’t help matters any with her statement to The Times: “Since that conversation, we’ve all learned a lot about how while white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy, ALL Jews are targeted by it,” she said.
And then there’s Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist with ties to Farrakhan and a long history of problematic statements involving Jewish people, such as saying Muslims shouldn’t “humanize” Israeli Jews.
According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Sarsour was recently seen as accusing some Jewish liberals of having dual loyalties between the United States and Israel because they had raised concerns about Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — who has made anti-Semitic statements on social media.
To her (very minimal) credit, Sarsour at least struck a note of apology before the exposés hit, but as calls for leadership to step down had intensified, stating that the Women’s March leaders “should have been faster and clearer in helping people understand our values and our commitment to fighting anti-semitism,” the JTA reported in a separate article. “We regret that.”
She did not, however, “regret that” enough to resign, nor did Mallory. (To be fair, it’s not even clear Mallory feels there’s anything to regret.)
Conservative media have long pointed out the Women’s March’s problem with anti-Semitism at the top, particularly in regards to Mallory and Sarsour. Nobody wanted to listen then.
“Far Right Slams Palestinian March Organizer Linda Sarsour as Anti-Semite,” a January 2017 article in the left-leaning Jewish publication The Forward was titled, and that roughly summed up how progressives felt about conservative criticisms of the Women’s March for having dubious leadership.
I wonder what they’re saying about those far-rightists at The Times and Tablet now.
Organizers cancel Women’s March in New Orleans as support drops ‘drastically’https://t.co/5OG2gI2ryX
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 1, 2019
Anyhow, the New York march has splintered into two contingents, there won’t even be marches in Chicago and New Orleans, and while we’ll wait to see what the attendance numbers are going to look like across the nation, a fair bet would be that they’ll be very far down.
To paraphrase the Hives, we hate to say we told you so, but we do believe we told you so.
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