J Street Is Jihad Street - Elects Muslima Amna Farooqi As President Of National Student Board J Street U

"...Her Twitter timeline, for example, is dominated by criticisms of Israel, and retweets of criticisms others have made. One tweet, for example, refers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "douchebag." (She does not criticize the Palestinians.)

Amna Farooqi, 21, fell in love with Zionism after playing David Ben Gurion during an Israeli studies course.

J Street U, the campus arm of liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street, has elected a Muslim-American as president of its national student board.

Amna Farooqi, a 21-year-old rising senior at the University of Maryland, was "decisively" voted to head the board during elections at J Street U's Summer Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C.

The child of Pakistani parents, Farooqi grew up in a Washington suburb in a fairly religious Muslim home, she told Haaretz.

Although, she "had a lot of Jewish friends and felt connected to that," Farooqi noted, she grew up "in a household sympathetic to the Palestinian cause," where, "the Palestine-Israel conflict was always the elephant in the room."

Interested in "ending this conflict," Farooqi said she felt a responsibility to "understand all sides."

During her freshman year of college, she got involved with University of Maryland's J Street U chapter, began going to Hillel, and taking courses on Israel. In one class, Farooqi was assigned to play Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, which "completely changed the way [she] thought about this conflict," Farooqui said in TED Talk-style video filmed at the J Street conference last March.

"Suddenly Zionism became about accountability. It was about the Jewish people taking control of their future after a history of being trampled on," she added, calling this the moment she "fell in love with Zionism."

J Street U's new president later studied abroad at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and traveled extensively within the Jewish state.

Although Farooqi is very excited to serve as J Street U's president, her election will almost certainly prove controversial, particularly from parts of the Jewish community who view J Street with askance.

"The election of a Muslim at the head of the most prominent left-of-center pro-Israel campus organization will evoke disparate reactions from conservatives and liberals," the prominent American Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen told Haaretz. "Pro-Israel conservatives, Jewish and not, will see confirmation of their suspicion that J Street specifically and the pro-Israel left generally is actually disloyal and subversive, lacking true commitment to Israel's security," Cohen, who made aliyah in 1992, noted.

"Pro-Israel liberals, Jewish and not," however, "will see confirmation of their aspiration to reach across national, ethnic and religious boundaries to build a pro-peace coalition," he added.

Amna Farooqi
Southeast Representative, J Street U Student Board
University of Maryland

Amna Farooqi is a junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, studying political science and Israel studies. Being a first generation Pakistani-American growing up in Potomac, MD post-9/11, she never really had a chance to engage with Israel. Her senior year of high school, she decided to embrace the awkward elephant in her life and study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and after hearing about J Street at work- a group of "liberal bastards"- she decided to get involved with J Street U on campus at UMD. Since then, she has studied abroad in Jerusalem and traveled throughout Israel and the West Bank. When she's not talking/reading/having internal monologues about the conflict, she enjoys eating mint chocolate chip ice cream and watching The Gatekeepers.

"...One J Street U activist was particularly remarkable: Amna Farooqi, a Pakistani-Muslim American from a heavily Jewish town in Maryland, who mentioned being inspired by our fellow blogger, Paul Scham, who teaches Israel Studies at the University of Maryland.

As she spoke of her positive experience studying in Israel, she also mentioned how disheartened she was by Israelis she met who were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the suffering of Palestinians a few miles away under occupation. So even when delivering the most passionate Zionist speech of the conference, she was very much in sync with J Street's concern that reasonable Palestinian aspirations for their freedom be met..."

Excerpt from " J Street U's New Student Board President Is An Anti Israel Muslim" by Daniel Greenfield.

So we've got the bizarre spectacle of Farooqi lecturing Jewish leaders on alienating young Jews by being too Jewish and too pro-Israel.

And we've got a Pakistani Muslim "Zionist" who will help Israel by campaigning against it and denying that Muslim anti-Semitism exists on campus.

Farooqi retweeted a message saying, "Wonder how many American Jews hear of the horror inflicted on Gaza this summer?"

"#Bibi cannot claim any mandate to speak for Jews in the United States. #BibiDoesntSpeakForMe."

Another of her tweets states, "Wonder what Bibi would say if Palestinians applied his Iran logic to their situation "We must stop aggression at all costs" #BibiSpeech"

Not to mention ominous stuff like this. "Every movement exercises a range of acts of resistance" @nsheizaf @jstreetu #JSTUECRW

"@Ben_Spinoza @AnarchoZionist right, the Jewish State should also acknowledge the 20% that's not Jewish. #1 name in Israel was Muhammed"..."

"...More than 120 of them had come "to talk about the occupation and the two-state solution," Amna Farooqi, the newly elected president of the student arm of J Street, told Hillel International's president during a Monday meeting in Chevy Chase, Md., where J Street U's three-day summer leadership institute was taking place..."

"The work I do [about Israel] is the best expression of Islam"

September 2, 2015 Daniel Greenfield

J Street U's new Muslim boss, Amna Farooqi has a new interview that's very revealing. Amid all the talking points about how she "loves" Israel and is sorta okay with Zionism, her agenda is crystal clear. And behind it is the traditional conspiratorial idea that Jews have a great deal of power.

And Amna Farooqi joined J Street to sell BDS to American Jews... because she decided that she could get more done there than among Muslim groups.

"The work I do [about Israel] is the best expression of Islam," Amna Farooqi says. And she states that, "Because I was Muslim I had a sense of Muslim solidarity with Palestinians."

Amna Farooqi repeatedly emphasizes how much power American Jews have.

"I got involved in this because I want to make change and I think the American Jewish community has more agency. If I thought moving the American Muslim community would move this – they just don't have the role in it," Amna Farooqi says.

In short, if Amna Farooqi thought that Muslim groups were more effective in fighting Israel, she would be over there. But she tried it and it didn't work. Also Muslim groups will sometimes have a glass ceiling for women. So she decided to work through Jewish groups which have more "agency" and more power to push her anti-Israel agenda.

J Street U and its media allies are trying to sell Amna Farooqi as a pro-Israel Muslim, when really she's just infiltrating the Jewish community because she thinks it's a more effective tactic.

"Growing up in Potomac, I really believed the Jewish community holds so much influence over this conflict," Amna Farooqi says. "You don't have to be Jewish to do this work, you just have to believe in the idea that the American Jewish community has a role to play in this," she adds.

And what role is that? Obviously BDS, a tactic that she describes as "charming" but not "productive for many, many reasons".

Amna Farooqi comes back again and again to the question of funding and money by American Jews. Though she disclaims BDS, she's pushing for it selectively in Israel.

"(Muslims are) not financially supporting the occupation the way the American Jewish community is," Amna Farooqi says.

"If Jewish groups would say they'd support a two-state settlement or where their funding goes over the green line, that would redefine pro-Israel right now," she quibbles.

"It's matter of being transparent about where its money is going, and pushing organizations to stand up and support their values," she throws in.

Think of it as phased BDS. First "Green Line" BDS in territory annexed and ethnically cleansed by her co-religionists in their invasion of Israel during its War of Independence. Then all of Israel. From the Islamic perspective, all of Israel is "occupied territory". The Jews have to be driven out of all of Israel, not just Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem.

BDS had its origins in the Muslim boycott of Israel. Amna Farooqi's push through J Street to BDS parts of Israel in support of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jews in the forties is more of the same.

There's nothing pro-Israel or Zionist about J Street. It's an anti-Israel group which isn't even bothering to Jewwash its anti-Israel agenda anymore.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/259998/amna-farooqi-joined-j-street-because-jews-have-daniel-greenfield

This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/7116