Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden condemned former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour Tuesday night after she spoke at the Democratic National Committee.
Sarsour spoke during a council meeting for the DNC’s “Muslim Delegates and Allies Assembly.” As The Daily Caller reported, she endorsed Biden on August 11 after he announced Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate.
Sarsour was forced to step down as co-chair of the Women’s March in September 2019 following anti-Semitic comments. The Washington Post at the time reported that Sarsour, along with co-chairs Bob Bland and Tamika Mallory all stepped down following allegations of anti-Semitism. Sarsour has been a proponent of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. She also once suggested Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born critic of Islam who suffered female genital mutilation, should have her vagina taken away, adding she and a conservative activist “don’t deserve to be women.” Sarsour has also previously said Israel was “built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else.” She accused pro-Israel Americans of marching with the Ku Klux Klan.
After Sarsour spoke at the DNC, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign released a statement saying the former vice president condemned Sarsour’s anti-Semitism.
“Joe Biden has been a strong supporter of Israel and a vehement opponent of anti-Semitism his entire life, and he obviously condemns her views and opposes BDS, as does the Democratic platform,” said campaign spokesman Andrew Bates. “She has no role in the Biden campaign whatsoever.”
Bates referred to the official Democratic Party platform, which states, “We oppose any effort to unfairly single out and delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.”
The Trump campaign had earlier in the day tweeted video of Sarsour speaking (with the official DNC banner for the convention at the top of the screen), saying the Democrat Party “is absolutely our party.”
The campaign claimed in the tweet that Sarsour’s “extreme bigotry is welcomed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Biden may have condemned Sarsour, but she is still a major figure in the Democratic Party and stumped for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as he campaigned for the presidential nomination.
A top pro-Israel Organization called Zionist Organization of America slammed Sarsour in August 2019, providing an exclusive statement to The Daily Caller.
“Sarsour is the one who stands with terrorists and bigots, including Louis Farrakhan. Sarsour shared a platform with and praised Rasmea Odeh – a Palestinian-Arab terrorist responsible for murdering Jewish students; praised an Arab kid holding rocks to throw at Israelis as ‘the definition of courage,’ and tweeted her support for the intifada – the knifing, bombing and shooting campaigns in which Palestinian-Arab terrorists murdered and maimed 12,000 Jews,” the statement said.
In 2018, Sarsour apologized for not condemning anti-Semitism among her fellow Women’s March organizers. Fellow co-chair Mallory attended a Nation of Islam event with Louis Farrakhan and later called him the greatest of all time. When she refused to condemn Farrakhan the next year, the DNC stopped sponsoring the Women’s March.