Award for Egyptian Activist Put on Hold by State Department

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CAMERA Snapshots..
07 March '13..



The State Department put on hold an award it intended to give to an Egyptian political activist after anti-Semitic comments she had twittered were publicized.

Samira Ibrahim originally was selected to receive one of the International Women of Courage Awards on Friday when First lady Michelle Obama joins Secretary of State John F. Kerry in presenting the prizes at the State Department.

The Weekly Standard broke the story on March 6 that Ms. Ibrahim had tweeted,

An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is such a lovely day with a lot of lovely news," referring to a suicide bomb attack that killed five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver.

Earlier in the same month, Ibrahim quoted Adolf Hitler as saying

I have discovered by the passage of time that the Jews have hands in any act against morality and any crime against society.

She also called the Saudis "dirtier than the Jews."

Ibrahim has not just limited her discourse to Jews but to America as well. The Standard reports that

As a mob was attacking the United States embassy in Cairo on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, pulling down the American flag and raising the flag of Al Qaeda, Ibrahim wrote on twitter: ‘Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.

Ibrahim was slated to receive a Women of Courage Award on grounds that she had survived horrific abuses in Egypt, including being sexually assaulted by the Egyptian military. She recently was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2012.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland stated, “We as a department became aware very late in the process about Samira Ibrahim’s alleged public comments.”

Ibrahim denied that she sent those messages, claiming her account had been hacked. Nuland said the State Department is investigating.

The story is all over the blogosphere and has been covered by mainstream news sources like the Washington Post, Washington Times, ABC and Fox News. An AP piece by Bradley Klapper, which is less detailed than the Weekly Standard piece, has been published widely. As of the time of this posting, it has not yet been reported by The New York Times, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS or CNN. We will update.

Link: http://blog.camera.org/archives/2013/03/post_110.html

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