The “badass” Muslim girl who charmed the media last week with “cheeky” selfies mocking a Belgian anti-Islam group has claimed she’s not anti-Semitic – just anti-Zionist – after it emerged she made racist remarks towards Jewish people in the past.
https://twitter.com/Mujahidarani/status/733549783030235138
Zakia Belkhiri shot to fame after confronting far-right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) protesters who held signs reading “No Headscarves” and “Stop Islam” outside an event celebrating Muslim culture and lifestyle.
She responded to the demonstrators’ taunting by taking numerous selfies with and in front of them.
Her act of defiance was hailed as “inspirational” by media outlets including the BBC, Buzzfeed and Vox – causing the photographs to go viral on the Internet.
But now it has been revealed that Ms. Belkhiri has repeatedly made a slew of anti-Semitic remarks online.
In 2012, she tweeted: “Hitler didn’t kill all the jews, he left some. So we know why he was killing them” before adding a hashtag “#fuckrs”.
In another social media post about Jewish people from 2014, she wrote: “I hate them so much”.
It turns out the woman whose protest against Islamophobes got world-wide coverage… is an anti-Semite. pic.twitter.com/0VeECPdRuc
— Daniel Sugarman (@Daniel_Sugarman) May 20, 2016
Ms. Belkhiri also answered a question on the Ask.fm social platform about whether she wanted to learn Hebrew with: “F*** that Jewish Language”.
In a misfired attempt to control the damage, she explained that the remarks were never meant about individual Jewish people but rather about the “zionists”.
It has raised questions whether that still “meant that Zionist Jews deserve to die?” as one Twitter user asked.
Ms Belkhiri has since hidden all traces of her online presence. Just before deactivating her Twitter account, she issued a lengthy statement about the row: “I would like to apologize to everyone in the Jewish community which I’ve hurt with my comments.
“I have said that the tweets were photoshopped because initially I really believed that they were. At that time I couldn’t imagine, nor recall at all, that I ever would have written such a thing.”
She added: “When the war broke out in Gaza, images of innocent civilians who were killed, of which many small children appeared everywhere.
“These images triggered a lot of unpleasant emotions in me like anger, sadness, incomprehension…”
Sticking to her earlier positions, however, she wrote: “I do know that the real culprits are the Zionists” and “the real Jews themselves reject such barbaric acts”.
Maybe the fawning media might do their jobs next time?
