#khybar kaybar

[eretzyisrael]

At the beginning of last week, Shaima Dallali was elected President of the National Union of Students for a two-year term, She had been the President of City University of London Students’ Union. The problem? In short, the NUS has just voted in an antisemitic Islamist extremist as its President.

There has been a fair amount of noise over Shaima Dallali’s appointment. To some degree her extremist positions and antisemitism have been covered in the Telegraph, Times, Mail, (twice), and of course the Jewish press. But none of these tell the whole story.

Below I set out what we know – and disappointingly (or perhaps as a tragic sign of the times), important facts have gone unreported.

Khaybar Khaybar

I start with the image most people have seen because it can be used to frame everything else that follows. It is a tweet from Shaima Dallali that reference the antisemitic Khaybar chant – a classic Islamic battle cry. It refers to a Muslim massacre of the Jews of the town of that name (Khaybar) in 628 CE – and carries an ominous threat that massacres of Jews will soon occur – led by the army of Mohammed.

There is no doubting that this tweet is antisemitic and pushes an extreme and violent Islamist ideology. After this historical tweet was found by researchers from Labour Against Antisemitism, and just a few days before the election, Dallali published an apology. But apologies about historical mistakes only hold weight if the behaviour afterwards is different from the behaviour before. In Dallali’s case I have absolutely no idea why she apologised. Everything she has done since suggests that her core ‘values’ have not changed at all.

Shaima Dallali and the Muslim Brotherhood

Dallali’s other response was more telling. She swiftly deactivated her Facebook account (took it offline) and deleted thousands of tweets; There was clearly a lot she wanted to hide. But these ‘hide the evidence’ practices rarely hide everything, and some of what turned up was beyond awful. The respected Westminster think-tank ‘Policy Exchange‘, found a historical link to Dallali’s old Twitter profile. This provided a window into what Dallali had tried to hide – and in the profile was part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto. The section in Arabic reads ‘death for the sake of Allah is our most exalted wish’. It is part of a Jihadi ideology.