McClatchy foreign policy reporter Hannah Allam is tweeting that the State Department will defer presenting an International Women of Courage Award to Egyptian Samira Ibrahim in light of lingering questions over several controversial tweets written by Ibrahim.
A scandal over the award broke open yesterday, when The Weekly Standard published an expose revealing both that First Lady Michelle Obama, joined by Secretary of State John Kerry, intended to give Ibrahim the award, and that Ibrahim’s Twitter feed contained anti-Semitic and anti-U.S. content. That content included tweets calling the murder of Israelis in Bulgaria “sweet news,” hoping to see “America burning” every September 11th, and referencing Hitler on the immorality and crimes of “the Jews.”
After the article was publish Ibrahim claimed that her account was hacked to send those three tweets, along with a fourth calling Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family “dirtier than the Jews.” The theory was met with a raised eyebrow by The Atlantic, which pointed out that “the tweets in question appeared over many months, and she is a regular user of Twitter.”
If the award is deferred indefinitely, the discussion will likely turn to the State Department’s vetting process, through which she originally slipped. The Weekly Standard was already raising such questions yesterday:
The decision to honor Ibrahim reflects poorly on the State Department, which is either incapable of doing the minimum amount of research required to find out who she is, or does not care that the secretary of state and First Lady are about to honor an anti-Semite who longs for violence against Americans. It’s understandable that now with Islamists having come to the fore after all the hope that the Egyptian uprising inspired, American policymakers are looking for the good guys, real liberal activists that deserve U.S. support. Samira Ibrahim is not one of them.
Fox & Friends ran down the controversy this morning: