The venerable women’s magazine Glamour boasts almost ten million print readers, and more than 11 million visitors monthly to its website. Mainly devoted to clothing, makeup and feminist topics, Glamour‘s also won acclaim for its coverage of health issues.
This year, however, Glamour veered into unhealthy territory with its 2017 Women of the Year list. Alongside actress Nicole Kidman and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, Glamour will be honoring the organizers of last January’s Women’s March. Included among those organizers is virulent anti-Israel activist and terrorist sympathizer Linda Sarsour.
The awards will be presented at a ceremony on November 13, which will be live streamed on Glamour‘s website, as well as to Glamour‘s 5.5 million followers on Facebook. The ceremony will be preceded by a “Summit,” at which the honorees will “discuss the issues we care about most right now.”
Sarsour openly supports the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel — a movement that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer terms, “a deeply biased campaign that I would say ... is a ‘reinvented form of anti-Semitism’ because it seeks to impose boycotts on Israel and not on any other nation.”
Sarsour has also said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” and that Zionists can’t be feminists. As CAMERA has written, “although she tries to present herself as simply a critic of Israel, what Sarsour is really campaigning for is the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Sarsour is also a supporter of Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted in Israel for the terrorist killings of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner in 1969. Odeh’s conviction was based not only on the confession she made the day after her arrest, but also on physical evidence of bomb-making materials found in her home.
Odeh lied on immigration papers when coming to the US, and was stripped of her citizenship and deported. Yet, in April, Sarsour and Odeh appeared together at a conference of the radical anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace, with Sarsour declaring that she was “honored and privileged to be here in this space, and honored to be on this stage with Rasmea.”
In addition to overlooking Sarsour’s bigotry towards Israel, Glamour‘s editors also apparently have no objections to her shocking statements about women’s issues.
As CAMERA has noted, Sarsour has been “malicious in her disparagement of Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, who campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings and child marriages. ... Sarsour repeatedly smears and agitates against Ali.”
In 2011, for example, Sarsour tweeted about Hirsi Ali and activist Brigitte Gabriel that, “I wish I could take their vaginas away. They don’t deserve to be women.”
When asked about this tweet by a student activist at a college event last May, Sarsour could have seized the opportunity to recant. Instead, she lambasted the student who dared to question her, claiming that as a “white man,” he had no right to do so.
Sarsour has also minimized problems faced by women living in Arab countries. At least twice, she has lauded Saudi Arabia as a model of women’s rights. In doing so, she ignored the fact that in Saudi Arabia, all adult women must have a male guardian, whose permission they need just in order to get married, get a passport or travel. She also ignored that at the time she made those statements, Saudi women were prohibited from driving, and that in Saudi Arabia, girls as young as eight years old can be forced to marry old men.
Why would a women’s magazine — especially one that historically has championed women’s issues, including the elimination of FGM — give an award to someone who has made such anti-female statements? And why would it ignore Sarsour’s blatant bigotry against Israel and Jews?
In response to a complaint from one reader, a Glamour Reader Services Editor wrote: “the organizers of the national Women’s March inspired women across the globe to be politically active. They launched a year full of activism and have created a rallying cry for a new generation. We stand by our decision to honor them as a collective as the facilitators of this movement.”
Millions of readers who thought that they were subscribing to an ethical publication seriously devoted to women’s health and well-being are now discovering that Glamour is actually the handmaiden of prejudice.