NEW YORK (VINnews) — Sofia Khalifa Shremko is not a political person, but when she encountered incitement, hatred of Jews and justifications for the October 7 massacre, she realized that she could no longer remain silent. “As a Muslim Arab who grew up in a Jewish community in Israel, I feel that I belong to both sides and believe that all opinions must be respected,” she said in an interview with Israeli news site Walla!
Yet Shremko, the daughter of Hussein Al-Heib, a Bedouin IDF tracker who rose to the rank of colonel, is finding it more and more difficult to maintain her position. Attempts to persuade her former alma mater, Stanford University, to condemn the Hamas attack on Israel have not succeeded so far. Instead, Shremko has been subjected to explicit threats and threats from Hamas supporters on campus. A false rumor was even circulated among the students that she worked for the Israeli government, which she categorically denies.
“It’s not just Arabs,” she says, “in the Palestine Liberation protest tent they erected on campus, I recognized a terrible phenomenon, that about a third of the people sitting there are Jews who are being brainwashed by BDS. They know how to disguise this with the absurd claim of ‘we are not anti-Semites, only anti-Zionists.’ They are very sophisticated, know how to excuse and disguise everything, and so in a meeting with the rector of the university she told us that we received only two complaints from Jews and actually a lot of comments about Islamophobia. So now we are responsible for it? I went to check the grounds, walked around a lot. I couldn’t find one anti-Muslim sign.”
Shremko says that the university refuses to allow signs against Israel to be taken down due to “freedom of speech.” However when she and her friends put up 500 pictures of the captives in Gaza, “The next morning they were all torn down.”
The university doesn’t even show a pretence of equality. On October 8th there were already signs calling for “the destruction of Israel.” On October 9th the main newspaper in Stanford described the Hamas atrocities as “legitimate opposition”, instead charging Israel with war crimes due to its bombing the “Palestine building” housing the media. The university’s med school held a session on “Medical apartheid” which hailed Hamas’s attack as ‘the first time they left jail in the last 13 years.”
In an interview with FOX, Shremko spoke out against Stanford, explicitly demanding that the university condemn the murderous incident and rising anti-Semitism on campus. “This is a leading university and it has an obligation to set an example,” she said on air.
In an open letter to her classmates, Shremko described the extent of the horrors of the October 7 massacre and explained to her colleagues that “Hamas is not a resistance movement of freedom fighters for the oppressed people of Gaza. Hamas is also not the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is an extremist, misogynistic terrorist organization whose goal is to destroy Israel and the Jewish people.” To pro-Palestinians among them, she clarified that “condemning Hamas does not mean that you are against the idea of Palestine. Condemning Hamas does not mean that you do not care about the lives of Palestinian civilians. Condemning Hamas means that you are against using hundreds of partygoers as a short-term target.”
“Hamas harmed civilians mercilessly and deliberately. They also killed and kidnapped Americans, Thais, Italians, French, Germans and others,” she added, “They killed paramedics in ambulances and shot doctors on their way to hospitals. Some of you have seen the photos and videos. Hamas posted them, sometimes live, on the Facebook pages of their victims. They want you to see them. They want you to know who they are.”
For those who, after all this, remain concerned about the price that non-involved civilians of Gaza will pay, she added: “Israel is committed to defending its people and bringing all abducted civilians home, while minimizing the losses of Palestinian civilians, just as you would expect any democratic state to do.”
After she published the statements, the invitations to come and give a speech on the subject were not long in coming, as were the threats. “I was attacked by seven Hamas supporters outside one of the events where I spoke pro-Israel, and they invented conspiracy theories about me that the government pays me. It bothers them a lot that I’m talking. I confronted them, but it was scary,” she says. “After this incident, friends of a friend, special forces, volunteered to look after me, to secure me and my message, that’s how they define it.”
At a rally in San Jose two weeks ago, she called on those present to “liberate Palestine from Hamas,” which she called “our common enemy.” She appeared on a panel at a local school where she defended Israel against allegations of apartheid. “People don’t know but dozens of Palestinians would come on a daily basis to hospitals in Israel and receive the best possible treatment,” she said. The 17-year-old niece of senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh was hospitalized not long ago for life-saving treatment in a Tel Aviv hospital.”
Shremko’s life story is remarkable, not the least because she has suffered from multiple sclerosis since the age of 19. “I was born into a family of Bedouin, nomads, only 3% of whom graduated from high school, my mother is illiterate. But thanks to the Compulsory Education Law, I studied and thanks to the State of Israel they didn’t murder me, despite threats from relatives when I became the first Bedouin fashion model. If it weren’t for Israel, I would probably be a shepherd in the Galilee, but thanks to Israel I completed a bachelor’s degree in engineering, I have an MBA from Stanford and mostly I have the right to live my life the way I want. I grew up in Israel, my mother raised nine children on Israeli money, we grew up on the value of loving the country and I received all the support from the state in Israel and I personally got everything I could get and I know how to say.”
Sofia grew up in Nahariya, and was the first Muslim to be accepted into the IDF’s academic reserve in the field of research and development, this only after the intervention of the chief of staff. She worked at Intel and Google, and now she is a product manager at Amazon. She is married (to an engineer, a Jew) and a mother of two.
“On Black Saturday I saw what was happening on TV and I started getting calls in Israel and I was shocked,” she said. On Monday I wake up and in the Stanford newspaper I read that what Hamas has done is legitimate and that Israel is committing war crimes. We Israelis, Jews and Arabs, have gone crazy about it, how is it possible? The day after the massacre, signs were hung on campus saying ‘Israel is an illusion.’ A Jewish student took it down and the university persecuted him. So it’s clear that all this anti-Semitism was here even before Israel fired a single missile and it got worse, there are signs that read ‘From the river to the sea – Palestine is free,’ there are calls for an intifada, and in Arabic, ‘Israel is dead’ and ‘On this land you don’t deserve life,’ calls about genocide, and of course ‘With blood and spirit we will redeem Palestine.’ They started hanging all kinds of signs on the doors of Jewish students in the dormitories and one of the young Jewish students, they literally targeted her on the nets, targeted her as a ‘Zionist’, she took it very hard, felt threatened, scared, left school and fled to San Francisco.
“I really fear for the lives of Jewish students on campus. The blood is bubbling, it is enough for one person to be depressed and the consequences can be tragic. We must also remember that the Arabs we meet abroad hate the Arabs in Israel, the ones they call the Arabs of ’48. They call us collaborators and traitors. I don’t need the FBI to tell Stanford there’s no threat.”
“Behind this anti-Semitism there are very organized bodies, very funded, with a lot of money and people who come from outside the university and simply brainwash with material that seems very authentic and authoritative. That way they can hold a screening of the atrocities as they already did at Stanford Medical School, and claim that all those murdered at a bad guys party are bullets fired by the Israeli police. I was told people applauded it. As I understand it, they pay students to participate. So we asked the school to issue a condemnation of the remarks, and they refrained from doing so. We looked left and right, asked what we had, for the good of the State of Israel, and realized that there was nothing. We were a few students, we started spreading what was happening here, more and more people started joining, including alumni who donate a lot of money to Stanford.”
Source: VosIzNeias