GEICO blundered with invite to Islamist, will it fix the mess?

If anyone has reason to be furious about GEICO’s decision to invite Linda Sarsour to participate in a diversity seminar honoring Middle Eastern and North African Heritage Month for the company’s employees in early April, it’s the company’s corporate owner, Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway.

For a company whose entire raison d’etre is to mitigate risk, GEICO’s selection of Sarsour is bewildering. Without meaning to, GEICO provided a clinic on how companies can make gross errors in partnerships when they move forward without an iota of research or an eye towards actual risk for the company, its communities, and our country. Even a few moments with that elusive search engine, Google, would reveal Sarsour’s incendiary and divisive rhetoric is hardly the message that a national insurance company in the business of risk management should promote.

In 2017, Sarsour called for “jihad” in America, comparing Donald Trump, an elected president, with unelected authoritarian tyrants in the Middle East. And at the height of the George Floyd riots during which protesters were destroying store fronts and setting buildings on fire in cities throughout the country, she declared that reforming law enforcement practices in the United States was impossible. “Burn it all down, start over,” she said.

In both instances, Sarsour said she wasn’t promoting violence, but given the realities of intergroup conflict in the U.S., it’s hard not to conclude that some of her listeners would interpret her words as license for attacks on property owned by GEICO customers.

It just doesn’t make sense for an insurance company to promote such a speaker, but that’s what GEICO did when it asked Sarsour to speak at a celebration of Middle East and North African Heritage Month.

GEICO officials did the right thing by canceling Sarsour’s presentation, but the company put itself into the proverbial Islamist frying pan and is not yet out of trouble. GEICO is facing an onslaught of bad publicity from Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its allies who now absurdly claim that its change in programming for its employees is surely a sign of “Islamophobia.”

Many Muslims would argue that the only anti-Muslim bigotry seen so far from GEICO officials was their perception that civilizational jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood legacy group sympathizers like Sarsour somehow represent “diversity” among the Arabic and Muslim communities. If events proceed as has other Islamist bullying episodes, CAIR and its allies will not stop until they force the company into apologizing for canceling Sarsour’s presentation and admitting to the sin of Islamophobia.

I’m certainly not a fan of cancel culture, as the Islamists have targeted me on a number of occasions. When I was targeted, however, I was booked to speak on the very principles our reform-minded Muslim organization promotes.

In this instance, GEICO did the right thing. When GEICO realized it booked the wrong person for the event they were hosting, the corporation changed direction.

By anointing Sarsour as a representative of Arab Americans with its invitation, GEICO unintentionally portrayed this community as being at war with the country where they live, and that’s simply not how it is, not to mention the venomous antisemitism that Sarsour embodies in her support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel.

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