Chris Graham: The crime of being born, and Oday Aboushi

“The @nyjets are a disgrace of an organization,” read the tweet of Jonathan Mael (@jdmael), the new media coordinator for MLB.com, the official site of Major League Baseball. “The Patriots have Aaron Hernandez, the Jets have Oday Aboushi.”

I’m thinking I must have missed something pretty serious about Aboushi, the University of Virginia offensive tackle taken in the fifth round of the 2013 NFL Draft by the New York Jets. Hernandez, after all, stands accused of being the triggerman in a first-degree murder and is looking at life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Whatever Aboushi did to put him at any level of moral equivalency to Hernandez, well … had to be murder, right, if not worse?

Or … not. Turns out that the recent attention on Aboushi is based solely on the fact that he’s a Palestinian-American who has the gall to occasionally express his feelings on politics involving his homeland, doing things like commemorating the anniversary of Palestinians losing their homeland and tweeting a photo of a Palestinian woman who had been evicted from her home.

These kinds of things, clearly, coming from a Palestinian Muslim, make one a terrorist, and terrorists are, you know, bad, really bad, the worst, really – far further down the Axis of Evil than your everyday, run of the mill tight-end murder suspect.

The Mael tweet came after a disturbing piece was posted to Yahoo! Sports by columnist Adam Waksman suggesting that Aboushi and his “anti-Semitic activism” should be drummed out of the league. And that column came on the heels of a hit piece in FrontPage Magazine from David Horowitz, for whom these kinds of smear campaigns are par for the course.

Yahoo! has pulled the column from Waksman, and Mael has since backtracked from his tweet. (Horowitz is Horowitz, and we have to assume that he’s beyond ecstatic that he was able to create a media firestorm out of the thin air.)

Aboushi has bigger things to focus on in the here and now – making the team, first and foremost, and then making sure Mark Sanchez doesn’t run into his backside trying to evade an incoming outside linebacker.

I, for one, hope that he continues in his downtime to tweet and otherwise share his feelings on world affairs, the protestations of Horowitz and Mael and Waksman be damned.