

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Democrats’ REFUSAL to Call Out Ilhan Omar’s Anti-Semitism is Just APPALLING

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John Podhoretz

It’s really not hard to get to the bottom of this: When you say that Jews have magical hypnotic powers to control other people, you’re an anti-Semite. When you say Jews control other people through money, you’re an anti-Semite. When you say Jews have conspired to force you to apologize for saying anti-Semitic things, you’re an anti-Semite. ­Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite.
Now what? Well, now nothing.
For a while this week there was a thought that the House of Representatives, where Omar serves as a freshman from Minnesota, might vote on a resolution condemning her ­anti-Semitism.
Then it was thought that maybe said resolution would come up for a vote but wouldn’t mention her name and instead condemn anti-Semitism generally.
Then it was thought that there would be a resolution that would condemn both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Now there’s no timetable for voting on anything.
What’s hard is bringing a resolution to the House floor condemning a representative’s bigotry when you don’t want to and you’re afraid of making people mad, even though what we’re talking about here is Jew-hatred. We’re talking about a member of Congress attacking a small minority group.
Yeah, I know. Jews don’t feel small, right? Jews are prosperous. Many Jews hold positions of power and authority in the United States. This is true. It is also true that Jews constitute 2 percent of the population of the United States. In 1950, we were 4 percent. Jews are shrinking in size, not growing. We are smaller, not larger, in number.
So what we have here in Omar is a member of a larger minority group bullying a smaller minority group. It shouldn’t be hard condemning such a thing.
Nope. What’s hard, or at the very least far harder than it should be: saying she’s an anti-Semite when you’re a Democratic member of the House. Or the Democratic leaders of the House.
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, said she believed Omar’s remarks “were not intentionally anti-Semitic.” Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, said Wednesday that he didn’t believe Omar was an anti-Semite.
Pelosi and Hoyer aren’t idiots, and they weren’t born yesterday. I’d bet a million dollars — yeah, I know, we Jews and money; it’s always money — they know perfectly well what Omar is. The thing is, it matters less to them than ­being on the right side of their party’s young vanguard in the House.
Here’s another: Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who told Politico she doesn’t think Omar is an anti-Semite. Politico makes much of the fact that Schakowsky is a Jew, and she is. She also happens to be a supporter and devotee of J Street, the Democratic organization that exists to criticize Israel and the pro-Israel community in the United States.
The very fact of J Street’s existence, and that Schakowsky herself survives and thrives as an anti-Israel Jew, gives the lie to Omar’s repugnant contention about Jewish control of the conversation on Israel and the Palestinians in America. That’s about the only good thing I can say about the views of J Street and Schakowsky.
About Schakowsky running ­interference for Omar the anti-Semite there is nothing good that can be said, other than that Yom Kippur comes up in seven months, and on that Day of Atonement she should beat her chest blue for her sins against her own people.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, another leftist freshman in the new Congress, spoke these words about the idea of a resolution against anti-Semitism: “We need to have an ­equity in our outrage. ­Islamophobia needs to be included in this. We need to denounce all forms of hate. There is not hierarchy of hurt.”
No, but there’s a hierarchy of the hate Omar ­expresses, and that hierarchy features Jews at the top, Jews in the middle and Jews all the way down. If ­Omar were guilty of Islamophobia, as well, that too should be ­included in a resolution condemning her. Doing whatever you can to ­dilute a resolution against real acts of anti-Semitism in this fashion is called whitewashing.
No one started this conversation about Ilhan Omar save ­Ilhan Omar and her fanatical and obsessional expressions of the most destructive form of hate in the modern era. It’s a scandal she was elected to Congress in the first place, but that’s the fault of the voters of her ­district, and they should suffer for their choice by seeing her sidelined and their ­interests ill-represented.
But how her fellow Democrats in Congress choose to conduct themselves with her in their midst is one of the ways they will be judged when the time comes for them to be judged — by voters and Higher Forces.

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