Ilhan Omar Mounts Laughable Defense When Questioned on Anti-Semitic Tropes
Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar joined Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, where beside her House colleagues Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff she pled her case to the American people. The trio have been denied spots on certain committees by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) who says he won’t seat Omar on Foreign Affairs as a result of her “repeated antisemitic and anti-American remarks.”
In the past, Omar has suggested that “Israel has hypnotized the world” and implored Allah to “awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,” as well as demanded the “same level of accountability” for the “unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”
She has also argued that the position of McCarthy and other pro-Israel lawmakers could be explained by the cash that Jewish organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) furnish their campaigns with. “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby” tweeted Omar in February 2019, before identifying AIPAC, specifically, as having paid American politicians to support the Jewish state.
At the time, AIPAC did not have a political action committee through which it donated to candidates. Its individual employees donated a total of $21,350 to congressional candidates during the 2018 cycle — most of it to Democrats.
Asked by Bash what she had learned from the backlashes to those comments, Omar replied “a lot” before going on to explain that she hadn’t been “aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money.”
Ilhan Omar, a political science and international studies major, policy fellow at the University of Minnesota, and supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement who has made unsparing criticism of the world’s only Jewish-majority state a core trait of her political persona had independently come to the conclusion that the Jews were using their money to exercise malignant influence over the American government, you see.
It ‘s an unfathomably implausible claim. And yet, Bash declined to press Omar, following up only by inquiring if she had the votes to be seated on the committee in spite of McCarthy’s position.
The media has no such trouble drilling down on the far-fetched assertions of Republicans, even when they concern much less weighty subjects. The White House press corps once grilled Donald Trump’s doctor for nearly an hour to elicit denials that Trump wore dentures or was suffering from Alzheimer’s, as well as inquire how he received a clean bill of health after a physical examination despite the “McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and all those Diet Cokes” that the former president consumed.
In the case of George Santos, reporters instinctually recognize that fantastical and brazen claims need not be presumed to be true. Indeed, their skepticism of Santos has proven a great boon to a great many of them, as it it might have to Bash here had she shown an iota of it on Sunday.
Despite the politically active life she leads and her own purported emphasis on human rights in that sphere, it supposedly took until the eve of Omar’s fourth decade on Earth to learn about the age old trope of Jews and their gold. Somehow, she had managed to navigate a minefield in the Titanic, never encountering the single most infamous conspiracy theory about any group of people — one that nearly led to their extermination less than a century ago — until just recently.
Instead, she reached the erroneous conclusion that the Jews were using their deep wallets to pull strings and manipulate events all on her own.
How she came to understand as much — without any evidence and apparently without knowledge of the trope — we don’t know. She wasn’t asked.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
