The following two things are true. First, Representative Ilhan Omar was wrong to tweet that the American government’s support of Israel is “all about the Benjamins.” Secondly, she’s being judged by a grotesque double standard. Her fiercest critics in Congress are guiltier of bigotry than she is. Omar’s tweet was inaccurate. Yes, of course, AIPAC’s…
The Democratic Party has a Jewish problem. This may seem like a ludicrous statement considering that a majority of Jews are hardened Democrats, but hear me out. Some of the loudest, most hateful voices in the Democratic Party today share a consistent anti-Semitic theme. The party’s biggest celebrities, freshman Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and…
Yesterday, I opened my Twitter timeline to find friends, allies, and colleagues pitting racism and anti-Semitism against each other. The battle lines had been drawn, and I was, as I often am as a mixed race Jew, caught in the middle. Sunday afternoon, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted a response to Glenn Greenwald, who was musing…
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives called on Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota to apologize for what they described as her “anti-Semitic comments.” “Congresswoman Omar’s use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive,” Pelosi and the other leaders said in a…
In a tweet to Forward Opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Representative Ilhan Omar expressed that she believes AIPAC paid politicians to be pro-Israel. The statement, which is false because AIPAC doesn’t make political donations, led several notable figures to join Ungar-Sargon in condemning the Minnesota Democrat for drawing on the anti-Semitic trope of bribery. The Twitterstorm…
Ilhan Omar had an unlikely defender on Monday amid the debate over whether her remarks about AIPAC were anti-Semitic: David Duke. Duke, a Holocaust denier and the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tried to back up Omar’s false claim that AIPAC pays politicians to be pro-Israel. “The most powerful political moneybags in…
It should go without saying that these two things can simultaneously be true: that criticism of the Israeli government and AIPAC’s lobbying for U.S. support of it is not anti-Semitism, and that Representative Ilhan Omar’s recent tweet about “the Benjamins” was a mark of poor judgement, for which she has commendably apologized. It’s all about…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Jewish House Democrats repudiated party colleague Ilhan Omar of Minnesota after she said AIPAC buys the pro-Israel support of lawmakers. A letter being circulated Monday in the U.S. House of Representatives among Jewish Democrats urged the party leadership there to have the caucus call on every Democrat to speak out against anti-Semitism….
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