Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D - MN) is a Muslim woman who has made repeated deprecatory comments toward Israel and Jews, comments that many Jews, including members of her own party, have taken to be anti-semitic. This has caused a lot of dissension in the party between those who still think that hate speech is wrong no matter who engages in it and those who think it wrong only if Republicans engage in it.
The former demanded a resolution that would've chastised Omar (and others) for their increasingly audacious anti-Jewish remarks, so, in an attempt to heal the rift, Speaker Pelosi advanced
a weak-tea resolution that condemned just about every offensive form of speech anyone could imagine. the resolution was so childish and anodyne that even Ms. Omar voted for it, notwithstanding that it was originally instigated to serve as a condemnation of her conduct.
Some of her defenders in the Democratic caucus have subsequently embarrassed themselves by advancing the silliest arguments heard in the halls of congress since, well, since the debates over the border wall.
Speaker Pelosi, for example, insisted that the poor woman didn't understand the significance of her statements about Jews and Israel, but that seems to be a veiled allegation of the congresswoman's stupidity. If she doesn't understand why her comments have repeatedly offended Jews in the United States what's she doing in a position of national leadership?
Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), herself a Jew, voiced
this remarkable justification for overlooking her colleague's anti-semitism:
I want to tell you, part of being a Jew is to be welcoming to the stranger. And I want to tell you, Ilhan Omar is a refugee from Somalia. She comes from a different culture. She has things to learn.
So, being a refugee from a different culture makes hatred okay. That's a great argument for shutting down the immigration of Muslims altogether. Ms. Omar, who is Somali, has been living in the U.S. since 1995 and has been a citizen since 2000. One would think she'd understand by now that ethnic hatred is not acceptable here.
She also, it must be said, comes from a culture that practices genital mutilation of women, honor killing, and which holds it to be a religious duty to kill apostates. Does Ms. Schakowsky think we should give a pass to
those behaviors among immigrants as well? If not, why not?
She added that,
I am not either trivializing anti-Semitism or the things that she said or saying that it's okay that she said them. But what I am saying is that I think this a learning moment for her and a learning moment for the caucus on how to get along.
But she
is trivializing anti-semitism by excusing it on the basis of a misguided cultural relativism. Had a Republican been making comments like these Democrats would be outraged by the hatred it evinced and demanding that she be punished.
In fact, a few months ago Republican congressman Steve King
was stripped of all committee assignments for a pattern of remarks which many on both sides of the aisle felt to be too sympathetic with the notion of white supremacy.
Even sillier than Rep. Schakowsky's moral relativism, however, were the comments from Democratic House Whip James Clyburn who complained that media outlets weren't reporting that Omar lived through the Somali Civil War. "I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain," Clyburn said.
Does Mr. Clyburn suggest that we are to accept that, having lived through pain caused, be it noted,
by other Muslims, we are to exonerate Ms. Omar for her hostility to Jews? What's the connection between the hardships of her childhood and Jewish people?
If the hardships she endured as a consequence of the civil war excuse her repeated bigotry, I wonder if Mr. Clyburn, who is African American, would apply that same standard to the bigotry of white southerners toward blacks during Reconstruction.
Those whites lost everything in the American civil war, a war fought in large part for the benefit of blacks. If living through a civil war is justification for despising a group of people then why is the racist behavior of southern whites not at least understandable, if not justifiable?
The bald fact is Ms. Omar is an anti-semite and attempts by her colleagues to sugar-coat her hatred of Jews is as embarrassing as it is ineffective. She has no more business serving in the House of Representatives than does any member of the KKK.
