Reflections on the Ilhan Omar Controversies
I unequivocally condemn the disgusting anti-Muslim display and sentiment shown in the West Virginia Statehouse against U.S. Senator Ilhan Omar.
I am appalled people in my own party did something that’s not only hateful and discriminatory but puts lawmakers’ lives at risk.
While I object to such discrimination on fundamental, moral grounds, I also believe there’s a practical aspect we must face head-on and that is protecting innocent American lives. Not only are the sentiments displayed by this poster morally wrong, they encourage domestic terrorists and further endanger the lives of American Muslims generally but especially Representative Omar herself.
It is frightening to be on the hitlist of domestic terrorists. She puts her life on the line every day just by being in Congress and doing her job. I have a deep respect for her courage.
The reason the recent controversies surrounding Representative Omar are such a tricky subject is that discrimination against her based on her faith is being connected to the controversy surrounding her statements on Israel when they shouldn’t be.
It’s not okay to do things that arbitrarily put anybody’s lives at risk or encourage domestic terrorists. It’s not okay for people on the right to attack and endanger her and American Muslims and it’s also not okay for her to make comments that endanger Jewish Americans.
This is not a partisan thing for me. I’ve called out the President of my own party many times on this exact same issue.
Within a few weeks, we’d had a domestic terrorist incident wherein “the first crude bomb to be discovered had been delivered to the suburban New York compound of George Soros, a liberal billionaire and major contributor to Democratic causes.”
In America today, anti-Semitic dog whistles are more liable than ever to cause acts of domestic terrorism. Representative Omar may well have valid points about free speech and West Bank occupation but it’s disingenuous to pretend her past statements have no bearing on how current statements are interpreted. This article in The Atlantic gives a good overview of why her past statements are so problematic.
In the anti-Semitic imagination, Jews run the world through a global conspiracy of cash and power. This belief is both old and resilient, and in the past seven decades, anti-Semites have relied on this framework to explain the tight alliance between the United States and Israel.
It is not accurate to state that AIPAC pays politicians for their pro-Israel votes, for the basic reason that AIPAC is not a political action committee that donates to individual politicians. But even her apology, which grouped AIPAC with other “problematic … lobbyists” like “the NRA, or the fossil-fuel industry,” offers a reductive way of understanding politics. What gives groups like the NRA or AIPAC clout on Capitol Hill are the supporters who stand behind them, and their passion for the issues these groups champion.
I’ve spent large swaths of my life in extremely liberal areas. I know how intensely people on the far left hate the NRA and anything associated with fossil fuels. They truly consider them to be pure evil. So it is exceedingly dangerous for Representative Omar to encourage people who think that way about “out groups” to lump AIPAC into that blind hatred as it is likely to lead to them subconsciously accepting conspiracy theories that put the lives of Jewish Americans at risk.
Ironically, her words also gave fodder to radicals on the far right. Reading this passage after watching BlacKkKlansman made me sick to my stomach.
David Duke, the prominent white supremacist and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, defended the congresswoman. “So, let us get this straight,” he tweeted. “It is ‘Anti-Semitism’ to point out that the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists who put another nation’s interest (israel’s) over that of America ??????”
So my problem with Representative Omar saying things like this:
Is that it mischaracterizes her past statements. Israel has an election coming up and a portion of the country is not going to vote for Netanyahu yet they are definitely not anti-Semitic so it’s true opposing specific policies is not anti-Semitic. But pointing that out now in a way that implies she should be blameless for her past statements because that’s what she always meant is disingenuous.
It feels like she’s saying, I finally found the politically correct way to say things and that means no one should find my past arguments anti-Semitic and if they do, it’s an attack on free speech. But she still shows a misunderstanding of anti-Semitic tropes when going “off script”, like in this exchange.
People are trying to explain that it’s painful when she implies she does not have dual loyalty, unlike people who support Israel. It’s a loud and constant dog whistle attack that anti-Semites who now listen to her arguments hear which implies, Jews can’t be real Americans because they’re loyal to Israel instead. This is a similar argument Putin makes as I explained in my Holocaust Remembrance Day post.
America got a clear glimpse of how casually Putin throws around anti-Semitic sentiments when he denied meddling in the 2016 elections by blaming it on various groups including Jews, making it clear he does not view Russian citizens who happen to be Jewish to be actual Russians.
The fact that she is often unwilling to listen until forced to when people try to explain how she is hurting Jewish Americans is what bothers me. She does have freedom of speech. And the rest of us have the freedom to say her comments often contribute to anti-Semitism in America through dog-whistle tropes which make America a less safe place. The fact that she has a history of perpetuating such stereotypes accidentally, so subconsciously, is troubling to me.
While I completely condemn attacks on Representative Omar based on her faith, gender, or race, two wrongs do not make a right. It is not okay for the right to endanger American Muslims even if she’s made anti-Semitic comments and it’s not okay for the left to endanger American Jews even if the right made anti-Muslim comments.
