It’s rather hard to turn the page when the Democrats didn’t actually, specifically condemn Ilhan Omar’s Jew hatred, nor all those who offered cover and protection for said Jew hatred
Dems struggle to turn page on Omar controversy
Democrats desperately want to turn the page on a painful week but doing so is proving to be difficult.
Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has been the center of a debate on anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred that has exposed deep divisions within the new majority, on Friday signaled she’s not going to stop battling on social media with her critics.
Less than 24 hours after the House adopted a resolution broadly condemning bigotry in the wake of Omar’s comments about U.S.-Israel relations, she launched into a Twitter battle Friday morning with Meghan McCain over the thorny topic.
Omar did so by retweeting a message from Mehdi Hasan, a columnist for The Intercept and a host of Al Jazeera English, that was deeply critical of McCain’s father, former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died last year.
“Meghan’s late father literally sang ‘bomb bomb bomb Iran’ and insisted on referring to his Vietnamese captors as ‘gooks’†Hasan wrote. “He also, lest we forget, gave the world Sarah Palin. So a little less faux outrage over a former refugee-turned-freshman-representative pls.â€
President Trump also got into the act on Friday, seizing on Omar’s remarks and the House resolution — which to the dismay of several veteran Jewish Democratic lawmakers changed from a measure condemning anti-Semitism to one that condemned many kinds of hatred — to argue that Democrats had become an “anti-Jewish†and “anti-Israel†party.
If GOP bigwigs aren’t ready to bring up Democrat protection of anti-Semitism in 2020, you can bet that Trump won’t forget and will make sure that voters will remember.
And then there was Nancy Pelosi, who probably never thought she’d have to deal with the crazies in her own party
On Friday, she defended Omar for a second day in a row, arguing she is not anti-Semitic.
“I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning,†Pelosi said of the Somalian-born Omar, who came to the United States in 1995 after years in a refugee camp in Kenya.
https://twitter.com/jeffmarshallep/status/1104102607658930176
She’s been here for 24 years. Was her assimilation that bad? Is she still living in the Jew hatred world of radical Somalia? She’s almost 40. If she’s so ignorant, should she be sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee? What Pelosi is saying is that Omar is anti-Jew, she just doesn’t know how to express it in terms that don’t expose her being anti-Jew.
Omar, Andre Carson (D-Ind) suggested, isn’t about to alter her aggressive messaging style.
“On one end, we know that there are members who are going to be free, they’re going to candid, they’re going to be fearless in their approach to getting their message out,†he said. “There are other folks who are going to be more measured and pragmatic, and I don’t think we’re in a place to condemn one methodology over the other.â€
In other words, she has no problem hiding her Jew hatred, and expect more to come.
