Tipsheet

Ilhan Omar: Anti-Semitic Hypocrite

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 31, 2019 10:30 AM

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of two pieces of legislation.  The first acknowledged and condemned Turkey's genocide of Armenians more than a century ago, and the second slapped sanctions on Turkey while condemning that country's recent invasion of northern Syria, resulting in the slaughtering of our Kurdish allies.  The former vote was 405-11; the latter was 403-16.  These are, needless to say, veto-proof majorities, much to the chagrin of our Erdogan-appeasing president.  Small handfuls of Republicans voted against each measure for various reasons -- including, perhaps in some cases, slavish devotion to the White House -- but the pair of bills passed with powerful bipartisan majorities.  Democrats were unanimous on both votes, with one notable exception:


We'll return to that decision in a moment, but Omar also voted "present" on the Armenian genocide issue.  Why?  Here's her explanation:


This garbled, morally-deaf pablum was panned by almost everyone, with many pointing out that it was the "All Lives Matter" equivalent of genocide condemnation.  In fairness to the Minnesota freshman, this sort of disgraceful accountability-ducking equivalency was recently and explicitly deployed by House Democratic leadership in order to shield Omar from consequences for one of her spasms of overt bigotry.  If it "worked" previously, so why not hide behind it again?  I'm curious to know the real reason why she couldn't bring herself to join even the rest of the Squad in calling out a 20th century mass slaughter.  Even worse, however, was her vote against sanctions for Turkey.  But might this be consistent with her oft-stated view that sanctions amount to "economic warfare" and must be stopped?  She's made that argument in opposition to US sanctions against terrible actors and abusive regimes in places Tehran, Caracas, and now Ankara:


Imposing sanctions on criminal regimes ends up "hurting the people we claim to help," she's asserted.  I strongly disagree with this naive and dangerous view, but at least it's consistent.  Oh, wait:


She's against sanctions for the Iranian regime, for the Socialist cretin in Venezuela, and for the Islamist butcher in Turkey, but she's passionately supportive of sanctions for...Israel -- a close US ally, a liberal democracy, and a pluralistic society that affords rights and protections to a wide array of minorities, unlike virtually every other country in the region.  She's explicitly argued that sanctions harm the innocent populations of nations whose governments we are seeking to punish or coercively influence, yet she's perfectly comfortable with that harm landing on the people of Israel, which just happens to be the only (and tiny) Jewish state on earth.  By all means, she effectively argues, let's wage "economic warfare" against them.  There is a term to describe the sort of glaring and ostentatious double-standard that applies one set of rules to Jews, and another set of rules to everyone else:

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I'll leave you with more intellectually-bankrupt, historically-illiterate, anti-Israel lunacy from a man whose keen moral instincts led him to honeymoon in the Soviet Union during the Cold War:


Sanders demands that Israel "fundamentally change" their relationship with Gaza, or else they risking losing US assistance and support.  Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, a wrenching decision that was made in the hopes of forging a peace.  The result was the election of Hamas, a terrorist organization, by Gazans, and thousands upon thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians ever since.  For this, Bernie believes it's time to get tough. On Israel.  Extraordinary.  Over to you, Madam Ambassador: