Ilhan Omar is both a canny political operator and a con artist who specializes in gutter smears. And thus there is no question about who won the fight she picked with Nancy Pelosi and Democratic congressional leadership, desperate to sweep the party’s anti-Semitism problem under the rug.
Speaking live on CNN before the introduction of a resolution that was originally intended to condemn anti-Semitism, and indirectly Omar, but wound up condemning “all forms of hate,” Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the headlights, stuck between one of the Democrats’ traditional constituencies and the party’s insurgent progressive base.
A new Gallup
poll released last week shows that while most Americans favor Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (59 percent to 21 percent), net sympathy for Israel is declining dramatically among liberal Democrats. Since 2013-2016, “the percentage who sympathize more with Israel minus those sympathizing more with the Palestinians” has gone from +17 to +3. In other words, Palestinians are replacing Israelis in the hearts of the party’s base.
The inability of senior U.S. Democrats, including senior Jewish members of Congress, to muster a counteroffensive, or even much of a defense, shows that a pillar of the increasingly disoriented liberal political establishment is being pulled down by institutionalized identity politics.
Liberal Jews are being replaced—but by whom or what, exactly? It’s hard to put a name on it. Let’s call it progressivism, or the American version of the U.K. Labour Party’s Corbynism. It’s intersectional, sectarian, nominally collectivist in its economics, and boldly Third Worldist in its political convictions. It is also, therefore, fundamentally anti-Israel.
“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” said Omar. Why, she asked, can’t she talk “about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?”—that is, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The previous month Omar said that sympathy for Israel in Congress was bought by Jewish money—“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.” When asked what she for them to work through their pain by punching down at the latter. Condemning them, or Omar, would only cause more pain.
Omar’s statements are not accidental, not slips of the tongue, and they will not disappear after more dialogue—no matter how much advice she receives from the honest brokers of interfaith comity about how the proper way to criticize Israel is to focus narrowly on the Likud Party or Bibi Netanyahu. Nope, it’s all fair game—she’s going after Israel, the very physical fact of it, as well as the American Jews who dare support a U.S. ally which is also supported by a large majority of the American public.
The Democratic Party leadership is complicit.
As the Ilhan Omar Controversy Shows, American Jews Have Only Begun to Pay the Price Demanded by the Democratic Party’s New Math