Caroline Glick: Ilhan Omar & Co. Were Elected Because of Their Racism, Not In Spite of It

Rep. Ilhan Omar is an antisemite and, as the actions of the congressional Democratic leadership last week made clear, hating Jews is a perfectly acceptable position in today’s Democratic Party.

By Caroline Glick, BRIETBART

Consider the chronology of events. Last month, Rep. Steven King (R-IA) was stripped of his committee assignments following a statement he made to the New York Times where he seemed to legitimize white supremacism. (King insists his remark was deliberately taken out of context).

Last week, Rep. Omar tweeted another statement that was inarguably antisemitic. Omar argued that the only reason that Congressional Republicans seek to censure her and her colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for their anti-Jewish bigotry is because Jewish money dictates their actions.

That is, she defended herself against allegations of antisemitism by proving, yet again, that she is an antisemite.

The Congressional Democratic leadership responded to Omar’s statements not by censuring her, let alone stripping her of her committee assignments – including her membership on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rather Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and their colleagues reacted to Omar’s presentation of further proof that she hates Jews and sees the world through the distorted lens of antisemitism by asking her to apologize.

That is, she was allowed to get away with it.

Indeed, when Omar was asked if she feared that her bigotry would cause her to be stripped of her committee assignments, she responded confidently, “Absolutely not.”

In the event, Omar issued a self-evidently fake apology, in which she effectively repeated the antisemitic slur that Jews dictate policy through the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), for which she was apologizing. She then proceeded to re-tweet a post that backed up her contention that Jews control U.S. policy with their money.

What does the Democratic leadership’s decision to give her a pass for bigotry tell us about the nature of today’s Democratic Party?

Hoyer as well as Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Elliot Engel (D-NY)are strongly pro-Israel. Pelosi, while less outspoken, has never been a foe of the Jewish state or of American Jews who support Israel and seek to secure continued bipartisan support for a strong U.S. alliance with the Middle East’s only democracy.

And yet, all of these leaders gave a pass to a woman who effectively said that American Jews exert malign and all-powerful influence over the Congress with their “Benjamins,” (which we now all know, thanks to Omar’s slur, refers to $100 bills).

What gives?

To find the answer it is necessary to look in two directions – first to former president Barack Obama’s consigliere, Valerie Jarrett.

By all accounts, Jarrett is the closest person to the former president. As a practical matter, it is difficult to imagine that the views she expresses contradict those of the former president even if, from time to time, he strikes a more moderate public stance than Jarrett.

Jarrett is an outspoken supporter of Omar. In a series of tweets, Jarrett has not only supported Omar, she has gushed that Omar represents the future of the Democratic party. On January 3, when Omar was sworn into office, Jarrett tweeted, “You are the change in Congress we have been waiting for. Thank you Ilhan Omar for your willingness to jump with both feet into the arena! Many in the country are both counting on you and have your back!”

In other words, Omar – and Tlaib and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), whom Jarrett also supports – are the legitimate heirs of Obama’s Democratic Party, as far as his closest and most powerful advisor is concerned. They aren’t marginal figures, radicals with no real links to the party’s power structures. Omar, as well as Tlaib and Cortez, reflect the interests and positions of the most powerful faction in the Democratic Party – the Obama faction.

When seen in this light, the congressional Democratic leadership’s decision to respond to Omar’s latest assault on Jewish Americans and the Jewish state by smacking her with a wet noodle indicates that they are mere figureheads. They have less power than Omar does. Because, as Jarrett told Omar the antisemite, Jarrett, (and by inference, Obama), has her back.

The other reason the Democratic congressional leadership may have chosen to give Omar a pass for her open hatred for Jews is found in the leadership dynamics of Jeremy Corbyn’s British Labour Party.

If Corbyn and his supporters were traditional Labourites, then common sense would have it that he would have been ousted by now.

Given British Prime Minister Theresa May’s incompetent handling of the Brexit negotiations with the European Union, and the disarray of the ruling Conservative Party, a traditional Labour leader could certainly have been expected to be leading May in opinion polls.

Yet, despite May’s unpopularity in her own party and among the general public, Corbyn is sinking like a stone in opinion polls. According to pollsters, anger among Labour voters over Corbyn’s refusal to forthrightly support remaining in the EU on the one hand, and concern over his antisemitism on the other, are the principle reasons that a mere 17 percent of British voters said they are satisfied with the Labour leader (down from 27 percent in December), and 72 percent said they are dissatisfied with his performance.

If Corbyn were a normal politician, and his supporters were standard political operatives, his unpopularity even in the face of May’s failed leadership would be sufficient cause for his fellow Labourites to oust him from power. But as Nick Cohen noted recently in the Spectator, Corbyn’s radical far left supporters’ “cult-of-personality” worship of “Jeremy” and their utter devotion to their far-left ideology, means that they are unwilling to abandon him.

With the blind support of his followers, over the three years since Corbyn seized the reins of the party, he and his supporters have achieved near-complete control over Labour’s party institutions. And so, Labour lawmakers who oppose Corbyn’s radicalism and would like to see him replaced by a more centrist, less anti-Jewish leader feel they have no hope of winning back their party. Their demoralization, and effective disenfranchisement, within Labour’s political machine mean that despite his failure, Corbyn is likely to retain his hold on the party for the foreseeable future.

Corbyn’s iron grip on power is relevant for the Democrats because it shows that once the hard left seizes a party, it is all but impossible to dislodge it, even if the public abandons it. Many commentators have argued in recent weeks that the bigotry and socialism of the likes of Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are President Donald Trump’s best argument for reelection. All he has to do in 2020 is point to them to make the case that the Democrats must not be allowed to return to the White House.

While there is truth to this argument, it is equally true that the new crop of Democrats are powerful not despite their radicalism and bigotry, but because of their radicalism and bigotry. Their ideological alignment with Obama’s consigliere and key donor groups and the party’s activist grassroots means that moderate Democrats lack the power to stand up to them.

Indeed, whereas Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer and their colleagues responded to Omar’s Jew-hatred by making angry noises, the Democratic presidential candidates were mum. More significantly, the Democrats seeking the presidential nomination are responding to the rising tide of hostility towards the Jewish state and American Jews who support Israel by aligning themselves with the anti-Israel voices in their party.

Similarly, aside from Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, all Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls have endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, despite the fact that its adoption would destroy much of the industrial base of the U.S. economy.

The implications of this state of affairs are fairly straightforward. Radical, socialist, antisemitic ideologues hold sway in today’s Democratic Party. That is why Pelosi gave Omar, an out-and-out Jew-hater, a spot on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and why she will not remove Omar from the committee even if Omar tweets and apologizes for anti-Jewish conspiracy theories all day and all night.

This is the reason that Ocasio Cortez may suffer no repercussions for nearly single handedly killing 25,000 jobs for New Yorkers by pushing Amazon to cancel its plan to set up its headquarters in New York City.

Barring any dramatic shift to the Right, if Democrats lose in 2020, like the Corbynized Labour Party, they will not change. And if they win in 2020, the U.S. will be governed by Jeremy Corbyn’s comrades.

Caroline Glick is a world-renowned journalist and commentator on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. She is running for Israel’s Knesset as a member of the Yamin Hahadash (New Right) party in Israel’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for April 9. Read more at www.CarolineGlick.com.

February 19, 2019 | 2 Comments »

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  1. Direct Line from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Rep. Ilhan Omar
    Alex Grobman
    Feb 14, 2019 by

    By Alex Grobman, PhD, Senior Resident Scholar at the John C. Danforth Society

    Rep. Ilhan Omar’s antisemitic statement that AIPAC buys the support of American politicians for Israel should not come as a surprise. It is nothing more than the now-Congresswoman’s latest attempt to resurrect the baseless accusations against Jews that were originally aired in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

    Prior to the 2018 elections, her campaign boasted to the Muslim Girl blog that she supports BDS. She has labeled Israel an “apartheid nation.” In 2012, Omar tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

    Her attacks have raised the issues of dual loyalty and conspiracy theories based on charges of Jewish control of the world made popular by the Protocols and support for a nefarious Israel lobby promoted by Professors John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.

    Despite the fact that the Protocols has been widely dismissed as a 19th-century hoax, the potential danger it retains in shaping public opinion should not be underestimated. When Jews are portrayed as manipulators who seek power over other people’s lives, they can be perceived as dire threats. The Nazis recognized this phenomenon and exploited it, using the Protocols to rationalize the destruction of European Jewry.

    It is particularly disconcerting that this false perception of the Jews is embraced by leaders of the Arab-Muslim world, where the Protocols continues to be ubiquitously available and is cited in the writings of mainstream academics, who lend credibility and legitimacy to this utter canard.

    Israel and Arab Lobbies

    As Omar undoubtedly knows, in 2003, the Protocols and its concomitant issue of Jews’ dual loyalty were injected into the American mainstream. In a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, two prominent professors charged that a small group of Jewish officials working in the U.S. government were secretly responsible for engineering the invasion of Iraq.

    Mearsheimer, a professor of political science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University, examined the Israel lobby and alleged it had “profound” influence on U.S. foreign policy.

    They argued that the very significant level of American assistance to Israel, both financial and diplomatic, was unjustified on moral grounds and even strategic need. With absolutely no evidence of any connective tissue, they claimed that the “largely unconditional” aid was granted primarily because of the “political power of the Israeli lobby,” which they defined as “a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seek to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel.”

    They claimed that, beyond working to persuade the U.S. to support Israel “more or less unconditionally,” the groups and individuals in the lobby played key roles in shaping American foreign policy with regard to the Arab/Israeli conflict, “the ill-fated” invasion of Iraq, and the “ongoing confrontations” with Iran and Syria. These policies, the authors said, were not only contrary to American interests but “in fact harmful to Israel’s long-term interests as well.”

    In a March 23, 2003 essay in the London Review of Books, Mearsheimer and Walt were careful to disavow any connection between their views and the Protocols. The biggest difference, they implied, was that the Israeli lobby is more adept: “[T]he Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.”

    Though Walt and Mearsheimer claim to uphold Israel’s right to exist, their biased assault on the Jewish state, including their insistence on holding Israel to a higher standard of conduct than any other country in the world, suggests they favor the country’s disappearance entirely.

    Neo-Antisemitism

    Like Omar, Israel’s enemies have embraced this view because it conveniently corresponds to their own conspiratorial fantasies about American Jews controlling U.S. foreign policy. Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the German weekly Der Zeit, calls this “neo-antisemitism,” which he describes as a variant of antisemitism, one that may lack overt genocidal intent, but which contains historic themes of Jewish exploitation, manipulation, avarice, worship of false gods, and absolute wickedness.

    The neo-antisemitism of people such as Mearsheimer, Walt, and Omar is the projection of old fantasies on new targets: Israel and America. In their view, the U.S. is an antisemitic fantasy come true, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in living color. “Isn’t it true,” they say, “that Jews, who owe their primary allegiance to Israel, control the banks, the Pentagon, universities, the media and the Congress?”

    While classic antisemitism held World Jewry as the culprit, for the neo-antisemites, it’s Israel.

    Accusing Individuals

    Those who adopted Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s analysis accused Jewish officials working in senior Pentagon positions, such as Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz, along with Jewish intellectuals and commentators outside the government, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Kagan, of subversively operating for the benefit of Israel by initiating the war in Iraq.

    Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was accused of conspiring with the Jewish cabal to dupe Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and President George W. Bush into attacking Iraq. By this criteria, anyone seeking to discredit the Bush Doctrine found it easy to “expose” the Iraq invasion for what Mearsheimer and Walt said it really was: a war initiated by the Jews and fought entirely for the benefit of Israel.

    The absurd premise that seasoned politicians like Bush, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld could be so easily deceived and manipulated into initiating a war in which the U.S. had no apparent interest was not on the radar of these neo-antisemites.

    When Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, was asked on an African-American talk radio program about Jewish responsibility for the war, he offered a detailed refutation of the charge. Nothing he said persuaded the callers, until he turned the tables on them: “I see that the Secretary of State is Colin Powell and the national security adviser is Condoleezza Rice. It seems to me that it is more of a black conspiracy.”

    The Arab Lobby

    Many observers say it is the Arab lobby, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which is quantifiably the most potent influence on American foreign policy. It represents the interests of Arab regimes that frequently undermine America’s security by supporting terrorism. The lobby works to infiltrate the American educational system, seeking to hide the aims and practices of radical Islam and distort a true understanding of the Middle East.

    Political scientist Mitchell G. Bard notes that by working behind the scenes, the lobby ensures that Arab interests are given “disproportionate attention” by decision makers in order to influence American foreign policy and “manipulate” public opinion. Its deep pockets and long reach pose an actual danger to American democracy.

    Significantly, Bard points out, the Arab lobby, as opposed to AIPAC, has no popular support.

    “While the Israeli lobby has hundreds of thousands of grass-root members, and public opinion polls consistently reveal a huge gap between support for Israel and the Arab nations/Palestinians, the Arab lobby has almost no foot soldiers or public sympathy. Its most powerful elements tend to be bureaucrats who represent only their personal views or what they believe are their institutional interests, and foreign governments that care only about their national interests, not those of the United States. What they lack in human capital in terms of American advocates, they make up for with almost unlimited resources to try to buy what they usually cannot win on the merits of their arguments,” he says.

    The Saudis who run the Arab lobby focus on a top-down style of lobbying rather than the bottom-up approach favored by AIPAC. As a proposal written for the Saudis once explained, “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”

    From Congresswoman Omar’s remarks, one of the Arab Lobby’s efforts has been made crystal clear: the goal to weaken support for the longstanding friendship between America and Israel.

  2. Caroline also wasn’t able to predict Morsi’s ouster in Egypt. So Jarret/Obama want to destroy the United States. What else is new?