The two-faced women who hate Israel – and Jews

Now that she has attacked Elliot Abrams, I wonder where Representative Ilhan Omar stands on the issue of FGM given that she is a Somali-American and the practice is pandemic among Somalis. No one has asked her about it publicly. I am asking her here.

Prof. Phyllis Chesler, INN

Many Westerners seem to believe that oppressed Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh women are by definition, frightened, submissive, peaceful, and quiet.

Is this true of face-masked or hijab-wearing women who purposely stand right next to other women at prayer and who blow them and their young children right up?

How quiet were the young women in hijab who refused to allow Nonie Darwish to speak at Wellesley by repeatedly coughing loudly, then getting up, one by one, to leave their row and the room, only to return to continue their demonstration?

How peaceful are those mothers and mothers-in-law who beat and humiliate their daughters and daughters-in-law daily, who death threaten them when they refuse to veil, marry an odious first cousin, marry out of caste, make friends with infidels, or venture beyond their own communities?

Memoirs that are painful to read confirm the extraordinary cruelty of mothers and older female relatives who preside over their daughters’ FGM procedure and/or who refuse to allow surgery to correct for deadly infections. I wonder where Representative Ilhan Omar stands on the issue of FGM given that she is a Somali-American and the practice is pandemic among Somalis.

Has anyone asked her about this? Well, I am doing so here.

Yes, I am talking about Representative Omar, among others who are perhaps, unexpectedly, and extremely angry, even aggressive. Were she to behave this way at home or in a mosque—God knows what might happen to her.

Well, maybe Omar could get away with it right now but most other women in her community could not.

For example, Representative Ilhan Omar just castigated senior diplomat Elliot Abrams uncivilly, shamelessly, and with undisguised malicious pleasure. But it seems she was reading directly from the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera 2/12 “hit” piece on Abrams (whom she addressed as “Adams”). This point was made by Mike Waller on Twitter.

Is Ilhan accepting or expecting “Benjamins” from the Qatari regime which has been known to fund worldwide Jihad terrorism and massive disinformation campaigns against Jewish Israel and the West in textbooks, via funding professorships and Institutes on American university campuses, and in terms of lobbying governments here and everywhere?

It’s true: Both religious and non-religious women can be very aggressive. Women are only human, as close to the apes as to the angels. Unfortunately, they are usually allowed to indulge their rage only against other women whom they are supposed to keep in line.

Non-religious “social justice” female street demonstrators (as well as elected officials) are increasingly loudangry, even physically menacing.

I admit it: I wish that angry women were less invested in hating Israel and loving imaginary, Sharia-compliant countries and would focus their considerable rage on women’s issues such as FGM and Honor Killing.

Women are as entitled to express anger as men are. Since women are not “supposed” to do so, we are probably more judgmental when they do. Also, psychologically, we may unconsciously associate any and all female anger with our own mothers’ anger—which is always terrifying to a dependent child.

Nevertheless, I do not like public displays of uncontrolled rage. They unsettle and alarm me.

I am so old-fashioned. I still expect civility from both men and women, at home, on the street, and on the part of elected officials. I say this even as—or because—I hear the sound of the dreaded timbrels, smell book burning, and fear that our entire civilization may soon go up in smoke.

And it is inconceivable that a hijab wearing Somali woman would dare to try to humiliate a man, especially in public. It seems this is permitted only if that man is a Jew and an infidel.

The writer is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award,.authored 18 books, including Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism, and 4 studies about honor killing, Her latest books are An American Bride in Kabul, A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

February 15, 2019 | 2 Comments »

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  1. Since this is about “Women” peripherally although mostly about Jew-Hate I have a news item about a woman.

    Arutz today published a report of an interview with Ayelet Shaked where she said that in exchange for extending Israel Law over Area C. She would grant 500,000 Arabs Israel citizenship. The Arab and Jewish birth rates are the same she said so she was not worried.

    This must rank as the most stupid remark coming from an Israeli this century. Assuming it was properly reported. …She’d lose MY vote and I’m sure many thousands more just by this stupidity. Imagine relying on Arab birthrate which could zoom because of the next diatrjbe of some crazy imam…..

    Israel can extend it’s Law over Area C anytime without thIs monstrous exchange. The 100,000 Arabs In Area C have infiltrated from A and B over the last 2-3 years. Then it was at most 20,000

    Politcians….. Phoo….!!

    p.

  2. This article, although from al-Jazeera English, was republished on Google News and is on its current web page. Google regularly republishes al-Jazeera stories on its News app. I have never seen it publish any article from an Israeli newspaper or web site. The author, it should be noted, is an Israeli-born anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Jew, reportedly a physician. Oy! There are thousands of these people–a massive with column.

    All Zionist roads lead to genocide
    Zionism supporters feel threatened by the intersectional solidarity that women like Ilhan Omar represent.

    15 Feb 2019
    Congresswoman Ilhan Omar walks through the halls of the Capitol Building in Washington on January 16, 2019 [File: Andrew Harnik/AP]
    Congresswoman Ilhan Omar walks through the halls of the Capitol Building in Washington on January 16, 2019 [File: Andrew Harnik/AP]
    Over the past week, yet another recently-elected progressive congresswoman found herself in the eye of a media storm. On February 10, Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar retweeted a posting by American journalist Glenn Greenwald which criticised attacks on her and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for their support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, adding, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.”

    Shortly after Batya Ungar-Sargon, an editor at the Jewish periodical The Forward, asked Omar to clarify who, she was suggesting, pays US politicians, to which the congresswoman responded with a single word “AIPAC”, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

    AIPAC is a right-wing Zionist lobby group, which, as it declares on its website, “advocates pro-Israel policies to the Congress and Executive Branch of the United States”. As any other lobbyist operation, it raises funds and uses them to influence politicians. As an Al Jazeera documentary and other investigations have demonstrated, AIPAC leverages its large budget to gain influence over US politics. In this sense, there is nothing factually wrong about Omar’s assertion.

    Yet Ungar-Sargon was quick to charge Omar with “anti-Semitism”, accusing her of peddling anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish conspiracies. A battle of accusations ensued, involving politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as the Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish advocacy groups.

    Even US President Donald Trump became involved, hypocritically calling on Omar to resign, claiming “anti-Semitism has no place in the United States Congress”.

    After facing mounting pressure, Omar caved in and needlessly apologised for her comment. Once again, the US political establishment and the mainstream media demonstrated that they cannot tolerate progressive, anti-Zionist voices like Omar’s and will persist in their relentless campaign to silence them with fake accusations of anti-Semitism.

    However, this episode also elucidated two important facts: one, that “liberal Zionism” does not differ in substance from “right-wing Zionism”; and two, that intersectionality in politics and advocacy is increasingly becoming a grave threat to Zionists and their supporters in the US.

    The ‘liberal Zionist’ fallacy

    That Ungar-Sargon was among the first to accuse Omar of anti-Semitism should not come as a surprise.

    The Forward claims to be “the most influential nationwide Jewish media outlet today” providing “rigorous reporting and balanced commentary on politics”. It is perceived to be “progressive” or “liberal” due to its occasional critique of Israeli government policies and tokenisation of marginalised voices.

    Liberal Zionism presents itself as a left-wing political alternative to its more explicit fascistic version. In a recent article, Ungar-Sargon precisely expressed this false notion by attributing white supremacy exclusively to the right-wing branch of Zionism.

    But the “liberal Zionism”, which Ungar-Sargon and The Forward represent, de facto serves to grease the machinations of Israel’s reactionary politics by sanitising the white supremacist essence of the Zionist movement, concealing its motivations and trajectory.

    Thus, it was hardly surprising that Ungar-Sargon chose to accuse Omar of “anti-Semitism” by deploying Zionist propaganda which co-opts Judaism as a weapon of oppression and a shield against criticism, consequently labelling resistance to Zionism and Israeli policies as “anti-Semitic”.

    As veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has said: “If you remain a Zionist, you can no longer be of the left; if you’re of the left, you can no longer be a Zionist.”

    Or in other words, Ungar-Sargon’s feigned liberalism or left-wing slant far better represent oppressive and reactionary Zionist principles peppered with identity politics, than a genuine left-wing Jewish outlook.

    All versions of Zionism, including The Forward’s liberal sort, lead to the same reactionary end of unbridled expansionism and continued settler colonial genocide of Palestinian people.

    Zionism has always been a white supremacist, settler colonialist, anti-democratic, right-wing ideology, which has demanded a loyalty based on nationalist racism. Zionists of all sorts, including of the liberal kind, have collaborated with anti-Semitic forces towards a mutual goal of global apartheid, often at the expense of Jews who live outside Israel.

    Zionism and its denialism appeals to white supremacists in the United States who similarly are in denial of the American genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of black Africans.

    The ‘threat’ of intersectionality

    This recent attack on Omar is part of the concentrated, fraudulent smearing campaign against her and Congresswoman Tlaib and is directly linked to the targeting of other pro-Palestinian men and women of colour (such as Marc Lamont Hill and Angela Davis).

    What all of these people have in common is that they represent intersectional, anti-imperialist, leftist and feminist politics; that is, they all recognise that the sources of oppression they face in their everyday lives are interconnected and interdependent.

    For someone like Omar – a black Somali Muslim woman – oppression manifests itself in the white supremacy that seeks to subjugate all non-white races, in the imperialism that has stoked war in her home country Somalia, in the Islamophobia which demonises and marginalises her Muslim community and the patriarchy which constantly tries to relegate women to a secondary, subordinate position in society.

    Although she is not Palestinian, her experience of all these forms of oppression cannot but make her sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This is because all of them – white supremacy, imperialism, Islamophobia and patriarchy – lie at the very core of the Zionist movement which has victimised and brutalised Palestinians for more than seven decades now.

    Seeing and resisting oppression through the lens of intersectionality galvanises lessons of past anti-colonial movements and helps break apart the fictitious political narratives of white supremacy, imperialism, racism and patriarchy. Furthermore, the recognition that various oppressed peoples have common enemies serves to reinforce solidarity between them and assists in principled grassroots movements, such as BDS.

    The reason why Zionists consider intersectional solidarity dangerous and why they tend to attack viciously those who represent it (such as Omar, Hill, Davis, etc) is because it dispels fragmenting propaganda and empowers Palestinians and pro-Palestinian forces to build a wider front to challenge Zionism and the hegemonic powers which support it. It is able to mobilise an increasing number of people under the anti-Zionism banner who are unified in their call for justice in Palestine.

    To maintain this united front, moving forward, it is important to retain clarity of vision and defy the pernicious conflation of Zionism and Judaism or anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

    As Omar Barghouti, a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and cofounder of BDS, once wrote: “In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti-racist, sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil non-violent resistance, but also a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.”

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.