Resolved: Ilhan Omar has not expressed antisemitism

There have been a number of red states that require contractors and government employees to sign loyalty oaths to Israeli to work for the state. That is what she is referring to.

I had no idea. This is utterly shocking to me, and insane.

More germane to the discussion, how are we to criticize the political influences forcing Americans to have dual loyalty towards Israel without being accused of invoking the “dual loyalty” antisemitic trope?

And America doesn’t?

Look, don’t make me support Bibi Netanyahu - I loathe that jackass, and I’ve voted against him more times than you’ve had hot meals. I think his speech before Congress in 2015 was an insult and a blunder.

But you’re still engaging in conspiracy theories. He said that they stood by Israel, not that they “supported Israel unconditionally, 100%, with no criticism”. It’s not the same thing. Joe Biden is a self-declared friend of Israel, and the Israeli government has agreed with him, and yet President Biden has criticized Israel on numerous occasions, as is his right (some might say obligation). You can support a country without supporting specific leaders or specific policies. That’s perfectly normal behavior.

I hate that shit, and I wish those wingnuts would stop. I despise this type of pointless political posturing and I don’t want assholes like that supporting my country.

That said, this is Texas and Arkansas we’re talking about here - I doubt many Jewish people were involved with the legislation, if any. How does this have anything to do with canards about Jewish dual loyalty? Have any Jews demanded that Americans “pledge loyalty” to Israel?

You are absolutely correct!

You can also not support a country because of its specific leaders and policies.

My point, though, is that these are political issues, not religious or ethnic ones. And they do indeed exist, as political issues. So when a discussion relates to these political influences, it’s unfair for people to make the leap to presuming that this is a coded discussion about ethnic or religious groups.

But that just it - Omar hasn’t made any reference to Jewish people. It’s the critics who are making that leap.

If Omar talks about Israel, she’s talking about Israel. If she’s taking about political influences, she’s talking about politics. (For context, and as a reminder, the dual loyalty comment was “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for the allegiance to a foreign country.”)

The leap, however, is that she’s actually talking about Jewish people, and invoking stereotypes instead of referencing specific events, and is therefore antisemitic.

I’m in agreement with all of this.

Yes indeed. And that’s exactly the problem. What Ilhan Omar said fed into that problem, and encouraged it.

I am willing to believe, pending any further clear evidence to the contrary, that she spoke unthinkingly and partly out of ignorance, and now regrets having done so.

Say what?

That is absurd and, if not illegal, ought to be.

– wait a minute. From the site linked:

she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation.

That’s not a “loyalty oath to Israel”. That’s an agreement to not take a specific type of action against Israel.

I think, looking at the language, that it’s supposed to apply not to her personally, but to her business – that she’d be agreeing, say, not to refuse to buy supplies used by her business from a supplier in Israel, based only on the grounds that the supplier is Israeli. I’m not in favor of that language, either; and, reading the rest of that article, it seems like a shitload of states are doing something that looks to me like it’s utterly unconstitutional.

But I will note, not only that it’s not a “loyalty oath to Israel”, but also that this is being done by state, and attempted to be done by federal, legislators who are overwhelmingly not Jewish. They’re almost all at least nominally Christian; and so, presumably, were most people in Texas and elsewhere who signed that or similar oaths without blinking. Why is the issue not about Christians in some fashion pledging loyalty to Israel?

Which would be true, in an ideal world in which such coded discussions didn’t happen.

As I said, I’m willing to believe that she used that language out of ignorance, and didn’t mean to be antisemitic.

The proper response to that is, indeed, to apologize; and to be more clear in future. She could, for instance, specifically attack the type of regulation referred to in the Texas case; citing that case and those in other states. I don’t know whether she has done so.

I think if she had said “it’s all about the votes, baby” instead of “Benjamins”, it would have been far more accurate. Politicians pander to voting blocs, regardless of their sincerity in doing so, and part of that pandering is to immediately accuse others of being anti-name-the-bloc.

So I tried to answer that. It doesn’t look like Omar has commented on these state level decisions, but has (as might be expected of somebody who works in the national Congress) commented on the national effort to accomplish the same thing by sponsoring a resolution in Congress

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/496/text

Now, what I wonder is whether her reference to America’s prior boycotts in support of Jewish people will be interpreted as a sly dig or something, as opposed to being consistent with her ideology of advocating for the maligned.

And lest you think that Omar is peddling in some sort of conspiratorial thinking

But then she doesn’t get to make the reference to Bibi Netanyahu. It was a tweet which used a rhetorical flourish. Even if she could have said something else, it doesn’t mean that what she did say was outrageous or bigoted.

(I mean, if somebody had asked why Israel had an outsize influence on American policy, and she had something even remotely approaching “you know Jews control the purse strings”, I’d be all over it. But when you need a decoder ring to understand where the bigotry lies, and when the interpretation is buoyed by the characteristics of the speaker (she’s a middle eastern Muslim, ya’ know) it’s an unfair slander).

Certainly not by me. I just read the proposed bill at your link, and it seems to me that that’s included as part of an entirely reasonable list of boycotts important in US history.

– do I gather correctlly that the bill hasn’t gone anywhere since 2019, even though the Democrats held the House majority for the following two years?

Seems to me that she said something far more than “remotely” approaching “you know Israel controls the purse strings.” And there are significant numbers of people in this country to whom that amounts to the same thing.

Again – maybe she was thinking of Netanyahu, and not of multiple centuries of slanders about Jews and money. But intentions are not the only thing that matters; effect also matters. Saying something that has an effect other than intended calls for, when one has been informed of what the effect is and why, apologizing and doing differently in the future. She seems to understand that just fine, and to have done so. I’m not sure why you’re being so insistent that the effect of that phrasing is nonexistent. Maybe you needed a decoder ring, but it’s utterly obvious to me.

Not always, but you have a point. If someone says “sub-Saharan Africa is nothing but corrupt, failed nations, full of violent, superstition people” you’d rightly consider that statement to be racist, since all those nations have black majorities and black government leaders. And, it isn’t really true.

Sure, it’s okay to condemn Israel for it’s dealings with Palestine, but you can’t ignore Palestine’s constant terrorist actions vs Israel. Trust me, if Mexico started lobbing rockets over the boarder at American schools, we’d be less tolerant than Israel. Does that completely excuse Israel? No, but it puts it in context.

Lots of white majority nations, just one Jewish state.

This thread has been informative to me.

I was pretty sure that in the past I had heard criticisms of Israel - and its right to exist - denounced as antisemitism. I now believe the more proper term would be anti-Zionism. I wonder if I had misunderstood the denunciations, or whether the denouncers spoke imprecisely.

That’s precisely the point - the political influences aren’t Jewish, and Omar never referred to them as Jewish.

So why do people get to presume that she really was talking about Jewish people, when people are pointing out that this isn’t a Jewish issue at all, but instead about the political pressure in America regarding loyalty towards Israel, which is precisely what she described?

The issue isn’t whether Omar is correct. The issue is whether her opinions are antisemitic.

What does that mean in the context of criticism of Israel? Are you saying the criticism is presumptively antisemitic, because it’s the only place where the Jewish people are the majority ruling class? Is there a higher bar to pass before Israeli criticism is deemed valid, and not bigoted, than in one of those many white majority nations?

Yes. In many cases, like when Islamic terrorists and even governments state that “Israel must be destroyed” - they are doing so out of antisemitism. And Oman didn’t just criticize. Israel, she condemned it.

Of course you can criticize Netanyahu, or any specific actions the government of Israel has taken. But once you condemn the nation as a whole, then yes, that looks a lot like antisemitism.

How did she encourage it? She said it was a problem we need to talk about.

If I point out the problems of racism, am I just feeding into the problem of racism and encouraging it? I mean, that’s something I do hear, but as a blanket attempt to quell dissent (“if you see racism, you’re the real racist”), not as a fair discussion of the complaint.

In rebuttal, I’m just going to quote Omar yet again, with one of those statements that has led to her condemnation.

I’m frankly gobsmacked that this is controversial.

Depends on how those criticisms were phrased, and in what context. Some criticisms of Israel are antisemitic. Others aren’t. But many of the people currently arguing that Israel has no right to exist are doing so for antisemitic reasons: they not only don’t want the state of Israel to be there, they don’t want any Jews to be there either.

What people are pointing out is that due to hundreds of years of historical and current context, continuing up to and including the modern USA, her particular phrasing sounded as if she were talking about Jewish people.

You’re insisting on trying to consider the issue as if the only context of the statement were the overt topic of the discussion. It would be nice if that were so, but it ain’t so. It may have been the only context Omar was thinking of when she made the statement; but that doesn’t make it the only context that applies.

Which implies that it’s a problem that exists.

The problem that some Christians are trying to prevent legal boycotts does exist, yes. But that’s an entirely different problem than “Jewish people [presumably those who are US citizens] are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S.” That is not a problem that exists. The problem that exists is that there are people in the USA who believe it.

People condemn Russia all the time. And Iran. Etc., etc.

“I can’t be racist, some of my best friends are blacks.” says the racist. That was clearly a self-serving comment to deflect criticism.

You don’t think calling Israel an apartheid regime is controversial? I’m not asking if you agree or disagree - only if you think it’s a controversial statement.

That’s not what I said.

I said that criticism of Israel (whether valid or not - if it’s not an apartheid regime, so be it. I’m not saying it is) is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.

This is what I’m shocked is controversial.

Where did Omar say that this was a problem that exists? Where did she refer to Jewish people?