Resolved: Ilhan Omar has not expressed antisemitism

Typically, people don’t get accused of anti-Semitism just for being critical of Israel. That happens when they invoke virulent anti-Semitic tropes in support of their views.

Accusations of U.S. support for Israel being tied to cash bribes feeds into long-held claims that Jews exert vast untoward influence through money. The idea that Americans being pro-Israel equates to allegiance to a country other than their own is a restatement of the bigoted view that Jews are the “other”, a foreign and probably sinister presence; for example, it was a common charge among French Jew-haters at the time of the Dreyfus Affair.

These are classic anti-Semitic tropes.

Resolved: Omar is an unrepentant bigot. She’s not a victim.

And that comes from someone who’s been heavily critical of Israel’s actions in recent years on this board.

Well, that was to boost her Democratic opponent in the Primary.

Exactly. Omar should have been careful in picking her words, lean more on criticizing Netanyahu, etc. not the whole nation.

I mean, Netanyahu is a dishonest crook, a right wing populist, like trump was. Say bad things about him, no hackles are raised.

I’m…not sure that’s true.

The following things can all be true, and I think they are:

  1. There are legitimate criticisms of Israel’s government, and of the electorate that continues to vote them into power.
  2. There are antisemitic criticisms of Israel’s government and electorate, and also of the state of Israel and of Jewish people.
  3. There are antisemitic ways to express the legitimate criticisms.
  4. There are folks who point out the antisemitic ways to express the legitimate criticisms.
  5. There are folks who try to deflect legitimate criticisms by claiming they’re antisemitic criticisms.
  6. There are folks who try to defend antisemitic criticisms by claiming they’re legitimate criticisms.

Which is to say, we can’t make generalized statements like “people don’t get accused of anti-Semitism just for being critical of Israel,” or, as I’ve heard others say, “You can’t say anything negative about Israel without getting called antisemitic.” We gotta focus on the particulars.

In this case, I think Omar’s “Benjamins” comment falls under category 3. It was unintentional, but she was right to walk it back. I think a lot of AIPAC’s behavior falls under category 5.

I’m not sure how genuine the complaints against Ilhan actually are.

I’m not hearing anyone racing to explain how her comments are worse than MTG’s jewish space lasers, or Trump meeting with avowed antisemitics (and indeed “jews will not replace us”).

They needed an excuse and this was the best they could think of.

I think many of them are legitimate, and many are motivated by Islamophobia, and many are motivated by #5 in my categories above. I can spend more time criticizing her than I spend criticizing MTG because I think Omar is a better person who is likely to listen to criticism. Criticizing MTG for being a bigot is like yelling at flies for eating shit: it doesn’t do any good.

When I say “I’m not hearing anyone…” I meant among the people who called for IO to be removed from her committee assignments.
Of course I have no issue with anyone criticizing her comments in isolation, if indeed they were antisemitic (which I don’t think they were, but I also think she was right to apologize).

I don’t want to engage in whataboutism…but in the case of people that were trying to flag these words as particularly egregious, we can ask why all the others did not even warrant a comment.

(My bold)

Really? You don’t think she made any efforts to ameliorate the nature of her “offensive comments”?

And what of the comprehensive post above that lists the numerous times she’s publicly pledged support or solidarity with the Jewish people? How do you reconcile that?

(I’m presuming you’ve read the entire thread, and know what unrepentant means - im not being flippant; I truly don’t know how you can take this position in light of her actions).

We can ask that, but we can also ask, “Why do sharks eat fish?”

Sharks eat fish because they’re hungry; and Republicans flag IO’s words but not MTG’s words because they’re hypocrites.

I don’t think it’s any more complicated or debatable than that.

I agree…perhaps we’re talking past each other.

The OP seems to express some degree of suprise as to how seriously IO’s tweets have been taken, and how she’s “routinely derided … on the basis that’s she’s antisemitic”. He then tries to break down why he thinks that she is not.

In this context, it’s worth pointing out that it is 100% manufactured outrage, and incontrovertible hypocrisy.

If she hadn’t tweeted this benjamin’s comment, there would be some other pretend reason for kicking her off the committees. Probably she once visited a mosque where a guy once said something that can be interpreted as anti-American. That’ll do.

I think it’s worth looking at how seriously it’s taken on the left, and on the right.

As I understand it, there are some folks on the left who treat it as a non-issue. I think they’re wrong, but absent evidence to the contrary (e.g., freakouts about similar levels from Republicans), I won’t brand them hypocrites.

But McCarthy et al are absolutely hypocrites.

We should separate the merits of the charges themselves from the hypocrisy of those leveling the charges.

…as far as support for an assertion goes, you’ve done a very poor job of supporting this particular one in this thread. Is this really it?

So, apparently someone hacked Omar’s mouth, so that she didn’t “knowingly” say what she said, and furthermore, who knew there were vicious tropes about Jews and money?

Thaaat’s repentance!

It just goes to show you can’t say anything of substance in America anymore. Why, they’re out to cancel Joe Rogan now for defending her!

““That’s not an antisemitic statement,” Rogan said on his podcast, which featured guest Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host. “Benjamins are money. The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza.””

She said that AIPAC buys influence in American politics. Other people said that what she daid and how she said it sounded close to saying that jews peddle influence and secretly control the world. The she apologized for the first thing sounding like the second thing.

You really have to strain to see unrepentantly antisemitic in that.

Yeah, I’m not seeing “unrepentantly antisemitic” either. She did exactly what somebody who’s not bigoted, or is trying not to be bigoted, should do upon being informed that they’ve said something that’s being taken as sounding bigoted: she checked into why people were saying that, apparently now understands why, apologized, and to the best of my knowledge hasn’t done it again.

– Rogan is another matter. Has Omar been defending Rogan, or defending his saying that? If not, then I don’t see how she’s responsible for him.

Yes, and antisemitism is baked so deeply into so many cultures that it’s often reasonable to not jump straight to cries of explicit bigotry.

The problem is that if language of the sort isn’t stepped on hard and fast, it’s going to be interpreted as dogwhistles by the actual explicit bigots. And *those *people are going to nod gravely and say “ah yes, somebody who understands.” And then, armed with fresh reinforcement of their beliefs, they’re going to go and do something hateful and/or violent.

Except reacting hard and fast to language like this just boosts the “Oh, those stubborn and vexatious Jews don’t want anybody having honest conversations!” signal. So it’s basically lose-lose.

Which is why, as a liberal Jew in America, trying to talk about antisemitism with other liberals is fucking exhausting and almost always unproductive.

Everything you said makes sense to me. It’s definitely an area where I have to check myself, as a raised-Protestant guy: I know my granddad was explicitly antisemitic, and while I ain’t him, I grew up around him, and doubtless absorbed some of his attitudes unconsciously.

My first exposure to anti-Zionism was from the owner of Internationalist Books, a radical left bookstore in my hometown owned by an anarchist Jewish man. It was actually years later before I learned that anti-Zionism was often dogwhistle for antisemitism–and that still isn’t intuitive to me. So I have to check myself.

That is 100x more anti-Semitic than anything Omar said. Omar didn’t say “Jewish people are into money.” She said the Israeli lobbyists are influencing American politics with money. Say “Jews love money” is absolutely a repugnant thing to say.

In my experience, a lot of it boils down to a deeply implicit belief that Jews don’t ‘count’ as an oppressed minority (they’re successful! they’re rich! they have outsized representation among elected officials!), and so antisemitism doesn’t deserve the same level of careful and often uncomfortable introspection that comes with confronting implicit bias.

Which is how you get people who will readily (and genuinely) decry obvious antisemitism - murder and violence and explicitly hateful rhetoric - but balk at demands that anti-systemic work needs to take place.

Which is just crazy to me. They are one of the most infamously oppressed minorities in the world historically (spanning multiple continents) and to this day are targeted by bigots, even killed. :man_facepalming:

I think Omar said some antisemitic things (the stuff about money) and then apologized for it. I think it’s over and done with, unless she does it again. I’m a (secular) Jew, if that matters.