Well, it appears the Democrats have dropped a five-ton “Zero Tolerance” hammer on my newbie congresswoman. That’s gotta hurt.
The reaction to Ilhan Omar’s tweets about Jewish money in American politics could not have been more swift and indignant or filled with any higher level of dudgeon. Another breath was not going to be taken without hearing her unequivocal apology … which she kinda offered.
Within hours of her glibly tossing out a reference to an old P Diddy song she (and all Democrats by association) were being condemned for “hating Israel”. Minutes later she was being taken out behind the barn for a whoopin’ by Nancy Pelosi and every Democrat close to a microphone. Yikes. Bad day, madam.
To be clear, the dagger’s edge of the condemnation of Mar wasn’t directed at her complaint about money in politics so much as it was … the inference of the “trope” she banged out via Twitter. To everyone that mattered, any reference to the way AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) doles out cash in Congress is exactly the same thing as saying “Jewish bankers control the world.”
I’ve said “yikes” already, right?
Several things come to mind.
1: Public officials in general would be very well-advised to reserve Twitter for only the blandest pronouncements. For example: “Today is Mothers Day. Let’s all tell Mom we love her.” On Twitter (which, “When it isn’t kindergarten it’s a sewer”*) anything else leads to instantaneous re-re-interpretation, flame wars and grief. Stop trying to prove you’re more clever in 20 words and an emoji than everyone else and stick to a speech or policy paper when you’ve got something important to say.
2: A nuanced conversation about Israel is damned rare in the USA. The reasons include the often psychotic tribalism of both the genocidal dictators over there in the ‘hood, (Saddam, Bashir al-Asad) and our oil-rich Gulf allies. (That sound you hear is the bone saw carving up the reporters our gas station buddies don’t like.) That and the perilous position Israel is always in relative to those neighbors. That reality has a way of severely out-weighing the innumerable ways Israel makes its situation worse by being controlled by its arch-conservative religious “leadership”. Given that pretty medieval crowd, there’s not much chance puppet governments like Benjamin Netenyahu’s will ever stop piling more and more people into West Bank developments and rubbing Israel’s affluence in the face of the average Palestinian, penned in and governed by their own rotating cast of demagogues. (And forget about ever sorting out which is the chicken and which is the egg.)
3: Omar is part of the current Congress’s 0.6% Muslim representation, (1% of total US population.) By contrast, Congress today includes 31% Catholics, 14% Baptists and 6% Jews. 3% of 535 declared either “don’t know” or “refused”, so they might be our atheist representation. Praise be!) Point being, Omar’s in no position to do anything other than register an occasional (albeit much too glib) complaint about the US government’s near-total deference to Israel … and the wealthiest of the Middle East’s Muslims. (But hey … when that Palestinian rabble strikes oil, we’ll take their calls.) Omar’s a voice in the wilderness, and yet she’s getting hammered by friend and foe alike as though she’s winding up to lead a jihad. Proportionality isn’t much in vogue these days.
4: It goes without saying that virtually every Republican in Congress and the pundit-ocracy is a hypocritical fool when it comes to condemning “hate speech.” Somewhere, a few of them might have expressed discomfort with Trump referring to the cro-magnon, tiki-torch, in-your-face-anti-Semitic Nazi-bros in Charlottesville as some of the “good people on both sides”, I just don’t recall at this moment. But it’s unfortunate even a few Democrats don’t use this fleeting window in the news cycle to reinforce Omar’s underlying complaint about money — from wherever — steering US politics.
Unfortunately, Zero Tolerance within the herd means everyone stays on the same script in these moments of (Twitter-sparked) crisis.
So much then for making lemonade out of this outrage.
(*Me. Often.)
There needs to be more public discussion about AIPAC’s programme of lobbying, and what it is exactly their long term goals are. The pernicious nature of AIPAC was one of the motivations for the launch of the alternative pro-democratic, pro-peace, pro-Israel group J Street.
That being said, Omar’s messaging was, I think, a bit inflammatory. She could have made the same point using more neutral language. She probably would still have been attacked, but she would have had to backtrack less.
It seems that several of the newbies in Congress are using language to trigger emotional responses in the public. I’m not sure how useful that is, nor am I sure yet if they are following a defined strategy or if they are simplyfalling prey to ego inflation, which often infects those who come into power.
I think for Omar it’s a pretty rough “teaching moment.” If I were her my response would be to either sign-on or craft some tough and specific lobbying-reform measure … and lay off [bleepin’] Twitter.
Agreed.
Well said, Brian. I visited the West Bank two years ago for the first time and spent about 5-6 days there. I tend to be pro-Palestinian; I had followed/read about the conflict there for decades. So I thought I kind of got it, but nothing really prepared me for the sight of millions of people being imprisoned behind the huge West Bank wall. It was right up there with the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain in terms of a stark, massive, brutal barrier. And then there’s the endless, daily humiliations and human rights violations. In short, the Palestinian situtation was much, much worse than what I had imagined. I’m glad Ilhan spoke out. She’ll learn how to do it better in the future. The GOP and AIPAC people are gonna hate on her no matter what. And I am so glad she represents me.
Thank you for sharing your experiences in the West Bank. It’s too bad more people aren’t aware of what’s going on there.
This was in a newsletter received today from Current Affairs, a socialist magazine:
Ilhan Did Nothing Wrong
This is not completely accurate — according to the worm-brained consensus of Washington’s boldest thinkfluencers, the first Somali-American woman elected to Congress did commit an unforgivable sin when she criticized the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on American politics. But this, dear readers (as you know well) is craven bullshit. Current Affairs wishes to extend its full support to Ilhan Omar as she battles spurious accusations and coordinated character smears from AIPAC and the political establishment.