Andrew Sullivan Tergiversates

In his column this week Andrew Sullivan seems to be speaking out of both side of his mouth. He seems to be contradicting himself. Or better, if you would like to learn a new word, he is tergiversating.

Or better, he is back to being the Andrew Sullivan who declared with full confidence that Sarah Palin had not given birth to her youngest son. Because Sullivan is an expert in such matters.

Today, he is opining about today’s leftist democrats, a group that he likes and does not like at the same time. He extols the transcendent virtue of new Rep. Ilhan Omar, a stone cold anti-Semite before denouncing her for being… you guessed it, an anti-Semite.

He begins with this extraordinary distortion, from someone who ought to know better:

Finally in 2019, we have one of two Muslim women in the U.S. Congress, proudly wearing a hijab, and immediately destroying any stupid stereotypes of Muslim women as subservient or silent. We have a seemingly fearless and often charming woman of color with the temerity to interrogate the overwhelmingly white and male foreign policy blob in the heart of our political system. We have a refugee from Somalia as a young congresswoman, a hard-left analogue to the great Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

This, if you need reminding, is America in 2019. …  this is the most successful, multicultural, multiracial democratic experiment in the history of humankind. Omar is part of it. If her success doesn’t make you proud of America, in this broad and nonideological sense, there’s something critical you don’t understand about this country, and why so many of us immigrants love it so.

Begin with the obvious, the hijab is an instrument of female oppression. It is the most visible instrument of female oppression. Nearly all the women who wear it are forced to wear it. If they take it off, they are beaten or jailed, at best. If, in an Islamic Republic, in a nation ruled by the Sharia Law that Omar loves, a woman refuses to wear the hijab, here is what happens to her, via the Daily Mail:

A woman who removed her headscarf in central Tehran last year, sacrificing her job and her freedom, says she did it for her daughter.

Azam Jangravi felt terrified before she decided to clamber onto the electricity transformer box but says she did it for her eight-year-old daughter Viani.

A crowd formed around her on Revolutionary Street and men shouted at her to come down.

She was arrested, fired from her job at a research institute and sentenced to three years in prison for promoting indecency and wilfully breaking Islamic law.

Perhaps Omar wears her hijab because she wants to do so. The truth is, women in nations run by Islamic Law do not have this freedom. Omar’s gesture makes it appear that they do. She is thereby fostering a lie. She certainly fooled Andrew Sullivan. 

And let’s not forget, Somalia is one of the nations in the world that still systematically practices the barbarous custom of forced female genital mutilation. Of young girls. About her own suffering at the hands of Islamic Law in Somalia Ayaan Hirsi Ali has testified openly. She has fought courageously against those fanatics whose misogyny Omar manifests. For Sullivan to compare a woman who has fought Islamic Law and who has been threatened with murder with a woman who manifests it is disgraceful and appalling.

Sullivan seems to believe that Omar has destroyed stupid stereotypes of Muslim women. In truth, Omar was perpetuating such stereotypes when she launched into a viciously anti-Semitic tirade against a Jewish public official… a man whose name she refused to pronounce correctly. She has submitted to the hijab and to God knows what else. She is carrying water for Islamic anti-Semites. If this makes you proud of America, you have a problem.

Of course, our tergiversating friend Sullivan did see Omar’s display of anti-Semitism in her interrogation of Elliott Abrams:

Now look at Omar. She didn’t just push back on AIPAC’s distortion of American foreign policy, she reiterated a classic anti-Semitic trope that American Jews buy influence, period. She didn’t just confront Elliott Abrams, she refused to let him answer anything but loaded “yes” or “no” responses.

Does this make Andrew Sullivan proud to be an American?