Making Rep. Ilhan Omar a Victim

It isn’t so obvious that rhetoric produces violence, but we are within our rights to ask which unhinged leftist incited James Hodgkinson to open fire on a softball team made up of Congressional Republicans. Obviously, no one cares any more, but still.

Now, the armies of the left are out in force defending poor put upon anti-Semite, Rep. Ilhan Omar. You know about Omar, she of the repeated insincere apologies. Along with her partners in crime, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Tlaib, she has made the Democratic party the epicenter of American anti-Semitism. Some achievement, that.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi brushes off the radical wing of her party— they are not helping her to raise money from Jewish constituents. And she denounces President Trump for calling out the Democratic Party’s leading anti-Semite. Pelosi wants Omar to have more security because, don’t you know, Trump’s words might incite violence against the Congresswoman. About the attack on Rep. Steve Scalise, perpetrated by an Uncle Bernie supporter… well, forgive and forget.

So, Omar is ipso facto now a victim. A victim of the dread white patriarchy. Poor darling. Anyone with any sense knows that the reputation of Muslims has been severely damaged for a long time now—by the behavior of Muslims themselves. By embracing the Palestinian cause, as the Palestinian Tlaib does, the radical left is trying to blame Jews for the manifest failures of Palestinians. The problem over there is that Jews succeeded, beyond anyone’s imagination, where Palestinians have done nothing more consequential than building terror tunnels and sending flaming kites into Jewish settlements. The shame of failure is too much for the Palestinians to bear, so they blame the Jews, they scapegoat the Jews. Besides, they do not know what to do to build anything themselves. Which compounds their shame and drives them stark raving mad.

People who scapegoat are moral degenerates of the first order. The cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and live to destroy what others have built. In another context it’s called deconstruction. It’s a lot easier than building something yourself.

Anyway, Rep. Omar provoked a reaction when she gave a talk to the Council of American-Islamic Relations last week. That CAIR is a Hamas front, that it is a leading force in the drive to blame Jews for the failures of Arabs, does not register. Nor do the many absurdist idiots that want us to believe that the trouble with the reputation of Islam lies in the minds of the Islamophobes. If only they could exercise complete mind control over the way other people see them, then all would be well in the Muslim world. Serious Muslims know that this is idiocy… but it has not reached the pea brain of Ilhan Omar.

Jonathan Tobin offers an excellent synopsis of the Omar perplex:

Imagine if there was a member of Congress who openly supported an anti-Semitic movement, issued multiple statements promoting traditional themes of Jew-hatred and then gave a speech at a fundraiser for an organization founded as a front group for terrorists in which the 9/11 attacks were described as merely as “some people did something.” And then imagine if the person who did all these things was embraced as a heroine and, more importantly, a victim of hate.

What did Omar tell CAIR about the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Why, she told them that “some people did something.” If she was trying to whitewash the motives of the perpetrators, if she wanted to diminish the importance of the event, by treating it like a piece of lint on her blazer, she could not have done better.

Needless to say, many people took serious offense. Among them The New York Post. It produced a piece of cover art attaching Omar’s words to a picture of the Twin Towers in flames. Naturally, that blithering imbecile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for a boycott of The Post… because she is a staunch defender of free speech--- not really, she is a staunch defender of thought control. If she cannot control the way people think, then they would see for the the fool she is.

Tobin continues his analysis:

Her latest surge of publicity involved a speech she gave for the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the pushback about her 9/11 comments, whereby many Democrats embraced her as the victim of a hate crime because The New York Post published a cover reminding her about the horror that “something” entailed.

Omar has received death threats in recent months, and there is no excuse for that. No one should be threatened with hate or death for expressing their views, even when they are hateful as some of Omar’s have been. But what demands our attention here is not the contents of her CAIR speech or even the Post cover with its depiction of the iconic photograph of the World Trade Center towers in flames, but rather a curious process by which a person who has made a name for herself largely on the strength of anti-Semitic incitement has been transformed into a victim.

If this feels slightly familiar, it should. When a group of Islamist terrorists murdered four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris,Barack Obama could not do better than this:

It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris….

Not a word about Islamist terrorists. Not a word to label the attack anti-Semitic. It was all about shooting “a bunch of folks.” The cowardly lion shrunk back into his den… and abrogated world leadership. Omar is not alone in her failure to condemn Islamists. In that Barack Obama showed her the way.

In time, and after the White House press secretary had been called to account by Jonathan Karl of ABC, the Obama administration did conclude that the attack had been motivated by anti-Semitism, but it was too little too late. The Obama White House shrunk in craven fear before the awesome power of radical Islam. If President Trump had failed to condemn an attack on Jews vigorously, the media would be overflowing with commentators calling him the second coming of Hitler. Double standard, anyone?

As for Rep. Omar, when she addressed CAIR she declared that the organization had been founded right after 9/11 to fight Islamophobia—because what could be more abnormal than that the reputation of Islam suffered because of the attacks. Of course, she was wrong. Tobin called her out:

In her speech to CAIR, Omar claimed that the group had been founded after 9/11 in order to defend Muslims against a backlash after the attacks. This is patently false. CAIR was founded in 1994 as a political front for the Holy Land Foundation, a group that raised funds for the Hamas terror group that was eventually shut down by the Treasury Department. Her support for CAIR is consistent with her backing for the anti-Semitic BDS movement.

But the broader point to be made here is the way the effort to shift the discussion about 9/11 from a seminal moment in the long struggle against Islamist terror to a mere excuse to discriminate against Muslims is now being used to downplay Omar’s anti-Semitism.