It also revealed the Democrats' unwillingness to challenge Islamophobia, and even a willingness to play on it. Ilhan Omar is a black Congresswoman who is Muslim, relatively young (37), progressive on most issues, and an immigrant from Somalia. By bashing her, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer could give a nod to conservative white voters who would never vote for a Democrat in 1000 years that Democrats, too, can be anti-Mulsim, anti-black, anti-immigrant, and against uppity young women - all in one package!
Is that a stretch? I don't think so. There are various kinds of people promoting anti-Semitism. White Christian Congressman Gym Jordan, for instance. (Zack Ford, Ilhan Omar’s critics have little to say about Jim Jordan’s anti-Semitic tweet Think Progress 03/04/2019) But the biggest group by far is made up of fundamentalist Christians. And this isn't a recent recognition. Michael Lind did a great review essay 24 years ago on Pat Robertson's book The New World Order (1991) that details how Robertson presents an anti-Semitic vision of history, Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory New York Review of Books 02/02/1995. Robertson did a follow-up book along the same lines, The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense (1993). Lind noted in 1995 that Robertson "is the founder and leader of the most powerful grass-roots movement in American politics today", meaning the Christian Coalition, then the most prominent Christian Right group.
Robertson is still around, though his personal influence is not so dominant among the Christian Right as it was in 1995. But anti-Semitic theology is just as present if not more so today as it was 24 years ago. Much of it centers around "End Times" theology, the most prominent versions of which look forward with happy anticipation to the day that all the Jews in the world will be "gathered" into Greater Israel where most of them will be slaughtered in a huge war. The remaining few Jews will then convert to Christianity and the Second Coming of Christ can occur. There are variations on the details. One of the fundamentalists in the following video has the unslaughtered Jewish remnant converting when Jesus returns to Earth. Why Evangelical Christians Love Israel Vice News 05/15/2018 (published on YouTube):
The establishment Democrats are willing to challenge Christian fundamentalist political positions. But they are not willing to directly challenge this kind of incredibly influential anti-Semitism directly. Because Democrats have been tiptoing around Christian fundamentalists since 1978. So when we see things like the Trump-Pence Administration flaunting with their friendship with John Hagee, leader of the group Christians United For Israel (CUFI), a large and prominent fundamentalist group that promotes an anti-Semitic End Times ideology (Kelsey Bradshaw, S.A. pastor John Hagee meets with President Trump to discuss international affairs San Antonio Express 04/05/2017), the Democrats don't rush to denounce them in public, much less try to pass censure resolutions against them.
But a black, immigrant Muslim Congresswoman criticizing the influence of the Israel lobby in promoting US support for the rightwing Netanyahu government, that's something Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer were willing to jump on right away, fecklessly dancing to the Republicans' tune, as they so often do.
Part of what establishment Democrats have done to appear at least critical-minded toward Republican and far-right Islamophobia is to urge that the national, state, and local governments work with members of the American Muslim community to combat extremism. One of the biggest American and European criticisms of Muslim extremism and even Islam generally is their hostility to women's rights. Far-right parties in Europe who are conservative or even hostile toward protecting women's rights, like the far-right Austrian FPÖ and their partners in the "turquoise" faction of the Austrian Christian Democratic (ÖVP) party, use women's rights as one of the main slogans for their Islamophobia and general hostility to Muslims. And as a cover for their own anti-women's-rights stances.
Congresswoman Omar would seem to be a good personal example and advocate for a women's-rights-friendly version of Islam, as one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. This press release from her office in January is an example, Rep. Ilhan Omar Introduces First Bill Providing Childcare for Workers Affected by the Shutdown 01/24/2019:
Rep. Ilhan Omar (DFL-MN), along with over thirty members of the House Democratic Caucus, introduced the Federal Worker Childcare Protection Act of 2019 today—which ensures that federal employees affected by the shutdown are eligible for reimbursement of their childcare expenses. ... There are about 100 childcare facilities in federal buildings across the country providing care to 7,500 children a day, two thirds of whom are children of federal employees. As long as those daycares are closed, many parents are paying double – fees to their interim provider, on top of fees to the closed daycare to maintain their child’s place once the government reopens.But the Democratic establishment isn't interested in Omar as a model of a small-d democratic and successful Muslim woman. (Much less a large-d Democratic one!) They are more interested in discrediting her as a progressive and a black Muslim immigrant woman. Even at the cost of stepping on the publicity for their own HR1 bill to secure elections and fight corruption. All while tip-toing around Republican white supremacy and anti-Semitism.
“What this bill does is simple: it makes sure that the people who are suffering because of the President’s manufactured crisis are at the very least able to cover their childcare expenses,” Rep. Omar said. “This bill is personal for me. I am a working parent with three beautiful children and I know firsthand the costs associated with child care.”
Even Chuck Todd was willing to (mildly!) press Congresswoman Liz Cheney on Republican anti-Semitism this past Sunday. (Ben Kamisar, Rep. Liz Cheney blasts House Democrats for 'enabling' anti-Semitic comments Meet the Press 03/10/2019)
Phyllis Bennis was present at the event that the Democratic establishment used to bash Congresswomen Omar, and she describes it in The Democratic Party Attacks on Ilhan Omar Are a Travesty The Nation 03/05/2019:
The most recent attacks on Representative Omar are based on her answer to a broad question about anti-Semitism during a recent town hall meeting at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC. I was there, sitting just a few feet from Omar, asking a question during the Q&A. She never said that Jews have dual loyalty. She never expressed “prejudicial attitudes” or supported “discriminatory acts” against Jews or anyone else. And yet that is the language being proposed for a Democratic Party–sponsored resolution aimed at undermining Omar’s credibility, and likely that of Rashida Tlaib, the other Muslim woman just elected to Congress. Like Omar, Tlaib, who is Palestinian, stands forthrightly in support of Palestinian rights, against the power of the pro-Israel lobby and other lobbies that use money to influence Congress to support guns, environmental destruction, and Israeli violations of human rights—and she stands against racism and anti-Semitism.The white Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites are also among the whites most likely to support intense white supremacist ideas and practices. And Donald Trump. The prominent "Ex-Eveangelical" writer Chris Stroop (also a scholar of Russia) writes about the centrality of the Christian Right to the radicalization of the Republican Party and to Trump's grassroots supprt (#ChristianAltFacts, or, how the Christian Right Broke America 02/24/2017)
These members of Congress understand that real anti-Semitism in the United States has been rooted in white supremacy since the Ku Klux Klan reemerged in 1915 and added Jews to the African Americans who had long been their primary target. That’s the real anti-Semitism we’re seeing — the violence of the Charlottesville march by Nazis and the Klan, the Pittsburgh synagogue murders, all of it rooted in white supremacy. Criticism of Israel, and of its human-rights and international-law violations and its lobbies, is simply not anti-Semitism. [my emphasis]
Fundamentalists–including the vast majority of white Evangelicals in the US–are inherently authoritarian. Authoritarianism, for its part, is a form of abuse on a social scale that depends on gaslighting, hence post-truth politics and “alternative facts.” And ... it is the Christian Right’s #AltFacts, post-truth ethos that has radicalized and overtaken the Republican Party. Having broken one of our two major parties, the Christian Right broke America. It’s been a long time coming, but here we are–and since those of ex-Evangelicals who grew up indoctrinated and mobilized to fight the culture wars have been well aware of the plan, many of us are particularly angered and even retraumatized by the white Evangelical backlash that, with 81% of the white Evangelical vote, has brought us the disastrous Trump presidency. [my emphasis]Branko Marcetic at Jacobin Magazine argues that the Ilhan Omar flap shows that, Actually, the Democrats Don’t Care About Identity 03.09.2019:
The controversies around Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar are instructive. As numerous writers, a number of them themselves Jewish, have explained at length, there was nothing antisemitic or even particularly controversial about what Omar has said about the pro-Israel lobby in DC, which, contrary to what some pundits might tell you, is not synonymous with the Jewish community. Nonetheless, she received a torrent of attacks, much of it from the pro-Israel Right, casting her comments as antisemitic.And, of course, it remains the case that Israelis themselves seem to be far more willing to criticize Israel's most questionable policies than even Democratic Members of Congress in the US:
Given the prevailing rhetoric over the last few years, one would have expected the Democratic party and its boosters to close ranks around Omar. After all, they’ve spent the Trump administration celebrating women’s defiant voices in politics, urging others to listen and believe women, and making the defense of immigrants a key plank of the party, while valorizing black women and their pivotal electoral role. And here they were faced with a barrage of dishonest attacks on not just an outspoken woman, but an outspoken black, Muslim, refugee woman, whose voice her political opponents were trying to silence at the same time as they lobbed racist attacks at her and she faced death threats.
Instead of adhering to their self-declared principles, the party and its prominent loyalists instead quickly joined the right-wing pile-on against Omar, to the point of putting offensive, racist words in her mouth that she never actually said. In some cases, the same people who jumped to criticize her and silence her voice had previously expressed platitudes about women and girls persevering against adversity, and black women being the party’s backbone. [my emphasis in bold; internal links omitted]
“When the hell will someone in this government let the Israeli public know that this is a country for all its citizens and that every person is born equal. And also, that the Arabs are human beings,” @GalGadot https://t.co/gt5Cc0dK4v— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) March 11, 2019
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