Ilhan Omar and The Progressives

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The New York Times opinion piece by Bret Stephens headline proclaimed, “Ilhan Omar Knows Exactly What She Is Doing”.

Because Bret Stephens got so much wrong he inspired this fact-filled opinion piece by a ‘self-described progressive’.

By Eileen Fleming

Bret Stephens is a former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post and an Opinion columnist at The New York Times since 2017.

On Thursday Bret Stephens opined:

Like many self-described progressives, Omar does not like Israel. That’s a shame, not least because Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion…

Omar, however, isn’t just a critic of Israel… her objections to the Jewish state go well beyond what’s strictly necessary.

“Israel has hypnotized the world,” she tweeted in 2012. “May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Last month, she wrote that U.S. support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby.” A few weeks after that, she told an audience in D.C. that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

Timeline of the confiscation of Palestinian lands by Israel since 1947 and the partition by the United Nations. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

This progressive American has been to both sides of Israel’s Wall in Palestine eight times since 2005 responds by citing a few facts:

President George Washington who warned US in his Farewell Address:

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.

On 28 May 1993, Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Ariel Sharon who admitted:

The terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.

American Israeli Professor of Anthropology Jeff Halper wrote:

An ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises when one particular group-the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa, the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran, the Malay in Malaysia and, if they had their way, the white Christian fundamentalists in the US-seize control of the government and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society. Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one’s ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a county actually ‘belongs.'”- An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, Page 74

Bret Stephens concluded:

House Democrats are now wrangling over the text of a resolution that was initially intended as a condemnation of anti-Semitism, with Omar as its implicit target. At this writing it is mired in predictable controversy, as members of the party’s progressive wing and black caucus rally to Omar’s side in the first open challenge to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. In the Senate, the presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders andWarren have weighed in with statements that painted Omar as a victim of Islamophobia — which she is — without mentioning that she’s also a purveyor of anti-Semitic bigotry — which she surely is as well.

It says something about the progressive movement today that it has no trouble denouncing Republican racism, real and alleged, every day of the week but has so much trouble calling out naked anti-Semite in its own ranks. This is how progressivism becomes Corbynism. It’s how the left finds its own path toward legitimizing hate. It’s how self-declared anti-fascists develop their own forms of fascism.

If Pelosi can’t muster a powerful and unequivocal resolution condemning anti-Semitism, then Omar will have secured her political future and won a critical battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. At that point, the days when American Jews can live comfortably within the Democratic fold will be numbered.

This progressive American whose maternal grandfather was a German Jew concludes:

TRUE Antisemitism is a prejudice against or hostility towards the Jewish people and it is rooted in fear that breed’s hatred and it must be denounced and confronted as I have recently written HERE

As a friend to Israel I cite Jonathan Ben Artzi, a nephew of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and he went to prison for 18 months for refusing to serve in the IDF pleaded, “Sometimes it takes a good friend to tell you when enough is enough. As they did with South Africa two decades ago, concerned citizens across the US can make a difference by encouraging Washington to get the message to Israel that this cannot continue. If Americans truly are our friends, they should shake us up and take away the keys, because right now we are driving drunk, and without this wake-up call, we will soon find ourselves in the ditch of an undemocratic, doomed state.”

I remind all Americans that it was President Harry Truman who crossed out the word “Jewish state” on the draft of the Establishment of Israel [that was cabled him] and substituted “State of Israel”, which he affirmed was contingent upon Israel upholding the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which begins:

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood… Read More HERE