The apology this time

There is a reason that Ilhan Omar has resorted to anti-Semitic tropes in the the course of her brief public career so far. Omar is a proponent of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. She is, to put it bluntly, an Islamist hater of Israel. As I argued last year in “A question for Democrats,” Omar’s hatred of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic.

New York Times columnist Bari Weiss devoted a column to Omar’s use of one such trope in “Ilhan Omar and the Myth of Jewish Hypnosis.” Omar apologized in a threaded tweet beginning here. She claimed ignorance as an excuse.

Weiss’s column treated Omar’s tweet about Israel’s “evil doings of Israel” as a one-off. It wasn’t and isn’t.

Yesterday Omar resorted to another such trope. This time around, Jews are said to be buying support for Israel. Asked who was paying off American politicians, she responded: “AIPAC!” AIPAC doesn’t fund political campaigns, but you get the point. Jews! America! Israel! Money! PAC!

Today Omar became an inconvenience to the Democratic Party establishment. Thus this utterly vacuous apology (warning: reading may kill brain cells):

What we have here is not a slip of the tongue or the tweet. Omar believes that the Jewish state is illegitimate, as she explained most recently in the video I posted in “ILhan Omar: Why I hate Israel, cont’d.” Her Twitter effusions follow from long-held beliefs. When you are an anti-Semite, you are likely to resort to anti-Semitic tropes.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses