Anti-Semites Unite!

The New York Times has been having trouble with anti-Semitism lately…

…so it is only natural that they offered Ilhan (“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!”) Omar space for an op-ed in today’s paper. Omar’s target, of course, is President Trump: “It Is Not Enough to Condemn Trump’s Racism.”

Omar’s op-ed is the usual catalog of horrors: President Trump, who in fact has gone a considerable distance toward restoring the rule of law in his two and a half years in office, is an incipient fascist dictator. As evidenced by…what, exactly?

Throughout history, demagogues have used state power to target minority communities and political enemies, often culminating in state violence. Today, we face that threat in our own country, where the president of the United States is using the influence of our highest office to mount racist attacks on communities across the land.

Really? How?

In recent weeks, he has lashed out unprompted against four freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and me, from Minnesota.

So criticizing her constitutes “racist attacks on communities across the land.” Ms. Omar has a rather grandiose view of herself. More:

Last week, as President Trump watched the crowd at one of his rallies chant “Send her back,” aimed at me and my family, I was reminded of times when such fearmongering was allowed to flourish. …

The president’s rally will be a defining moment in American history.

Oh, please. Once again, we see Ilhan’s monomaniacal ego in action.

Omar recites a litany of lies about President Trump:

Today, that basic promise is under threat. Our democratic institutions have been weaponized.

She would have a point if she were referring to the Obama administration’s weaponization of the FBI and CIA against candidate and President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration has sought to restrict people from exercising their voting rights.

This is simply a lie. The administration has done no such thing.

It has sought to undermine the basic checks and balances of our Constitution by not respecting subpoenas from Congress.

Not, of course, to the same degree as the Obama administration.

The chants of “Jews will not replace us,” shouted at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017 by white supremacists, whom this president tacitly accepted…

An outrageous and utterly absurd smear against a man whose daughter converted to Judaism.

It goes on and on, but the leftist catechism is boring. Omar’s unique contribution is her comparison of the U.S. to Somalia, the warlord-ruled, lawless country that her family fled for a refugee camp in Kenya before American taxpayers brought her to the U.S. and supported her here.

I also couldn’t help but remember the horrors of civil war in Somalia that my family and I escaped, the America we expected to find and the one we actually experienced.
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In Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, I saw grade-school children as young as me holding assault rifles in the streets. I spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, where there was no formal schooling or even running water.

As Omar says, she escaped from that hellhole to the United States. But she was disappointed at what she found:

The America we arrived in was different from the one my grandfather had hoped to find. The land of opportunity he imagined was in fact full of challenges. People identified me in ways that were foreign to me: immigrant, black. I learned that these identities carried stigmas, and I experienced prejudice as a visibly Muslim woman.

Yes, she was so viciously discriminated against that she was elected to the Minnesota legislature at age 34, and to the House of Representatives a mere two years later. Since then she has been lionized, feted, featured on magazine covers and treated as an oracle by the American establishment, as manifested most recently by the vast tract of real estate the Times gave her today for a long–almost endless, really–op-ed. How discriminated against can you get?

Ilhan Omar and the New York Times are peas in a pod. They deserve one another.

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