A Permanent Stain on Their Party

From the April Commentary,  Licensed to Ilhan by John Podhoretz:

If what Ilhan Omar says she believes about the Jews were true, she would be sitting in a Twin Cities living room in deserved obscurity, left to rot there by the very conspiracy she claims is so powerful. If the Jews were indeed “hypnotizing the world,” as Omar claimed in 2012, then Israel wouldn’t be the subject of more hostile United Nations resolutions than every other nation on earth combined. And if moneyed American Jews were so powerful that they could successfully suppress views hostile to Israel, she wouldn’t ever have gotten to Washington in the first place.

The fact that Omar is in Congress at all is testimony to the monstrous falsity of her despicable slanders. But she did not get there alone. This was made evident by the shockingly aggressive posture within the Democratic Party against censuring Omar for spreading and defending hostile views about a minority group. For that is what Jews are, of course. We make up less than 2 percent of the population of the United States. We are, it would seem, the only minority group in America that it is permissible to criticize as a group—at least as far as the progressives who are coming to dominate the Democratic Party are concerned.

Ilhan Omar’s views, and the startling and depressing obeisance they have been granted by the leaders of her party in the House and Senate, spring from these parasitic weeds that are attaching themselves to the Democratic Party root. They are a sign of the implicit progressive rejection of the very melting-pot ideals that have allowed American Jews to be both Americans and Jews. In slandering us, Omar and her ilk slander America.

from the same issue, The Anti-Semitism Apologists by Christine Rosen:

In the case of Representative Ilhan Omar, the House Democratic freshman from Minnesota whose anti-Semitic remarks put Democratic leaders on the defensive just as they regained their majority, the narrative arc appears unlikely to bend toward anything remotely like justice. On the contrary, Omar has emerged from repeated controversies unrepentant and more powerful than before (and retaining her seat on the House Foreign Affairs committee). She and her progressive Democratic supporters did this by changing the narrative about the Democratic party and anti-Semitism—and not for the better. 

Democratic presidential candidates for 2020, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, actually defended Omar. When asked during a CNN Town Hall at the South by Southwest conference if she believed Omar’s statements were anti-Semitic, Representative Tulsi Gabbard (another presidential aspirant) hedged: “Well, let’s look at the bigger issue here . . . as members of Congress and people in this country making sure we can have open dialogue about our foreign policy.” When pressed again about whether or not Omar’s specific statements were anti-Semitic, Gabbard doubled down: “There were people who expressed their offense at these statements. I think what Congresswoman Omar was trying to get at was a deeper issue related to our foreign policy. . . . We’ve got to be able to have that openness to be able to have that conversation.” 

If this is the new standard, then every racist thing Donald Trump has ever said about immigrants is immune to criticism because he can claim he was just encouraging “openness” and “conversation.” As Dean Phillips, a fellow Democratic freshman (and moderate) from a nearby Minnesota district lamented to Politico, “suddenly an entire party is being branded by the perspectives of two of its members [Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] who represent 1 percent of the caucus.”

That’s how narratives work. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party—including anti-Semitic Omar and her defenders—has succeeded in reverse-mentoring their elders. And unless Nancy Pelosi regains her senses and quietly identifies and supports a primary challenger for Omar in 2020, the Democrats risk making the “different experience in the use of words” of anti-Semites like Omar a permanent stain on their party.