LONDON - Who remembers how, in 2018 and just days before the deadliest attack on Jewish people in US history, a prominent US politician tweeted: “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election!”? The tweet was widely – and correctly – understood as dangerously antisemitic, particularly heinous in a period of rising anti-Jewish hatred, writes Moustafa Bayoumi in the Guardian.
And whose tweet was this? If you thought the answer was Minnesota’s Democratic representative Ilhan Omar then, well, you’d be wrong. The author was none other than the House majority leader at the time, Republican Kevin McCarthy.
And who can forget when Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has tweeted that “Joe Biden is Hitler”, speculated that the wildfires in California were caused by a beam from “space solar generators” linked to “Rothschild, Inc.”, a clear wink to bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Incidentally, Greene, who has a long record of antisemitic and anti-Muslim statements, has been recently appointed, by the same Kevin McCarthy, now speaker of the House, to the homeland security committee.
Today’s Republican party has a serious antisemitism problem. The easy acceptance and amplification of all sorts of anti-Jewish hate that party leaders engage in emboldens all the worst bigots, raving racists, and far-right extremists across the globe, all the while threatening Jewish people here and everywhere.
The Trump-aligned wing of the Republican party has long had it in for Omar, and it’s not difficult to understand why. They’ll tell you that it’s a matter of what Omar says, but in reality it’s about what she does and who she is.
So it is more than a little rich that House Republicans voted on Thursday to remove Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee, where she’s served since 2019, because, they say, of her antisemitic views.
What really gets under the skin of the Republican party (and some Democrats) is that Omar won’t merely fall into line and toe today’s gentle political orthodoxies.
She has a point of view. She is often critical of the actions of both Israel and the United States (and Saudi Arabia, India, Russia, the Taliban and many more).