House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy urged Speaker Nancy Pelosi to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from her committee assignment Tuesday.
McCarthy, who referred to the Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota as “an individual that has not once, but on numerous occasions been antisemitic,” warned the opposition party of what to expect should Republicans retake the majority in 2022.
“I will promise you this,” McCarthy said. “If we are fortunate enough to have the majority, Omar would not be serving on Foreign Affairs — or anybody that has an antisemitic, anti-American view. That is not productive, and that is not right.”
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He previously called on the speaker “to act,” saying comments Omar made were “anti-Semitic & anti-American” and “abhorrent.”
Omar faced scrutiny after she tweeted an exchange she had with Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a congressional hearing and appeared to conflate the actions of the United States and Israel with those of the Taliban and Hamas.
Members of both parties expressed anger at the remark, while a dozen Jewish House Democrats came together to demand Omar “clarify her words” in a statement that suggested she had revealed “deep-seated prejudice.”
“I asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken about an ongoing International Criminal Court investigations,” Omar said in a statement. “To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding those ICC cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel. I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems.”
Democrats stood in allegiance with Omar accusing party leadership, which released a statement accusing her of “drawing false equivalencies” and of engaging in “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia,” as Missouri Rep. Cori Bush said.
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In a subsequent interview, Pelosi said the party leadership’s statement was not a “rebuke” and that it supported the clarifying statement.
“We did not rebuke her. We acknowledged that she made a clarification,” she said. “Congresswoman Omar is a valued member of our caucus. She asked her questions of the secretary of state. Nobody criticized those, about how people will be held accountable if we’re not going to the International Court of Justice. That was a very legitimate question. That was not of concern.”
Omar has faced accusations of antisemitism in the past.
