When Ilhan Omar criticizes a Jewish journalist should we call it ‘incitement’?

Not my rule, folks!

Following a press conference in which she deemed Israel not “an ally,” Ilhan Omar took to Twitter to lambast her critics. The congresswoman, who found herself barred from entering Israel after her publicly released itinerary demonstrated she and Rashida Tlaib would violate Israeli law and hobnob with boycotters rather than meet with members of the Knesset, decided to respond to the latest charges of anti-Semitism by retweeting an attack by an anti-Semitic website against a progressive Jewish journalist.

In a piece at Mondoweiss (aptly deemed by a Washington Post writer to be a “hate site”), Jonathan Ofir attacked Batya Ungar-Sargon, the liberal opinion editor of The Forward. Ungar-Sargon’s crime was criticizing Omar and Tlaib’s sharing of a cartoon by Carlos Latuff, who is an anti-Semite famous for winning in the Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition. Mondoweiss objected to the charge that the cartoon both came from an anti-Semitic source and promulgates the trope that Jews control foreign policy, writing:

And this article was favorably shared by a sitting member of the United States Congress. One who is supposedly defending herself from allegations of anti-Semitism.

By Omar’s own absurd rules of victimhood, signal boosting or even merely criticizing her rhetoric constitutes an incitement of violence.

Omar’s attack on Ungar-Sargon is reprehensible. Omar wasn’t explaining her own actions or defending herself from Ungar-Sargon’s charge. Instead she used her Twitter account with over a million followers to attack a Jewish journalist’s motivations by pushing an article from a hate site.