What Ilhan Omar’s latest scandal reveals about Democrats

Published June 15, 2021 6:00pm ET



It’s striking how rapidly things have changed since January 2019.

Back then, congressional Democrats still felt empowered to stigmatize leftist extremism, including open antisemitism. That month saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, so repulsed by the Women’s March leadership’s overt antisemitism that she penned an op-ed about why she wouldn’t march with them (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did). Rep. Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat, publicly called out antisemitism from then-new Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, in February 2019 and urged the House of Representatives to “singularly condemn antisemitism” in March. In August 2019, Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, criticized Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, by name for sharing a political cartoon by Carlos Latuff, the runner-up in Iran’s 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Contest.

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