There’s a certain irony to the anti-Trump “resistance” adopting the same defenses employed by the president’s most shameless acolytes
It’s as if to say, “We’re different, though no better.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has thrown the Democratic Party into chaos with her incessant anti-Semitic remarks. Despite initial efforts to condemn the freshman congresswoman outright, several key Democratic lawmakers have instead moved toward downplaying her vitriol as the unlearned musings of a naive child.
In other words, they’ve embraced a tactic commonly used by the White House to excuse the president whenever he steps in it with his big mouth.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for example, said Thursday that Omar doesn’t “understand the full weight of her words” as a member of Congress, adding also that the Minnesota lawmaker is “not anti-Semitic.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said elsewhere that Omar “has demonstrated a willingness to listen+work [with] impacted communities.”
“I think the remarks she made have been very troubling,” Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., told CNN, before adding, “You hope that people get elected to office and they grow.”
Omar is “under intense scrutiny,” Progressive Caucus co-chairwoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., complained Wednesday. “And I think she’s learning … she’s willing to learn, she has apologized.”
Omar herself said on social media that she is “listening and learning,” adding elsewhere that she has “given an earful to others who traffic in bigotry, so I need to listen and learn.”
Perhaps we’re all losing sight of the fact that Omar is a 37-year-old woman who served formerly as a policy fellow at the University of Minnesota. She isn’t some child throwing a tantrum, or even a teenager having a difficult time adjusting. Playing her remarks off as if she doesn’t know any better — that she has much to learn and she doesn’t understand what she’s saying! — is as insulting and disingenuous as when Republicans do it to excuse their 72-year-old champion, whose lack of a decent filter between his mind and his mouth has caused similar headaches for his party.
Omar, who is not even remotely a child, has claimed that Israel has “hypnotized the world,” obscuring world leaders from seeing its “evil.” She has also suggested that wealthy Jews dictate congressional Republicans’ support for Israel. She has repeatedly accused members of Congress and American Jews of having divided loyalties.
The idea that she can “listen” and “learn” seems a bit – optimistic. If you’re a 37-year-old woman with a penchant for trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, you’ll probably someday be a 72-year-old woman saying the same things. The issue goes deeper than being merely uninformed, and excusing it as such requires an act of either willful dishonesty or severe naivety.
The wildest thing about this story isn’t even that an overt anti-Semite roams the halls of Congress, or that she has a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s that Democratic leadership still can’t find the nerve to say, “Please stop.”
Rather than denounce Omar’s remarks outright — as Republicans finally did when Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, came out in support of white nationalism — Democrats are tiptoeing around the matter this week with a proposed resolution to condemn all forms of hate, not just anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the Minnesota congresswoman is being given a pass by her own party, whose leadership claims she’s just a babe in the woods.
I’ll believe that Omar is growing into her elected office when her colleagues stop talking about her like she’s a toddler.
