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. 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.
Then there’s former president Donald Trump, who dines with Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and antisemites like Ye. In stereotypically anti-Jewish moves, Trump has repeatedly called the loyalty of Jewish Americans into question. Just this past October, he wrote that “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!”
In case it’s not obvious, let me state it plainly. 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.
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. Suddenly the Republican party has found God, so to speak, on this issue? Hardly. In fact, any reasonable observer would see that the Republicans have set out to punish Omar for an alleged set of misdeeds which they themselves frequently indulge in. The fiasco would merit a hearty eye-roll if it didn’t cheapen the very real threat that antisemitism is today.
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.
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). As the political analyst Peter Beinart argues, she uses her position on the foreign affairs committee to ask tough questions to everyone. But instead of seeing her willingness to challenge convention as a right of democracy, her detractors see her principled questions and positions as an anti-American threat. This is unsurprising, considering the banal state of our overly conformist foreign policy politics. “Her worldview of Israel is so diametrically opposed to the committee’s,” the Texas Republican Michael McCaul told the AP. “I don’t mind having differences of opinion, but this goes beyond that.” Difference of opinion is great, McCaul seems to be saying, just as long as it’s not real.
Then there’s the political angle. In the last session of Congress and in a break from tradition (which usually leaves party discipline to each party), Democrats stripped Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar of their committee assignments after the two fomented violence against specific Democratic lawmakers. Now, the Republicans want their turn. Representative James McGovern, the top Democrat on the House rules committee, characterized the actions against Omar this way: “This is about vengeance. This is about spite. This is about politics.”
But to think that only cynical politics or lack of principle is motivating these specific attacks on Omar is to miss the bigger picture. The fact is that almost no one (except perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) endures the same avalanche of hatred and abuse that Omar suffers daily. Trump called her his “worst nightmare” and led a campaign rally in 2019 where the crowd chanted “Send her back!” in reference to Omar, who came to this country as a child refugee from Somalia. Today, she is routinely assigned a security detail because of multiple credible threats on her life. Because she represents the promise of a multicultural, multifaith, multiracial and multiethnic America, her presence alone is a threat to those who think their version of the United States, along with their traditional privileges, is evaporating in front of their eyes.
The Republican party continues to vilify Ilhan Omar because they believe they can. And they believe they can because she’s everything their constituents are afraid of. Omar is outspoken, principled, Black, a refugee, African, female and a hijab-wearing Muslim. But what they’re really showing us is something far more important. They’re showing us how antisemitism and Islamophobia travel on the same road, and how that road is a dead-end highway to nowhere.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
