By Charles Lipson
“We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted last week to her 1.2 million followers. They responded with warm support.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was cooler. Although the speaker lives in San Francisco’s progressive echo chamber, she heads a national party and understands that most voters do not think our country is similar to the Taliban or Hamas.
They have noticed a few small differences. Nor do they see a moral equivalence between Israel, which tries to avoid civilian casualties, and terrorist organizations, which use human shields and bomb pizza parlors.
They wonder if a representative who thinks America is so evil should sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as Omar does.
Pelosi pressed Rep. Omar for a “clarification” and received a half-hearted one. That was good enough for the speaker, who stressed that she was not rebuking Omar, whom she called a “valued member of our caucus.”
Pelosi walked gingerly because she has only a tiny House majority and relies on several hard-left members and dozens of very progressive ones. She doesn’t want to lose them, but she doesn’t want to endanger her more centrist members, either.
Omar’s tweet put her between the dog and the hydrant. Jewish members issued an outraged statement denouncing the tweet, while Omar’s left-wing colleagues, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, criticized Pelosi’s tepid request for clarification.
Another member of the Squad, Rashida Tlaib, chose to portray Pelosi’s request as an attack on all Muslims — on all women of color in Congress: “Freedom of speech doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.”
Tlaib’s claim that she and Omar are being silenced was sent to 1.4 million Twitter followers. Apparently, Tlaib has been fully inoculated against irony. Pelosi responded by saying that she had never meant anything as a rebuke. Not in the slightest.
The problem here goes well beyond Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who was welcomed to American and now sits in Congress, seething with contempt for her adopted country, its tolerant values, and those of its allies.
The Democrats are stuck with a whole Squad of like-minded representatives and thousands, perhaps millions, of young supporters eager to promote these socialist attacks on America. That’s not just a problem for the Democrats.
That’s a problem for the country.
Ordinary Americans are finally waking up to the danger. They see the pernicious impact of these ideas, which routinely condemn the police, demand they be defunded, support lax prosecutors (“Justice Democrats”), and say our prisons should be dismantled because they are the products of systemic racism.
The predictable result is a sharp rise in violent urban crime. The consequences can be seen in the nightly riots in Portland, Ore., and the breakdown of civic order in cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York.
They can also see the Squad’s ideas, which are now mainstream in universities, dividing the country by race, religion, and income and pitting those angry factions against each other. In the name of “anti-racism,” they are proposing policies based squarely on racial discrimination.
Its most prominent spokesman is Ibram X. Kendi, who says the answer to previous racism is more racism. “The only remedy to past discrimination,” he says, “is present discrimination.
The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In a paroxysm of hyperbole, he wants severe punishments for even small acts he deems unacceptable. “What other people call racial microaggressions, I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”
It is bad enough for feckless institutions like Boston University to award tenure and lucre for such drivel and for every university to stock its administration with dozens of deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It is far worse for that ideology to suffuse compulsory K-12 education. Parents are shocked to see their children coming home from elementary and middle schools indoctrinated with these ideas about race, oppression, and the pervasive evils of American history.
Parents want to see their children taught, not indoctrinated. They don’t want to see first-graders told that they are “the oppressors” simply because they are white, or “the oppressed” simply because they are black or Hispanic.
We are already seeing a hard pushback against local school boards that adopt this curriculum.
“Another member of the Squad, Rashida Tlaib, chose to portray Pelosi’s request as an attack on all Muslims — on all women of color in Congress: “Freedom of speech doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.””
Hey, stupid. No one diminishes your freedom of speech. However, others are also free to disbelieve your lies and vote your anti-American, anti-Semitic asses out of Congress. Not that their districts would, but it could cost Democrats votes nationally. Hopefully.
“and say our prisons should be dismantled because they are the products of systemic racism.”
It was Trump, not any Democrats, that got prison reform passed. Yet these lying racists never supported Trump in the least. THAT’S how much they actually care about or believe in what they like to call “systemic racism”.
The left’s ideology is not based on facts or history. They are based simply on what they WANT, what they want to turn the United States into, a socialist regime where a governmental elite control the lives and thoughts of all citizens.
the Somalia, muslin terrorist comes from a country where free speech is non existent. the bar fly, traitor polosi supported her in her destructive narrative. if you want to become educated on atrocities that the muslin have inflicted on the world, read Raymond Ibrahim and Bill Weiner’s work. Muslins have killed over 300,000,000 since the 5th century. they were and continue into this date to be the biggest slave traders in history. the heinous race theory is a plagiarized copy of the marx’s manifesto. to the rapist, thief, embezzler, incestual marx, the key was to pit the proletariat against the bourgeois. Over time this failed. In the ’60’s in Ameica the issue of race had begun to emerge, continuing forward: now white vs black. the new name is diversity(the woke masses are clueless as to what the word means). white racism, reparation( again the woke is clueless) and pc are now are the political buzz words. Recall that during the 1st purge by Stalin and opening up his 2ed purge pc was used as the denominator for political cleansing. pc is that it promotes the lawless disregard for the First Amendment. islamophobia is the new political and muslin brotherhood word to ensure that muslin’s feelings are not hurt. the former gov of OH., john kasich was an active and supporting member of CAIR while gov.
Enjoy the poison laced Koo-Aid.
I’d sure love to hear which actions by Hamas Ilhan Omar thinks are “atrocities.”
Was it when they forced children to build their tunnels into Israel and Egypt? Hundreds of those children were gassed to death by Egypt in a bid to stop these tunnels that took stolen Egyptian good into Gaza for sale in their open markets. Countless children have died during tunnel constructions when flooding, roof collapses, and sides falling in occurred.
Was it when Hamas shot men “suspected of homosexuality” in the backs of both knees? Most all these men were really Fatah members, not homosexuals. Then Hamas prevented medical care for all who survived the immediate bleeding. This left thousands of men crippled and totally dependent on Hamas for the care of their families. (Told you they weren’t homosexuals.)
Maybe it included the time that Hamas destroyed hundreds of greenhouses left by the Israelis when they withdrew from Gaza.
Gaza today would have been a net EXPORTER of fruits and vegetables had the greenhouses been allowed to remain in business…..all employees and the new owners were Gazans.
But Hamas wanted tunnel openings close to their Israeli border, so they used these as exit points. They also looted the skins of the greenhouses for tunneling materials.
Maybe she was talking about the fact that Hamas bombs their own people, including women and children, so much that they coined a term for their deaths (translated: inadvertent martyrs.)
That’s got to be a top atrocity.