Regardless of what you think about Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN), it’s time to stand with her against the spate of Islamophobic attacks emanating from President Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their allies in the conservative press. The attacks on her have been brutal, relentless, and blatantly bigoted — qualitatively different and far worse than any of Omar’s controversial comments in the past about Israel and its supporters in America.
I’ve been fairly critical of those comments, having written that she has repeatedly used language that plays into anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish money and dual loyalty, and that she needs to be far more careful in the way she speaks at a time of rising anti-Semitism in America. I’ve argued that the defenses of her language on the left, even from some Jewish leftists, bear a worrying similarity to the rationalizations used to hide the cancerous growth of anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn.
But perhaps the simplest moral axiom of modern politics should be this: If we are concerned about bigotry, we should be concerned about it regardless of which group is targeted or affected or which side our political allies are on. By that standard, Omar’s critics are particularly obligated to stand with her now.
This weekend, for example, President Trump tweeted a video that contrasted an out-of-context line from an Omar speech about Islamophobia with footage from 9/11 — asserting that Omar was indifferent to the tragedy.
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