Behold the face of the Democratic Party: minority, young, and racist. This is the fruit of identity politics. Be it Omar, who is on the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) who signaled the need to obliterate Israel on her first day in office, or the leader of the pack, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), a proud supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, the “new faces” of the DNC constitute a united front in their hatred for our Semitic brethren.

And no matter what Pelosi says, Omar will not be reined in.

Let me add that I think it is no accident that these faces are for the most part young, minority, female, and attractive. No, I am not saying those characteristics are necessary in order to be anti-Semitic and/or leftist, because that’s not the least bit true. What I am saying, or trying to say, is that those characteristics make the message more palatable, the person more electable, and facilitate the speaker’s wrapping herself in the cloak of sainted victimhood protectiveness.

More:

To call Stephen Miller a “white nationalist” [which Omar did] is more than simply obnoxious, given that white nationalism is an ideology which targets those of color generally, and Jews specifically.

Now, Jews are not people of color, unless they are Ethiopian Jews or other Jews who actually are also people of color. But white nationalists are certainly anti-Semites, and it is just another example of the knife-twisting in which Omar likes to indulge (with a pretty smile) to call Stephen Miller a white nationalist.

But Omar keeps going:

…[A]a disturbing video surfaced on social media in which the congresswoman casually described the mass murder of 2,977 people by jihadists on September 11, 2001 as an event where “some people did something.” This was before she used 9/11 as the justification for the establishment of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-front founded in 1994. A federal court in 2008 designated CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist-financing trial in American history. The FBI had to sever all ties with the group exactly because of its ties to the Holy Land Foundation and its leaders who were convicted in that trial for sending $12.4 million to Hamas from the United States.

Gorka’s last paragraph is a clarion call:

Freedom of speech is a right of all Americans. But so is our choice to denounce, call out, and recall racists. Ilhan Omar is the most flagrantly racist figure in politics today. Every day her vile beliefs and words are tolerated by Nancy Pelosi and her fellow partisans is a day that proves just how morally bankrupt and devoid of any legitimacy the Democrats have become.

Omar has a huge number of fans, as you can see if you go to this YouTube video of her appearance on Steven Colbert’s show and read the comments there.

In all the brouhaha from the right about Omar’s describing 9/11 as “some people did something”—a neutral, non-judgmental refusal to characterize the attack in any pejorative way—it’s often been lost that the main thrust of her mentioning it at all was to talk about how Muslims faced a backlash as a result. So not only did she fail to name the perpetrators as radical Muslims, or to say it was a heinous terrorist attack, but she focused on Muslims as the ultimate victims. And, as Jonathan S. Tobin points out, for the most part such a backlash failed to occur [emphasis mine]:

…[T]hose who have rallied to [Omar’s] defense have resurrected the myth of a post-9/11 backlash against Muslims. That has shifted the narrative of that trauma from one of an Islamist terror war against the West into one that focused on the victimization of Muslims. But the ability of Omar and her defenders to use it to effectively deflect charges of anti-Semitism and to essentially legitimize her as a public figure is something that out to alarm everyone, no matter what your politics or religious beliefs…

Omar refused to back down [for her earlier anti-Semitic remarks for which Congress was initially set to criticize her] and found herself the object of much public sympathy for what supporters claimed was an attempt to single her out solely because she was black, Muslim and an immigrant. Omar emerged triumphant from that fiasco. If there was any doubt about that, it was removed by the way Democrats instinctively moved to protect her from criticisms of her 9/11 remarks, and instead condemned the Post and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) as racists for calling her out.

In one sense, the kerfuffle is a typical inside-the-Beltway absurdity, with AOC asking Crenshaw—a decorated former Navy SEAL who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan—what he has ever done to fight terrorism. But this is more than just the usual political tit-for-tat on Twitter.

In her speech to CAIR, Omar claimed that the group had been founded after 9/11 in order to defend Muslims against a backlash after the attacks. This is patently false. CAIR was founded in 1994 as a political front for the Holy Land Foundation, a group that raised funds for the Hamas terror group that was eventually shut down by the Treasury Department. Her support for CAIR is consistent with her backing for the anti-Semitic BDS movement.

But the broader point to be made here is the way the effort to shift the discussion about 9/11 from a seminal moment in the long struggle against Islamist terror to a mere excuse to discriminate against Muslims is now being used to downplay Omar’s anti-Semitism.

The debate about this mythical backlash has been going on for a decade, especially during the controversy over an abortive attempt to build an Islamic center within the shadow of the fallen World Trade Center towers. At that time, I wrote in Commentary magazine about the way false fears were being used to make Muslims appear to be the true victims of the slaughter. The mainstream media had accepted as truth the claims that Muslims had been the subjects of a wave of discrimination after 9/11, even though there was no objective proof to back up that assertion.

(Please see NOTE below for some further discussion of that issue.]

As Omar herself indicates here, she has an enormous intersectionality advantage due to her membership in several victimhood groups:

If you haven’t watched Omar before, please note her great charm. It’s an illustration of the Shakespeare quote: “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

[NOTE: On the issue of whether there really was a widespread backlash to 9/11, I want to point out that there were indeed a couple of extremely serious incidents post-9/11 in which Muslims were the intended victims, but these were few and far-between (please see this and this). I say “intended victims,” because, in a strange irony, two of the three people killed in these two crimes were a Hindu and a Sikh. The third was a Pakistani Muslim, and one other person wounded and left partially blind in one eye was a Muslim from Bangladesh named Rais Bhuiyan, who opposed his would-be murderer Stroman’s death penalty:

A year after the killings, [the murderer] Stroman expressed no remorse for his crimes. He wrote on his blog that what he did was not a crime of hate but an act of passion and patriotism. Up until his date of execution, Bhuiyan protested Stroman’s death sentence, believing he did not deserve to be executed. Bhuiyan sued and tried to stop the execution but was unsuccessful. Bhuiyan argued that his Muslim beliefs told him to forgive Stroman and that killing him was not the solution. The courts denied his requests.

In his later years of imprisonment, Stroman expressed remorse for his crimes. After learning that a surviving victim of his shooting spree was appealing to save his life, Stroman changed his views, and described Bhuiyan as “an inspiring soul”. His racist views were reportedly altered. He eventually spoke to Bhuiyan and thanked him for his compassion.

Stroman was executed in 2011.]

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