Date: 2025-01-23 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016389
US Politics
I support Ilhan Omar ... and am appalled at the hypocricy (or ignorance) of those that don't.
I'm Jewish. I Support Ilhan Omar. Here's Why. ... I’m a moderately observant reform Jew. But there’s nothing moderate about this world.
Peter Burgess
nazis2.jpg ... Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, VA, holding Nazi, Confederate, and Gadsden 'Don't Tread on Me' flags. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Anthony Crider, cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC) [CC BY 2.0])
I’m a moderately observant reform Jew. But there’s nothing moderate about this world.
That’s why as a boy, I followed up The Diary of Anne Frank and Isaac Bashevis Singer by reading William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power in college—just to make sure I knew my enemy. They still get around.
I’m not about to say all Trump supporters are Nazis or even bigots; but like many of us here, I see lots of very highly connected, overt racists in the Trump government, and very dangerous anti-Semites—and even Nazis—just one degree away.
How many of Trump’s advisers or transition team members work or have worked with “punchable Nazi” Richard Sp*ncer or, even more unbelievably, the Daily St*rmer’s Andr*w Angl*n?
Who put an approximation of the neo-Nazi 14 words into an official DHS release?
How are highly organized white supremacists, only just now exposed, actively running interference for Iowa US Representative Steve King?
The idea that our Democratic leadership should be doing relatively little to call out the above, but are attacking our own Ilhan Omar for criticizing not Israel—not Jews—but Trump/Netanyahu proxy AIPAC, specifically for the influence AIPAC openly brags about… that’s nuts.
When Omar spoke of “the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” she was speaking specifically of the AIPAC-influenced Combatting BDS Act, a recent bill that would make individual Americans’ boycott of Israel punishable with the loss of US government contracts (!).
If that’s not an “effort to push people into allegiance,” what is it?
You’ll note, from that last link, that the progressive Israeli PAC, J Street, is against the Combatting BDS Act. I stand with J Street. Am I anti-Israel now?
AIPAC would say so. AIPAC likes to say it represents all Israel. But no; I remember the 1990s, when liberal Rabin and Peres were in power. AIPAC stood with their rightwing opposition.
As a Jew, I’m scared by the Nazis and by prominent Republicans’ connections to them—not by Ilhan Omar, who at the end of the day is likely to expose such connections and thus help protect me, point blank. And all of us.
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