What a sorry debacle: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bid to confront the poison spewed by Rep. Ilhan Omar has turned to a de facto endorsement of hate speech by the leading lights of the Democratic Party.
With Omar cast as some sort of victim of those who called out her blatant, repeated trafficking in anti-Semitism.
Pelosi started off wrong: Facing calls to pull Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee after the Minnesota freshman’s third set of bigoted public remarks in just two months, the speaker instead went for a House resolution condemning anti-Semitism but not Omar herself.
Yet even that turned out to be too much for Pelosi’s members. Days of watering the message down turned the resolution into seven pages of meaningless disapproval of all kinds of nastiness against every imaginable group. That pablum passed 407-23 — with Omar herself happily voting “aye.”
Message: Democrats hate hate — but when it comes to a hater in their own midst, they’ll make excuses or even elevate the bigot.
Because Democratic leaders publicly bent over backward to excuse Omar’s continued use of classic anti-Jewish tropes. Pelosi claimed she “doesn’t believe” that Omar’s comments were “intended in any anti-Semitic way,” and that the resolution is “not about her.” No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer also insisted Omar isn’t anti-Semitic.
And, in the most bizarre and offensive defense, No. 3 Jim Clyburn claimed Omar’s own experience as a Somali refugee means bigotry is “more personal” to her than to the children of Holocaust survivors.
Legions of progressives now claim Omar is being silenced simply for criticizing Israel — in fact, that she’s the real victim. Which is nonsense: The complaints come when she denounces Jews and Zionists as disloyal, money-grubbing hypnotists who control US policy.
Yet 2020 contenders Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren and Kamala Harris all played along with the “silencing” lie.
This was a critical test of Democrats’ willingness to tolerate hatred of Jews in their own ranks, and they flunked — badly.