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babylonsister

(171,036 posts) Tue Mar 12, 2019, 06:04 PM Mar 2019

Kevin McCarthy Is Lying About Ilhan Omar

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/kevin-mccarthy-is-lying-about-ilhan-omar.html

Kevin McCarthy Is Lying About Ilhan Omar
He says she made derogatory comments about Jews. He’s really covering for his party.
By William Saletan
March 12, 2019
2:55 PM

snip//

When McCarthy said on Friday that Omar had “questioned the ability of an American to have allegiance to America if they were Jewish,” he was responding to a reporter’s query. The reporter had asked whether Republicans were hypocritical to accuse Omar of invoking anti-Semitic tropes, given that “those very same tropes were advanced by Republicans in attacking people like George Soros.” One of the guilty Republicans is McCarthy, who tweeted just before the November midterms, “We cannot allow Soros, [Tom] Steyer, and [Michael] Bloomberg to BUY this election!” Another is Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who accused a Jewish congressman last week of jumping “to Tom $teyer’s conclusion.” If Omar’s tweet about “the Benjamins” was anti-Semitic, so were Jordan’s and McCarthy’s.

McCarthy doesn’t want to admit that. So he pretends that Omar, unlike Jordan and himself, has explicitly targeted Jews.

Republicans aren’t just hypocritical about alluding to Jewish money. They’re also hypocritical about questioning people’s allegiance based on ethnicity. In June 2016, Donald Trump, who was then a candidate for president, accused a Mexican-American judge of treating him unfairly because “We’re building a wall. He’s a Mexican.” A month later, McCarthy went to the Republican National Convention as a delegate for Trump. Alongside McCarthy in Trump’s California delegation was Rep. Duncan Hunter, who won re-election last fall by airing an ad that accused his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent of plotting to “infiltrate Congress.” Hunter also distributed a letter that suggested his opponent might “compromise U.S. operations” to protect his “family in the Middle East.” If McCarthy had any scruples about questioning the allegiance of Americans, he would have spoken up. He said nothing.

If you want to know what McCarthy really believes, don’t listen to what he says about Omar. Listen to what he says about himself. Last month on Fox News, he was asked to explain his tweet about Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg. McCarthy said he had only meant to point out that Bloomberg had spent a lot of money to help Democrats. “That had nothing to do about faith,” the congressman insisted.

Omar has a lot to learn. She’s an ideologue, and like her counterparts on the right, she can be self-righteous and mean. She seems obtuse to the fears of American Jews, who worry that the Democratic Party, like Britain’s Labour Party, could become a forum for anti-Semites. But the points she’s raising about Israeli policies, pro-Israel donors, and unconditional American support for Israel are legitimate. She has condemned bigotry, and she has never disparaged Jews. Yes, she should have spoken more carefully. But if she deserves censure, so do her Republican colleagues.