President Donald Trump slammed Democrats as an “anti-Israel party” after the latest comments by radical Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in which she questioned why lawmakers support the Middle Eastern country.
“Democrats have become an anti-Israel party, they’ve become an anti-Jewish party,” Trump told reporters on March 8.
“That’s too bad.”
Omar is a Muslim.
The Somalia-born representative sparked a fresh uproar after saying: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Omar also took to Twitter in February to insinuate that the Jewish group AIPAC was behind a scheme to exchange funding for politicians in return for support of Israel. After fierce criticism, she apologized but also suggested she was being criticized for speaking her mind.
Trying to explain why the resolution was amended from its original version that only condemned anti-Semitism, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on March 7 that a new version of the resolution was expanded to “speak out against anti-Semitism, anti-Islamophobia, anti-white supremacy and all the forms that it takes.” The speaker added that it is up to Omar to “explain” her latest remarks.
Omar was not named in the resolution.
“I feel confident that her words were not based on any anti-Semitic attitude,” Pelosi added, “but that she didn’t have a full appreciation of how they landed on other people where these words have a history and a cultural impact that might have been unknown to her.”
Trump slammed Democrats on March 6 for failing to condemn Omar and previously called her comments “a dark day on Israel.”
The far-left lawmaker should resign, he suggested.
“It is shameful that House Democrats won’t take a stronger stand against Anti-Semitism in their conference. Anti-Semitism has fueled atrocities throughout history and it’s inconceivable they will not act to condemn it!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
The resolution was approved by many in Congress but not all due to its expanded language.
“Rep. Omar’s comments were wrong and she has proven multiple times that she embodies a vile, hate-filled, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel bigotry. She deserves to be rebuked, by name, and removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee so that there is no mistake about the values and priorities that the House stands for.”
In a floor speech, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) said that Republicans stripped Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) of his committee assignments after controversial comments about white nationalists in January and named him in a resolution the House passed condemning white nationalism, in contrast to Democrats neither stripping Omar of committee assignments nor naming her in the resolution.
On the other side, high-level Democrats defended Omar’s comments, including House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who suggested Omar’s comments stemmed from the pain she experienced in Somalia before fleeing the country. He believes it is much more empirical compared to people who are generations removed from the Holocaust and other violent historical episodes.
Clyburn released a statement on March 7 saying he was not minimizing the Holocaust.
“Every student of history, which I consider myself to be, recognizes the Holocaust as a unique atrocity which resulted in the deaths of six million Jews,” he said. “It should never be minimized; I never have and I never will.”
