House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., vowed that Republicans would remove radical Islamist Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from her committee assignments if Democratic leadership does not do so and if the GOP wins back the majority in 2022.
Omar is “an individual that has not once, but on numerous occasions been anti-Semitic,” McCarthy told Fox News this week.
“I will promise you this,” McCarthy said. “If we are fortunate enough to have the majority, Omar would not be serving on Foreign Affairs—or anybody that has an antisemitic, anti-American view. That is not productive, and that is not right.”
In addition to her hostile rhetoric and use of offensive tropes against Jewish people, the charter “Squad” member has been accused in court of being a plant for the Iranian and Qatari governments, and she has been subject to a slate of serious, credible allegations involving campaign-finance-, election-, immigration- and tax-fraud, among other things.
After Democrats removed freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., over controversial social-media comments earlier this year, McCarthy fired back by pointing to the double-standard.
Last week, House Republicans re-upped their demand that Omar be stripped of her committee assignments after she compared the U.S. and Israel to terrorist organizations Hamas and the Taliban:
We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.
We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.
I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice. pic.twitter.com/tUtxW5cIow
— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) June 7, 2021
Members of both parties condemned Omar’s statement, with House Democrats asking that she “clarify her words.”
However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., refused to go any farther, later insisting that Democratic leadership’s statement against Omar was not a “rebuke” per se after many in the media characterized it as such.
“We did not rebuke her,” Pelosi claimed.
“We acknowledged that she made a clarification,” the speaker added. “Congresswoman Omar is a valued member of our caucus. She asked her questions of the secretary of state. Nobody criticized those, about how people will be held accountable if we’re not going to the International Court of Justice. That was a very legitimate question. That was not of concern.”
Omar later claimed she was not “equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems” and that she did not mean to make a “moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel.”
