‘It is not enough to condemn Mr. Trump’s racism. We must affirmatively confront racist policies…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Just as her ‘Squad’ colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich, recently raised the stakes on a minimum wage debate by saying $15 was not enough, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., upped the ante on a different kind of left-wing capital: racial guilt.
In an op-ed published Thursday in The New York Times, Omar addressed the largely liberal audience with a call to action against the rhetoric of President Donald Trump, saying their private disapproval and social-media critiques alone wouldn’t cut it.
….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
“It is not enough to condemn Mr. Trump’s racism,” she wrote. “We must affirmatively confront racist policies.”
Much like her past dog-whistle statements—among them, numerous tweeted references to anti-Jewish stereotypes and a speech to an Islamic audience that downplayed the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—Omar stopped short of endorsing outright violence.
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm election, several high-profile Democratic figures—such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—all were roundly criticized for encouraging physical confrontations and attacks on their political adversaries.
Domestic terrorism groups like Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America were happy to comply.
But if Omar’s piece was not seeking to mobilize activist radicals, it unquestionably served as an infomercial on her extreme policy agenda, most of which she simply pinned “race” onto as an afterthought.
Under the banner of “racism,” Omar invoked the current immigration crisis—claiming that detaining illegal aliens at the border constituted an attack on their skin pigmentation.
Omar also lumped into her appeal the issue of “segregation” in public housing—much of which serves to benefit illegals and lower-income minorities who exploit the country’s social safety net by living off the taxpayer’s dole.
“It is not enough to condemn the corruption and self-dealing of this administration,” Omar said.
“We must support policies that unmistakably improve working people’s lives, including by strengthening collective bargaining, raising the minimum wage and pursuing a universal jobs guarantee,” she said.
Critics maintain that many of the policies she advocated would disproportionately harm underprivileged people of color.
For instance, the influx of immigrants—an effect of Democrats’ refusal to close loopholes in the asylum laws— not only results in the overcrowding of detention centers, but also—after the immigrants are released into the country—overburdens the public health and education systems to the detriment of American citizens and their children.
Of the unskilled laborers who seek employment in the U.S., those doing so illegally drive down wages—often getting paid under the table—and harm the employment prospects of legal citizens.
Meanwhile, government efforts to raise the minimum wage for some workers often result in business closures, downsizing and job losses for many others.
Those gaming the immigration and welfare systems also breed resentment among legal residents and citizens, which in turn may perpetuate racial or cultural animus to the extent that the two are linked.
Thus, Omar’s misguided policies effectively would do the opposite of what she claimed—offering little to help Americans in need, but giving new life to the culture of grievance and victimization that Democrats depend on to stir up their base—by simply adding more fuel to the fire.
Ironically, while claiming Trump had inspired “racism” by telling Omar and her colleagues to “go back” to their countries of origin, the embattled congresswoman, a Somali refugee, found no issue herself with referring to her native land as her “home country.”
“Having survived civil war in my home country as a child, I cherish these values,” Omar wrote in her op-ed. “In Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, I saw grade-school children as young as me holding assault rifles in the streets.”
Omar, who is subject to ongoing investigations over tax and campaign finance fraud—and amid reports that she likely married her own brother to grant him U.S. citizenship—additionally claimed that Trump had used his Twitter attack on the ‘Squad’ congresswomen to distract from other issues and disrupt the news cycle.
“Throughout our history, racist language has been used to turn American against American in order to benefit the wealthy elite,” she said, without specification.
“Every time Mr. Trump attacks refugees is a time that could be spent discussing the president’s unwillingness to raise the federal minimum wage for up to 33 million Americans,” she added.
As if to brazenly signal the disingenuousness of her own argument, Omar also claimed that Trump was an anti-Semite for refusing to criticize neo-Nazi hate speech during a 2017 demonstration in Charlottesville, Va.
Trump instead issued a broader condemnation of the violence, while acknowledging that “good people” on both sides of the argument—initially over the unconstitutional removal of two Confederate statues—had participated in the protests.
“The chants of ‘Jews will not replace us,’ shouted at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017 by white supremacists, whom this president tacitly accepted, are a direct attack on the values of religious freedom central to the founding of our nation,” Omar wrote.
Democrats in the House of Representatives likewise showed little interest in condemning Omar’s own rhetorical attacks on Jewish people.
After a bipartisan resolution in March set out specifically to censure her hateful comments, Democrats—led by the Congressional Black Caucus—revolted and forced the measure to be watered down into a generic condemnation of all hate.
Omar and Tlaib have claimed that the criticism of their anti-Semitic remarks is itself tantamount to Islamophobia.
However, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke praised Omar’s positions, referring to her as “the most important Member of the US Congress” on Twitter for her stance against Jewish Zionism.
Dr Duke & Eric Striker: By Defiance to Z.O.G. Ilhan Omar is NOW the most important Member of the US Congress! https://t.co/R4d4X81xdv pic.twitter.com/C083V57VQp
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) March 7, 2019