“You really need to hear the excuses that people are making” for Rep. Ilhan Omar, starts a short video recently produced by the Israel Advocacy Movement. The film examines what it calls the “most stupid excuses for Ilhan Omar’s antisemitism.”
Omar, in recent months has been called out for a continual string of antisemitic remarks - made mostly via Twitter - including suggesting American politicians are bought by AIPAC, inferring powerful Jews have dual loyalty and claiming that the Jewish state hypnotizes the world.
In her defense, Linda Sarsour said that Omar “didn’t know nothing in Somalia about no antisemitism. It’s something she’s learning along the way now that she is a legislator.”
But, as the video explains, there’s one problem with this theory. Omar came to America when she was 12. She has been in the United States for 25 year and had the exact same education as every other American.
“If she is not smart enough to differentiate between hate speech and acceptable speech, she is probably not smart enough to be in Congress,” the narrator of the short film quips.
Others who defended Omar include Nancy Pelosi: “I don’t think our colleague is an antisemitic. I think she has a different experience in the use of words.”
And Marc Lamont Hill: “They made Ilhan Omar disposable. They don’t want her on the House Foreign Services Committee, allegedly because of this one tweet, but it’s also because they’re looking at her as someone who doesn’t belong and this controversy only reinforces this idea of outsiderness that gets assigned to Muslims, that gets assigned to women, that gets assigned to Black Folk. And so, the whole ball of messiness, of racialized, gendered messiness, is what we are seeing in the Ilhan Omar controversy.
The video, however, does not buy it. According to the Israel Advocacy Movement, “Do you want to know the real reason Ilhan Omar keeps making these antisemitic faux paus? Because that is what she really thinks.”
Watch the film.