On February 4, the House of Representatives voted 230-199 to remove Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia’s 14th district, from her committee assignments. The House sanctioned Greene for her past statements embracing QAnon, seeming to endorse the assassination of prominent Democratic figures, and harassing the victims of school shootings—tragedies she dismissed as false flags. House members stripped her positions on the Education and Labor and Budget Committees.
Yet only eleven Republicans voted for the House resolution to remove Greene from her seats, a stark contrast to how the party canned Liz Cheney—who voted in lockstep with President Donald Trump about 93 percent of the time—for voting to impeach him. To distract from their complicity in emboldening Greene and her embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories, the GOP has resorted to its favorite tactic: “whataboutism.” In retaliation to the resolution, House Republicans introduced an amendment to remove Representative Ilhan Omar from her committees, claiming that her past remarks regarding Israel were antisemitic and were just as egregious as Greene’s. Last week, they redoubled their efforts to remove Omar from the Foreign Affairs committee, capitalizing on the latest faux outrage over Omar’s alleged antisemitism. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly plans on introducing a privileged resolution, one that does not need Speaker Pelosi’s consent to get a floor vote, to oust and censor Omar. If Republicans take the House in 2022—it would take a miracle for things to turn out otherwise—it’s safe to say Omar’s position is toast.
And unlike Greene, Ilhan Omar faces attacks not just from Republicans, but from her own party over this farcical controversy. In early June, pro-Israel congresspeople and the House leadership condemned Omar for “equating” the war crimes committed by Hamas, the Taliban, Israel, the US, and the Afghan government. Of course, none of those shedding crocodile tears actually looked at Omar’s statement, which was entirely reasonable. She merely listed the countries involved in the proposed ICC investigation into war crimes committed by all parties, an investigation opposed by the State Department.
According to those up at arms, “legitimate criticism” of Israel is allowed, but drawing false equivalencies “foments prejudice.” On this, they are certainly correct; framing Palestinians as uniquely violent does indulge in Islamophobia, and Israel has killed far more people than any Palestinian militant group. In the latest bombing campaign in Gaza, more children were murdered by Israel than Israelis killed by Hamas rockets ever. But facts are of no concern to Israel hawks. According to them, anyone on the left who has the gall to acknowledge them is worse than a neo-Nazi and paves the way to another Shoah.
This bad-faith smear draws an equivalency between Omar and Greene with no basis in reality, underscoring key differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. When Greene supports conspiracy theories that are textbook antisemitism, the GOP rallies behind her. In contrast, House Democrats immediately throw Omar to the wolves, condemning her and caving into attacks that were more about smearing a Muslim woman who dares to question American support for injustice than legitimately standing up for the Jewish people.
The Republican Party embraces its fringes—to the extent that they aren’t already mainstream—while the progressive left of the Democratic Party is bottled up by party leadership, even when it represents most of its voters. The smear of Omar was part of a larger effort by the Israel lobby to create a culture where no dissent is allowed; one must either bend the knee in support of Israel or face the antisemitism card.
In 2019, Omar was also attacked for multiple statements that the media whipped up into manufactured outrage. In one discussion, Omar gave a moving explanation of how, as Muslims, she and Rashida Tlaib are often accused of antisemitism for speaking up about Palestinians. It was an entirely legitimate response to a question; if you oppose Omar, I’d highly encourage you to read her full statement, which received little coverage.
Instead, one sentence was singled out and reported on, devoid of context, as if Omar had shown up at a synagogue and suddenly blurted it out. “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Omar was also criticized for tweets in which she claimed that lobbying groups worked to silence criticism of Israel, including one arguing that the stance of mainstream US politicians was “all about the Benjamins baby.”
Pro-Israel activists and groups accused Omar of peddling the dual loyalty trope, an antisemitic canard claiming that Jews are more loyal to other Jews than their countrymen. Yet Omar was not talking about an international cabal as antisemitic conspiracies go; she referred to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the largest lobbying groups in the country, and part of the larger Israel lobby that spent over $22 million in 2018 alone on lobbying and contributions.
The criticism of the Israel lobby—of which AIPAC is only one part of—is the same one progressives levy at virtually all other super political action committees and dark money sources who seek toxic ends. It is not antisemitic, and labeling criticism as such is a clear attempt to silence dissent. While associating money and political influence with Jews can at times be antisemitic, this is very obviously not one of them. Whoever heard of a lobby that operates without money?
The power of the Israel lobby is one of the worst kept secrets in Washington; Omar is not antisemitic for acknowledging something so obvious it’s mentioned in my “Intro to Gov” textbook. The charge of “using tropes” benefits the ruling class of all creeds, who can stifle talk of how our governmental policies benefit them. It contributes to a phenomenon writer Em Cohen describes as the “tropeification” of antisemitism, wherein “if a statement appears similar to one of these tropes, it constitutes antisemitism—regardless of context, regardless of truth. It assumes that antisemitism is inherent to tropes, rather than expressed by them.”
Indeed, the intense power of the pro-Israel lobby, which immediately trumped up the bipartisan smear of Omar, does not even come entirely from Jewish organizations, despite the wishes of the conspiracy-driven alt-right. Rather, the massive support of right-wing American evangelicals buoys the Israel lobby. The largest pro-Israel lobbying group by numbers is Christians United for Israel, with over 7 million members, whose current leader once claimed that the Holocaust was a punishment from God.
American Evangelicals support Israel unswervingly, but this is not a sign of genuine companionship. The ahistorical narrative of “Judeo-Christian values,” bandied about by right-wing Jews like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, is used to explain their alliance with the Evangelical right, whose support for Israel is more about Islamophobia and the rapture.
Returning to Omar’s statement, she did not imply a “dual loyalty” any more than the one that AIPAC itself states is its objective. AIPAC self-identifies as “a bipartisan American organization that advocates for a strong US-Israel relationship.” The mission endorses the very thing Omar criticizes: an unwavering alliance between the US and Israel.
It is not anti-zionists who claim that Jews are synonymous with Israel: it is the Zionists. They routinely liken anti-zionism to antisemitism and promote Israel as the sole representative of the Jewish people. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently referred to himself as someone who spoke “for all Jews.” Zionists play the rhetorical game of claiming that it is antisemitic to “hold all Jews accountable” for Israel’s actions while simultaneously pretending that criticism of Israel and Zionism is out of bounds precisely because it is so intertwined with Judaism.
Omar’s critique has nothing to do with Jews being beholden to a foreign power. Due to the influence of the Israel lobby, lawmakers in the United States government have long felt they have a foreign policy interest in maintaining a proxy state in the Middle East. As President Biden said in 1986, “it’s the best three billion dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” How else could one explain Nancy Pelosi telling an audience at the Israeli American Conference in 2018 that “if Washington, DC, crumbled to the ground, the last thing that would remain is our commitment…to Israel.” The US government is fully aware of the atrocities it sanctions through its unwavering support for the Israeli occupation. It relies on keeping Americans believing that they are antisemitic if they even dare to question it.
The Israel lobby and Zionists have weaponized antisemitism for years to stifle criticism of Israel, but it has increased in the past decade as solidarity with the Palestinian people has grown in the Western world. Pro-Israel groups like CAMERA, Hasbara Fellows, and Canary Mission stalk campuses for support of Palestine, and create blacklists in attempts to get them fired or ruin their future job prospects. They also frequently spy on campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine; often, alleged “crises” of antisemitism on campus are the result of coordinated efforts by Zionist students with ties to pro-Israel groups.
The Anti-Defamation League recently blamed the left and anti-Zionists for a recent “surge” in antisemitism in the wake of Israel’s latest siege on Gaza and an outpouring of global support for Palestine. But the ADL’s metrics for reporting antisemitism are notoriously shoddy. They rely largely on self-reporting and include entries like protestors holding signs that say “Zionism is racism” or calling Israel an apartheid state. But the manufactured crisis served its purpose, getting well-meaning liberals who’d previously supported Palestine to shift to performative denunciations of antisemitism.
Bad faith accusations of antisemitism have been effectively used by the right and liberals to delegitimize the left, as was seen in Jeremy Corbyn’s fate. An avowed socialist and anti-imperialist, Corbyn’s hopes of leading a Labour government were besieged by an entirely fabricated scandal about the party’s alleged “antisemitism crisis.” Pushed by media figures, Tories, and abetted by the Labour Party’s conservative members, the Corbyn agenda was derailed by attempting to beat back these spurious charges. The phrase “Corbynism” is now widely used as a synonym for “left-wing antisemitism.” While Corbyn always faced an uphill battle, he and his supporters harmed his chances by apologizing rather than telling their accusers to, politely, piss off.
The attacks were especially sinister considering how they co-opted liberal social justice language, focusing not on any actual evidence of Corbyn’s antisemitism, but on how it makes British Jews (who already overwhelmingly vote Tory) feel to hear Israel criticized. Of course, no one really cares to ask about the feelings of the Muslim citizens of Britain, who are routinely scapegoated as terrorists and labelled as the sole source of antisemitism in their countries. It is a deep irony that Europe, the birthplace of antisemitism, now attempts to project its own historical misdeeds onto Muslims.
“Now everyone knows that to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile about Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy.”–Edward Said, 1993.
The Labour Party lost big in the 2019 general election, and Corbyn resigned, replaced by the more conservative, and most importantly, Zionist, Keir Starmer. Labour fully capitulated to the attacks, adopting the Israel lobby’s IHRA definition of antisemitism, which suppresses antizionist speech. Last October, when Corbyn refused to bow to a politically motivated report on Labour’s alleged antisemitism, he was suspended. Despite his eventual reinstatement, the Labour Party was defanged of its leftist commitments; the party eventually lost even more seats in the May by-elections, this time in former Labour strongholds.
The “antisemitism card,” that tactic used to oust Corbyn, is now being deployed in the US to neutralize Omar, Tlaib, and anyone else who dares to call Israel what it is: a fascist ethnocracy that should receive our scorn, not 3.8 billion dollars in aid every year.
When the Republican Party cried foul, House Democrats moved quickly to condemn Omar, ignoring that the allegations were lobbied in bad faith. No one mentioned that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who led the anti-Omar attacks, suggested in the previous election cycle that Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and George Soros—all Jewish businessmen—were attempting to buy the election. One could point out that this statement is at face value true. All three are prominent Democratic donors. Yet, we cannot then turn around and claim that similar statements about Sheldon Adelson or Frank Luntz, who lobby heavily on behalf of Israel, are antisemitic.
Yet, for all his zeal against Omar, Kevin McCarthy believes that a private reprimand and a trip to a Holocaust memorial is enough to reform Greene. But any look at Greene’s conduct shows her to be unique in her odiousness and not inclined to any about-face.
Over the past three years, Greene has continually voiced her support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that the country’s elite—particularly Democrats—are satanic worshipping pedophiles who traffic children and harvest adrenochrome from their blood for sustenance. If it sounds familiar, it is because it is a modern rebranding of the ancient “blood libel” conspiracy that Jews engaged in ritual sacrifices of Christian children. The charge of “blood libel” is often abused by Israel hawks, whose falsely use it to describe “anything about Israel I don’t like or deem to be untrue.” But QAnon truly does fit the bill of “blood libel.” Greene embraced the conspiracy a few months after the first Q posts appeared on the messaging board 4chan, and she further showed her true colors on a blog she wrote on a now-defunct website. While she claims to have renounced those beliefs, that has not stopped her from continuing to use QAnon-like rhetoric.
Yet, the GOP’s unwillingness to seriously condemn Greene stems from the fact that admitting to her misdeeds would shine a light on their own. There are some Republicans who can reasonably claim to take antisemitism seriously, but too many traffic in it in some form. The most blatant of them parrot white genocide and Great Replacement conspiracies, which purport a master plan for the extinction of the White race through mass immigration and the browning of the US. While many leave out the explicit idea that it is Jews behind this alleged conspiracy, the subtext remains.
Trump and conservative media have alluded to this theory, but former Representative Steve King and current Congressman Paul Gosar openly embrace it as well. Last February, both spoke at the America First Convention hosted by neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Nicholas Fuentes. This vile belief animated the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, in which 11 Jews were killed at a Pittsburgh synagogue. And the same white supremacist ideology was behind the Christchurch mosque shootings, where 50 people were murdered, displaying the degrees to which antisemitic and Islamophobic racism are interconnected.
Republicans tried to distance themselves from antisemitism when they canceled commentator Young Pharaoh’s planned speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference because of his numerous antisemitic remarks. Yet, as Pharaoh pointed out in a video decrying the decision, the event organizers previously made similar comments.
Even a cursory look at the Republican Party will reveal the extent to which antisemitism has corrupted it. Numerous avowed Nazis have mysteriously found their way onto the GOP ticket in the last few years, such as Arthur Jones, a former leader of the American Nazi Party and the 2018 Republican nominee for Illinois’s third district. Republicans have been caught multiple times doctoring photos of Jewish opponents. Pointing to the party’s rabid Zionism cannot dispel its antisemitism, for the Zionist movement has shown itself to be entirely reliant on collaboration with antisemites. Richard Spencer counts himself a “White Zionist.” Netanyahu buddied up to Donald Trump even as his supporters marched through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a fitting analog to the Israeli mobs that chant “Death to Arabs” in occupied East Jerusalem.
The discourse that attempts to paint an equivalency between Omar and Greene’s broader political and ideological affiliations as antisemitic is nonsensical. Omar is a refreshing progressive voice for Palestinian rights in a party where the orthodox view is uncritical and unequivocal support for Israeli apartheid. For her views, she is demonized in ways that, far too often, play off Islamophobia. Greene, by contrast, is an outspoken racist who is the embodiment of a virulently antisemitic Republican Party that uses support for Israel as a wedge issue to hide its bigotry.
