10 March 2019 — 1352 mdt
Not everyone agrees that Rep. Omar is an anti-semite
One writer who doesn’t is William Skink, author of the Missoula based Reptile Dysfunction blog. On 8 March, he published Do Democrats Have An Anti-Semitism Problem Or Does Israel Have A Racism Problem? in response to my post of 7 March, The Democratic Party has an anti-semitism problem. Skink alleges I piled on a “smear campaign.” Actually, I just told the truth.
I attempted to post at RD a comment clarifying my position, but at the moment it seems to be caught in a spam filter and is not yet visible to readers. Here’s what I wrote:
I do not support the BDS campaign. Neither do I support the laws intended to silence or punish critics of BDS or of Israel. And as I stated explicitly at Flathead Memo, I carry no brief for the current government of Israel’s excessively harsh responses to the Palestinians who continue shooting rockets and loosing explosives laden balloons into Israel, hoping to kill someone and provoke a disproportionate response that kills Palestinians who then earn sympathy from people whose understanding of history is limited to yesterday’s newspaper.
Rep. Omar accused American politicians of being bought by Jewish money and American Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own nation. Those are old anti-Semitic tropes, and I do not believe she is trotting them out innocently or because she allegedly speaks imperfect English. She know’s what she’s doing, and what she’s doing is aiding and abetting the people who want to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea. On this issue, William Skink and I respectfully disagree.
Rep. Omar represents a district that usually elects Democrats. Whether she will be re-elected in 2020, or ousted, possibly in the primary, for her anti-semitism depends on how she comports herself going forward, and on how much of her bad behavior her constituents are willing to tolerate. At this point, my hope is that she’s serving the only term she will ever serve in elective office.
I also hope that Americans, especially younger Americans and those cloistered on college campuses, start wising-up about the BDS campaign, whose goal is to obliterate Israel as a nation. I regard the people behind BDS as being to Palestinian terrorist organizations as Sein Féin, the ostensibly respectable public face of violent fanatics, was/is to the Irish Republican Army,