A girl once accused me of being critical of her because she wouldn’t hang out with me. I retorted that I wouldn’t hang out with her if she was the last girl on the planet and the future of civilization depended on us uniting. The girl, and me, were in high school at the time.
I recalled this incident reading this story about New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting that, “If Republicans are mad they can’t date me they can just say that instead of projecting their sexual frustrations onto my boyfriend’s feet. Ya creepy weirdos.” The tweet was in response to political commentator Steve Cortes criticizing AOC for visiting Florida, a state the Establishment media says is recklessly irresponsible for resisting vaccine mandates and other measures many consider violations of American civil liberties. Cortes made a snide reference to a male photographed with AOC who I assume is her boyfriend.
AOC is free to delude herself that every man who criticizes her does so because she wouldn’t avail us of her self-image of beauty, charm, and intellect. What alarms me about AOC and her “Squad” allies — Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Minnesota Rep. Ilan Omar — is how they distract from inspiring and accomplished representatives like Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving woman in the House, and Virginia’s Elaine Luria, the first woman to attend the navy’s Nuclear Power School, one of the most intellectually rigorous training programs in the armed forces. When AOC was taking classes to earn her undergraduate degree in economics at Boston University, Luria was commanding naval ships, some of them nuclear armed. A previous post of mine featuring Kaptur can be found here and my previous profile on Luria can be found here.
Allow me to provide some perspective. AOC at the end of the day should be judged on her Congressional accomplishments, not the size of her nearly 13 million Twitter followers. The twittersphere may consider AOC an oracle of wisdom and insight, but she’s a failure representing her Queens district. A study by the Center of Effective Lawmaking released in April ranked AOC among the least effective members of Congress.
Twitter owes much of its legitimacy and free promotion to both the Establishment and the conservative media, whose reporters urge their readers to “follow them” on Twitter. An unappreciated truth about Twitter is that only about 20 percent of Americans wade into the social media sewer and about 10 percent of the tweeters dominate the “conversation.” Another notable detail about Twitter is that 75 percent of the links tweeted on the site are never opened. At the end of the day, Twitter is a virtual Tower of Babel where participants all talk a lot, but they don’t hear or care to understand each other.
Rashida Tlaib, with some 509,000 Twitter followers, hardly serves the best interests of her constituents. Tlaib voted against the infrastructure bill because she said social spending was neglected. Michigan’s infrastructure is Third World, including the ninth worst roads in the country. Tlaib didn’t get all she wanted so she threw a tantrum and voted against the bill. There’s a real grown up for you.
One of the Beaumont Health hospitals serving Tlaib’s district is so neglected that it has a shortage of wheelchairs, despite the system’s $3.5 billion cash reserve. The hospital has a high percentage of Medicaid patients and was temporarily closed without explanation last year at the height of Michigan’s pandemic. Some 40 patients, including those on ventilators, were transferred to other hospitals. You can rest assured those patients didn’t have gold plated Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance.
Beaumont is a poorly managed hospital system awaiting regulatory approval to be taken over by Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health, despite both hospital systems saying they can’t cope with their patient loads because of the pandemic. The deal will greatly enrich the CEOs of Spectrum and Beaumont, so a representative could demand a lot of concessions from them, particularly since Governor Gretchen Whitmer professes to care so much about healthcare equity. Tlaib has expressed no concerns about Spectrum’s takeover, let alone demanded some concessions or commitments.
By comparison, when the local Toledo hospital disclosed it was entertaining putting itself up for sale, Kaptur promptly issued this statement: “Decisions of this magnitude require careful consideration, transparency, oversight, and input from the community. The sale of northwest Ohio’s only public hospital during a public health emergency in my view would not only be a mistake, but a moral injustice.” That’s what experienced and effective leadership looks and sounds like. Toledo’s hospital system dropped its sale plans.
Where Tlaib is very effective is pushing the boundaries on the public promotion of Jew hatred, which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank is alone among the Establishment calling out. Milbank provides a rundown of all the golden oldies antisemitic tropes that Tlaib promotes with abandon. Here’s a sample: Tlaib declared that “people behind the curtain” who want to stop a “free Palestine” are the “same people” who exploit “regular Americans” for “their profit.”
I’d have a tad of respect for Tlaib if she dropped her dog whistle and didn’t refer to Jews in veiled terms. In due course, I expect she will.
Ilan Omar, who was named Antisemite of the Year in 2019 by an advocacy organization, is another accomplished Jew hatred promoter. Omar came to national prominence with her declaration that for Jews “it’s all about the Benjamins,” for which she issued an insincere apology and has continued with her Jew hatred ever since. Omar has also questioned the loyalty American Jews have to America given that many also support Israel, a critical U.S. ally. As an aside, Elaine Luria, the former U.S. naval commander, is Jewish and a supporter of Israel.
David Harsanyi of the National Review in a recent column captured “the unmitigated gall” of Omar proclaiming her intolerance of hate speech. What Harsanyi and the few other journalists willing to call out Omar’s antisemitism fail to mention is that it’s because of a Jew that Omar was likely able to emigrate to America from her native Somalia. According to David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, a driving force behind the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, which liberalized America’s exclusionary and racist immigration policy, was a Jewish Congressional member named Emanuel Celler. The AJC supported that legislation.
The media has given Omar a pass on a vile lie she repeatedly told for many years. As reported by the Washington Post, Omar often recounted before audiences how she once shouted “bullshit” in the courtroom after seeing a “sweet, old … African American lady” in Minneapolis fined $80 for shoplifting, a fine she couldn’t pay. “I couldn’t understand how a roomful of educated adults could do something so unjust,” Omar told audiences.
Great story, but even the Establishment Washington Post admitted the story never happened or was grossly embellished. In Minneapolis the police can’t arrest someone for shoplifting unless there’s a likelihood of violence or further crime. Minneapolis, where the NPR station was, and still might be, the number one radio outlet in town for many years, was a truly progressive city long before Omar arrived. Yet she chose to manufacture narratives trashing the city’s values with stories about racial injustices that never happened. Another Omar whopper of a lie was denying she was having an affair with her political consultant. A few months later she married the guy.
The Post and other media outlets like to say that Omar is “complicated.” But like AT&T says about its pricing plans, it’s not complicated. Omar, Tlaib, AOC, and their other Squad member, Massachusetts’ Ayanna Pressley, are die-hard Jew haters who have played influential roles in the rise and open expression of Jew-hatred.
Such hatred was on display when New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer attended an event in August and has since claimed protesters from the Working Families Party began shouting “Jew.” Although Working Families denies Gottheimer’s claim, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also attended the event and confirmed she heard the hateful jeers.
Imagine the media coverage and outrage if Omar or Tlaib attended an event and protesters shouted “Muslim.” What galls me is the media refers to the Working Families Party as “progressive.” A party whose endorsed candidates include San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin isn’t progressive. Boudin’s so-called progressivism is letting criminals run free, which has contributed to San Francisco’s pervasive crime. San Francisco mayor London Breed recently called defunding the police and other criminal justice reforms “bullshit.”
I don’t regard the “Squad” members as progressives but rather Congressional court jesters who in addition to promoting Jew hatred, are causing grave harm to the Democrats. The extensive and fawning Establishment media publicity given to the Squad’s antics and musings creates the public impression that the Democratic party has been overtaken by a bunch of immature-like high school girls promoting an agenda Americans overwhelmingly don’t want. Polls indicate that Republicans will sweep the midterm elections, and one of the representatives the elephant party hopes to knock off is Luria.
The Squad has been given a free media ride far too long. Critics of AOC are dismissed as fearing a powerful Hispanic woman or, if they are male, having issues because she’d reject their advances. Critics of Tlaib and Omar are dismissed as “Islamophobic.” Critics of Pressley are dismissed as “racist.” It’s a clever strategy because one is already on the defensive declaring they aren’t sexist, Islamophobic, or racist. I’m no longer afraid of these accusations professing my beliefs. To quote vice president Kamala Harris, we are all entitled to our “truths.”
Here’s my truth: Nearly 60 percent of 2020 hate crimes in the U.S. targeted Jews. The Simon Wiesenthal Center recently named the BBC, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Administration of the University of Southern California among the leading global Jew haters. That’s a frighteningly diverse coalition. CAIR is the organization where Omar delivered a keynote speech referring to 9/11 as “some people did something.” If there’s any institution that’s truly all about the Benjamins, it’s the University of Southern California.
It’s a measure of Omar’s deceit or ignorance portraying all Jews as being supportive of Israel that another group the Simon Wiesenthal organization includes on its list of global Jew haters is an organization called Jewish Voices for Peace, which has declared “Zionism is an existential threat to the Palestinian people and therefore needs to be eradicated.” Self-hating Jews, particularly in America, are pervasive.
I’m not one of them. My New Year’s resolution is to be fearless calling out the mounting Jew hatred in America and around the world. Consider this my first installment.
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