Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) President Morton Klein and ZOA Chair Mark Levenson, Esq. released the following statement:
The woefully inadequate, watered-down, distorted, so-called “antisemitism” House resolution that passed today fails to even mention the major antisemitism problem of violent Islamist attacks on Jews, or that Congresswomen Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Alexandrea Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) repeatedly defamed the Jewish people and the Jewish state – and have never sincerely apologized. Omar, Tlaib and AOC’s scurrilous statements – such as falsely calling Israel “evil,” falsely accusing Jews of committing massacres against innocent Arabs, accusing Jews of “hypnotizing the world,” accusing Jews of dual loyalty, supporting boycotting and sanctioning Israel, accusing those who defend Israel against defamation of “attacking American free speech rights,” and attributing Americans’ support for our strong ally Israel to Jewish money – were what prompted the House to draft a resolution. In addition, there were deep concerns over Rep. Tlaib erasing Israel from her office map and replacing Israel with Palestine, supporting BDS, writing for Farrakhan’s newspaper, embracing Abbas Hamideh, a Hezbollah supporter who called Israel an ISIS-like terrorist state and literally wrapping herself in the Palestinian-Arab flag at her swearing-in ceremony. Also, there was concern about Rep. AOC praising antisemite Jeremy Corbyn, claiming Israel massacres peaceful protestors, and being a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, which calls for the destruction of the Jewish State.
The resolution thus should have focused on and strongly condemned Ilhan Omar and her cohorts’ antisemitism and Israel bashing. Such language is dangerous and frightening. As the great historian Paul Johnson wrote in his book “A history of the Jews”- “One of the principal lessons of Jewish history has been that repeated verbal slanders are sooner or later followed by violent physical deeds. Time and again over the centuries, antisemitic writings and statements created their own fearful momentum which climaxed in an effusion of Jewish blood.”
Of course, even a good resolution would have been dreadfully inadequate; Omar should be stripped of her committee assignments, just as Congressman Steve King was. It is especially dangerous that Jew-hater Omar still sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where the biased-against-Israel Omar works to destroy the valuable Israel-U.S. alliance, and defends corrupt brutal foreign dictatorships such as Abbas’ Palestinian Authority and Venezuela’s Maduro regime.
There are some somewhat helpful lines in the House resolution, making clear that almost 60% of religious hate crimes are against Jews, and generally condemning “dual loyalty” charges and demonizing stereotypes against Jews, and generally condemning “justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a [never identified] radical ideology or extremist view of [unspecified] religion.”
But even these lines sidestep and ignore the real issues of Islamist antisemitism and the fact that the dramatic increase in Antisemitism in Europe and around the world is largely caused by radical Islamists. The fact that Reps. Omar and Tlaib are radical Islamists must be addressed and confronted. Just as the fact that Jew-hating, Israel-hating Linda Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan and Mark Lamont Hill and Keith Ellison and groups like CAIR are radical Islamists must be confronted and addressed.
Moreover, the resolution is largely an exercise in appeasement to Islamists.
Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership apparently caved to pressure from Islamist antisemites and terrorist-sympathizers led by Linda Sarsour and CAIR (an unindicted co-conspirator for funneling money to the Jew-hating terrorist group Hamas). The Democratic leadership transformed what was supposed to be an antisemitism resolution, attacking antisemites in Congress by name, into a resolution that attributes antisemitism solely to the KKK, white supremacists and neo-Nazis – and repeatedly portrays Muslims solely as victims of bigotry and “Islamophobia.” The House resolution never mentions the hundreds of antisemitic incidents perpetrated by Islamists against Jews on American college campuses each year, radical Muslim plots to blow up American synagogues, the recent Islamist attack on Jews outside an orthodox Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles, the murderous Islamist shooting attack on Seattle Jewish Federation employees, the Jew-hating San Bernardino Islamists’ specific targeting and murder of a pro-Israel Messianic Jew at the outset of that horrific massacre, or the thousands of Jews whom Palestinian-Arab Islamists have murdered and maimed in Israel, and much more.
By contrast to the absence of any mention of Islamist attacks on Jews, the resolution highlights plots against Muslims and mosques.
If Speaker Pelosi wanted to condemn other bigotries, this should have been done in a separate resolution, instead of fundamentally transforming and dramatically weakening what should have been a resolution focused on condemning antisemitism, including Islamist antisemitism against Jews.
It is also concerning that the House resolution attempts to water down and transform the role of the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, into a broader mandate.
We paraphrase Rabbi Dov Fischer’s words- A resolution against all hate is not a resolution against antisemitism, rather when the challenge is a Nazi-like recitation about Jews and money, Jews and dual loyalty, Jews are evil, Jews hypnotize the world, Jews massacre innocent protestors, boycott the Jews…and the response is that “all hate is wrong” then that diluted resolution is an insult to American Jews, an insult to all decent Americans and it’s a piece of garbage that I, especially as a child of Holocaust survivors who lost most of my family to unbridled hatred against Jews, would have voted against if I were in Congress. That’s how Jew hatred and anti Israel bias works, Hamas and Fatah terrorists murder innocent Jews and the U.N. and world leaders and Abbas condemns “all violence”- not Hamas or Fatah or PLO violence. They don’t name the perpetrators so no real message is sent to the perpetrators! The presidents of universities respond similarly. When horrific Jew-hating, Israel bashing rallies are led by SJP or JVP, university officials refuse to name and condemn the groups by name, they simply make general statements against all hate or antisemitism generally. The antisemitic groups are never named and therefore never sent a real message. Their reputations remain intact.
ZOA reiterates our call, and the subsequent call of a dozen other Jewish groups, and a petition signed by over 212,000 people, for the House Democratic leadership to finally do the right thing: Remove Ilhan Omar from her committee assignments, especially the House Foreign Relations Committee.