Will anti-Semitism divide Democrats? It already has
As Democrats wrestled among themselves over the past week before taking a House vote to broadly condemn bigotry and hatred, I was reminded of what former President Barack Obama said in a fiery speech on the topic last fall.
"We're supposed to stand up to discrimination," Obama said at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "And we're sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers."
He was referring to President Donald Trump's seeming inability a year earlier to explicitly condemn a white nationalist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. "How hard can that be," Obama memorably asked the crowd, "saying that Nazis are bad?"
Indeed, but calling out intentional bigotry is easy compared with the anti-Semitism that many critics perceived in remarks by freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, remarks that left her fellow Democrats deeply divided over how best to respond to them.
Democrats boast the most gender- and ethnically diverse House in U.S. history after November's election, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi found herself embroiled in the downside of what that diversity means. Their famously fractious party has become even more deeply divided between its center-left establishment and its new generation of far-left progressives.
Many in the new bunch, including some senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus, see Omar's remarks as less problematic than the verbal offenses of, say, Trump.
Or the offenses of certain House Republicans such as Iowa's serial offender Steve King, who lost his three committee seats in January after he defended the terms "white supremacist" and "white nationalist" during a New York Times interview.
With many Democrats joining Republicans in condemning Omar's problematic remarks, House Democratic leaders turned to a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. That led to a painful week of arguments behind closed doors. One side wanted a stronger repudiation of Omar. The other defended her remarks as too harsh but not ill-intentioned.
Diversity isn't for wimps. As I have often written before, what you say in such sensitive matters can matter less than what people hear.
I, too, was upset by Omar's remarks. I don't think she's a bigot but, as with other sensitive topics, it's not hard to sound like one when you make strong criticisms in such touchy areas as U.S. policy toward Israel.
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