If Trump and his friends seriously cared about antisemitism, Ilhan Omar wouldn't be their priority

Imagine a serious reckoning with antisemitism in American politics.

Fox News would stop inviting Sebastian Gorka, the Nazi-affiliated former aide to President Donald Trump, to appear on TV. Republicans would ask serious questions of house minority leader Kevin McCarthy. Remember when he warned Jewish billionaires would “buy” the upcoming election?

Democrats would call out Andrew Cuomo. The Democratic governor’s campaign lied to Jews, preying on concerns about left-wing antisemitism to secure his nomination. Steve Scalise, the house Republican whip who once called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” might struggle to keep his leadership position.

Next, Congress would demand Trump apologise for saying there were “very fine people on both sides” of a murderous Nazi rally in 2017. The violent antisemitic right is surging. Legislators in both parties could at least insist that good people do not chant “Jews will not replace us”. Politicians would condemn not only the man who shot up the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, but the specific, mainstream Republican ideas about shadowy Jews and immigration that motivated his actions.

This is the sort of reckoning American Jews deserve. But it’s not where we’re headed.

Here’s what we’re getting instead. McCarthy – fear-the-Jewish-billionaires McCarthy – is working to make Muslim immigrant congresswoman Ilhan Omar the face of antisemitism in the United States. And the president himself just called for her resignation on national television.

The Republican leader doesn’t seem interested in addressing legitimate fears of antisemitic rhetoric and violence. Instead, he and his colleagues are working to redirect and amplify those fears toward their political opponents. The whole thing makes the most sense as a crass power play.

And it began as soon as Omar and her colleague Rashida Tlaib began their terms in January.

Four days after the start of the term, senator Marco Rubio (who is not Jewish) claimed that Tlaib (who, together with Omar, is one of the first Muslim women in congress) had engaged in antisemitism against him. Her crime? Agreeing with senator Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish) that an anti-boycotting-Israel bill Rubio co-sponsored interfered with constitutional rights. Unlike Sanders, she explicitly suggested the bill was un-American. Rubio claimed, incoherently, that Tlaib had accused him of dual loyalty.

A few weeks later, Republican representative Lee Zeldin, who is Jewish, badgered Omar to condemn a voicemail left at his office calling Jews “maggots”. Zeldin didn’t offer any evidence to connect his colleague with the deranged caller, but seemed to assume she might share the vile sentiment. (In response, Omar invited Zeldin for tea.)

At the same time, Omar responded to more serious concerns raised about a years-old tweet. During the deadly 2012 Israeli bombing of Gaza, Omar had posted that the country “has hypnotized the world”.

“That statement came in the context of the Gaza War,” Omar wrote in an apology for the old tweet. “It’s now apparent to me that I spent lots of energy putting my 2012 tweet in context and little energy in disavowing the antisemitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive.”

In an interview with Haaretz, McCarthy promised to “take action” against Tlaib and Omar for their antisemitism. McCarthy didn’t specify what antisemitic act, precisely, Tlaib and Omar had committed. But that didn’t seem to matter. He suggested that the two Muslim progressives were equivalent to or worse than Republican representative Steve King.

King endorsed a neo-Nazi-linked Toronto mayoral candidate known for her interest in “the Jewish question”. Republicans, including McCarthy, failed to repudiate King at the time, even though the endorsement took place before the Iowa congressman’s 2018 re-election. When they finally did rebuke the congressman, it wasn’t because of his behaviour toward Jews.

A reasonable person might suspect that the antisemitism of congress’s first two Muslim women, women who broke from the bipartisan political consensus on Israel, was a conclusion in search of evidence.

We’re now seeing these efforts rewarded.

On Sunday, Omar tweeted a P Diddy lyric that was also a theory about McCarthy’s behaviour: Maybe the right-wing Zionist lobbying group AIPAC’s money motivated McCarthy’s effort to marginalise her and her politics. It wasn’t a very wild idea. Omar is one of a handful of Congress members who openly opposes AIPAC’s policy goals. And there’s plenty of evidence that AIPAC spending influences congress.

Prominent journalists, Democratic politicians, Chelsea Clinton, and eventually Omar’s party leadership – all primed to interpret the congresswoman as antisemitic – repeated a maximally uncharitable interpretation of what she had said. Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat, quoted Omar as having actually referred to “Jewish money”, which was false. Clinton suggested that Omar’s tweet was a failure of American-ness, before apologising.

More than one of Omar’s critics, including former ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, indicated their real problem with the congresswoman was her dissenting Israel politics, not her tweet.

“Antisemitism must be called out, confronted and condemned whenever it is encountered, without exception,” a statement signed by House Democratic leadership said. Omar “unequivocally” apologised.

Of course politicians must call out antisemitism without exception. But if that’s the standard, it’s hard to understand why McCarthy hasn’t faced even a similar scale of blowback to Omar. For that matter, who can explain why senator Ted Cruz has never had to seriously answer for his close relationship with King? Democrats and Republicans alike have seemed much more eager to make an issue of a progressive’s jokes about a well-funded right-wing lobby than any Republican or mainstream Democrat’s links to overt antisemitism.

Whatever American Jews might feel about Omar’s comments, none of us should be tricked into thinking there’s a serious attack underway on American antisemitism. Instead, people who have demonstrated their comfort with malicious antisemites, and willingness to deploy antisemitic tropes when it suits them, are seizing on a perceived slight and inflating it for their own purposes.

McCarthy isn’t acting like someone who wants to lessen the hurt of antisemitism. If the leader wants to stand up against violent antisemitism, he has that option. Instead, he’s dragging the American Jewish community through a series of ordeals to discredit his political targets – targets clearly selected because of their own race and religion more than how they treat Jews. And plenty of Democrats are going along with it.

American Jews deserve a serious rebuke of political antisemitism – and we’re not getting it.