Republicans have a serious antisemitism problem. It isn’t Ilhan Omar

In this essay for The Guardian, I point out that Republican antisemitism is deep in the party today.

Who remembers how, in 2018 and just days before the deadliest attack on Jewish people in US history, a prominent US politician tweeted: “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election!”? The tweet was widely – and correctly – understood as dangerously antisemitic, particularly heinous in a period of rising anti-Jewish hatred. And whose tweet was this? If you thought the answer was Minnesota’s Democratic representative Ilhan Omar then, well, you’d be wrong. The author was none other than the House majority leader at the time, Republican Kevin McCarthy.

And who can forget when Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has tweeted that “Joe Biden is Hitler”, speculated that the wildfires in California were caused by a beam from “space solar generators” linked to “Rothschild, Inc.”, a clear wink to bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theories. Incidentally, Greene, who has a long record of antisemitic and anti-Muslim statements, has been recently appointed, by the same Kevin McCarthy, now speaker of the House, to the homeland security committee.

Then there’s former president Donald Trump, who dines with Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and antisemites like Ye. In stereotypically anti-Jewish moves, Trump has repeatedly called the loyalty of Jewish Americans into question. Just this past October, he wrote that “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!”

In case it’s not obvious, let me state it plainly. Today’s Republican party has a serious antisemitism problem. The easy acceptance and amplification of all sorts of anti-Jewish hate that party leaders engage in emboldens all the worst bigots, raving racists, and far-right extremists across the globe, all the while threatening Jewish people here and everywhere.

So it is more than a little rich that House Republicans voted on Thursday to remove Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee, where she’s served since 2019, because, they say, of her antisemitic views. Suddenly the Republican party has found God, so to speak, on this issue? Hardly. In fact, any reasonable observer would see that the Republicans have set out to punish Omar for an alleged set of misdeeds which they themselves frequently indulge in. The fiasco would merit a hearty eye-roll if it didn’t cheapen the very real threat that antisemitism is today.

The Trump-aligned wing of the Republican party has long had it in for Omar, and it’s not difficult to understand why. They’ll tell you that it’s a matter of what Omar says, but in reality it’s about what she does and who she is.

Read the rest here.