Representative Ilhan Omar, a prominent member of the progressive "Squad" in Congress, has successfully defended her seat in Minnesota's 5th District Democratic primary, according to projections reported by BBC. The closely watched race concluded with Omar securing over 56% of the vote, solidifying her position as the party's nominee for the November election.

With 99% of votes counted, Omar received more than 67,000 votes, comfortably outpacing her closest rival, Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Council member. Samuels, who had narrowly lost to Omar in 2022, garnered just under 43% of the votes in Tuesday's primary.

Rep. Ilhan Omar wins her primary election in the 5th Congressional district of Minnesota!

Omar has defeated The 75-year-old Black man named Don Samuels, winning 56% of the votes or 67,524 with 95% of the votes in.

pic.twitter.com/GVfq0JBadC

— EXECUTIVE MEDIA (@EXECUTIVEXMEDIA) August 14, 2024

The victory comes at a time when other members of the "Squad" have faced significant challenges. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri and Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York both lost their primary races earlier this year, with pro-Israel groups investing heavily in their opponents' campaigns.

Unlike the races involving Bush and Bowman, the Super PAC operated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appeared to stay out of Omar's contest. However, The Intercept reported a last-minute effort by wealthy pro-Israel donors to raise six-figure sums in support of Samuels.

Omar, one of the first Muslims elected to the US Congress, has been a vocal critic of Israel's policies, particularly regarding the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Her stance on Israel has been a source of controversy throughout her tenure in office.

In February 2023, Omar was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee by the Republican-controlled House, citing previous comments she had made about Israel. Democrats decried the move as political retaliation for similar actions taken against Republicans when Democrats held the House majority in 2020.

The congresswoman's campaign received support from high-profile figures, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris. An internal poll conducted last month had suggested Omar held a 30-point lead over her challengers.

In the same primary elections, Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has served in the US Senate since 2007, also secured victory in her primary challenge.

The post Ilhan Omar defends her Congress seat in Minnesota primary appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush lost in the Democratic primary in the state of Missouri, becoming the second member of the progressive and anti-Israel group of lawmakers known as "The Squad" to be ousted from Congress.

The political news site "Politico" reported that this is also an achievement for pro-Israel groups, which, according to the site, invested large sums in funding more moderate candidates to challenge members of "The Squad." Wesley Bell, former Attorney General of St. Louis County, was elected in place of Bush after receiving a substantial sum of 8 million dollars for his campaign from a pro-Israel donor coalition.

"I am committed to serving the St. Louis region in Congress with integrity, transparency, and dedication," Bell said in a statement. "Together, we will tackle the challenges ahead and build a community where everyone has the opportunity to thrive."

Bush said, following the primary, that "At the end of the day, whether I'm a congresswoman or not, I'm still taking care of my people."

Cori Bush is the second member of "The Squad" to be ousted in the Democratic primaries. New York legislator Jamaal Bowman also lost to a more moderate opponent in June. Bowman accused Israel of genocide and became one of the strongest anti-Israel figures in Congress, alongside legislators such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.

The post Another Primaries blow to 'Squad' by pro-Israel democrat appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

"No way in hell," Rep. Ilhan Omar told The Messenger when asked whether she would attend President Isaac Herzog's July 19 address to Congress.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Omar, part of the so-called "Squad" and a frequent anti-Israel critic, claimed that she didn't even know that the Israeli president was scheduled to come to the Capitol.

Video: Herzog on Israel-US ties (Credit: GPO)

"There is no way in hell I am attending the joint session address from a president whose country has banned me and denied Rashida Tlaib the ability to see her grandma," Omar tweeted.

Tlaib was permitted to visit her grandmother but opted not to do so.

In part of a Twitter thread, she appeared to be aware that Israel's president was different than its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

"While executive power in Israel is vested in the prime minister and his cabinet, the president as head of state has traditionally served as a 'faithful policy ambassador' for the government in charge," she wrote, sharing a Haaretz opinion article.

"I respect the fact that unlike others in her party, she doesn't even pretend it's about Bibi. She just hates Israel! Openly!" tweeted Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner.

"It's like when AOC pulled out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin when she found out he was Israeli." he said about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "Isaac Herzog ran against Bibi as head of the Labor party, and nearly beat him too. Now he's trying to get Likud to water down judicial reform. If you claim to simply hate Bibi and want a more liberal Israel, Herzog is your hero. If you just hate Israel, you boycott him too."

If Omar really opposed Netanyahu, then she would attend the talk and clap along, but her problem is with Jews, not with the prime minster, Mandel added.

"So Omar is boycotting Herzog's address to Congress because of the Netanyahu judicial package that Herzog has worked tirelessly to try to prevent?" tweeted Robert David Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at City University of New York.

Bryan Leib, executive director of CASEPAC, tweeted that Omar is a leader of the boycott Israel movement in America. "Stop calling for the boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel, and I'm willing to bet you will be allowed to visit like thousands of other Muslims do every single week," he wrote.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The post Ilhan Omar mocked for plan to boycott Herzog address to Congress appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Scapegoating Jews for the problems in a society has always been a central feature of Jew-hatred.

Since well before the German agitator Wilhelm Marr first utilized the phrase "antisemitism" in the late 19th century (to make Jew-hatred sound race-based, scientific and academic), the formula for justifying antisemitism and inciting Jew-hatred has been to find what people hate, fear or are most upset about, and attach it to the Jewish people. Call it the "Jew-hatred incitement formula."

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

In the Middle Ages, the Jews were blamed for the spread of the Bubonic Plague. They were accused of poisoning wells and breeding spiders and vermin to spread the disease among non-Jews. This led to ethnic cleansing and widespread attacks against Jews.

In Czarist Russia, deprivation and economic hardship were regularly blamed on Jews, often with deadly consequences. So common was the scapegoating of Jews that between 1880 and 1920, pogroms (riots aimed at massacring Jews) exploded over and over again. And while hard data about the numbers of casualties is hard to come by conservative estimates are that more than 100,000 Jews were murdered during this period, with at least three times as many being wounded.

Hitler and the Nazis took full advantage of the history of antisemitism in Europe, as well as of the Jew-hatred incitement formula, by blaming Jews for the Great Depression, Germany's loss in World War I, the shortcomings of capitalism, and, with no concern for the apparent contradiction, the spread of communism.

Now, in the 21st century, the Holocaust has become distant history for many people, and the Jew-hatred incitement formula is once again being utilized as a political tool by Jew-haters, including, sadly, many members of the US Congress.

Considering also the historic obsession with focusing hate on Israel, the only Jewish country, it should surprise no one that some of these representatives would use this formula to incite hatred of Israel. What should be surprising is that so many of their fellow Democrats have turned a blind eye to the antisemitism coming from members of their own party.

On May 13, in a speech before Congress, Representative Ayanna Pressley compared the Israeli army to "violent white supremacists."

Not the Chinese Army, which rounds up Uyghur Muslims in the dark of night and takes them to slave-labor "re-education" camps. Not the Iranian security police, who literally hang homosexuals. Not the Pakistani army, which regularly beats and oppresses the Baloch people. No other countries were referenced by Pressley as a parallel to the horror and stain of Jim Crow racism – only the one Jewish state is shoehorned into that mendacious comparison.

Perhaps Pressley was inspired by fellow "Squad" member Representative Rashida Tlaib, who just two days earlier, in a speech delivered in front of the State Department decrying Israel's response to Hamas rocket fire, claimed: "What they are doing to the Palestinians is what they are doing to our Black brothers and sisters here."

Who are "they" in this statement? And how is it that Tlaib can claim that the Israeli response to Hamas firing rockets on Israel is connected to the struggles of black people in the United States?

The answer is that no one in the Democratic leadership challenged her effort to attach the one Jewish state to the more than 400 years of racism in America.

Later, on Aug. 1, in a speech at the 2021 Democratic Socialist of America National Convention, Tlaib took her use of the Jew-hatred incitement formula to the next level when she said:

"We also need to recognize, as I think about my family and Palestine that continue to live under military occupation and how that really interacts with this beautiful black city that I grew up in. … [Y]ou know, I always tell people cutting people off from water is violence, from Gaza to Detroit. And it's a way to control people, to oppress people. And it's those structures that we continue to fight against."

It wasn't enough that Tlaib attached legitimate water concerns in Michigan to fraudulent claims about Israel denying water to Palestinian Arabs – she took her speech to the Democratic Socialists yet another step further:

"I know that you all understand the structure that we've been living under right now is designed by those that exploit the rest of us for their own profit. I don't care if it's the issue around global human rights and our fight to free Palestine or to pushing back against those that don't believe in the minimum wage or those that believe that people have a right to healthcare and so much more. And I tell people, those same people, that if you open the curtain and look behind the curtain, it's the same people that make money and, yes, they do, off of racism, off of these broken policies. There is someone there making money, and you saw it!"

Appropriately, Tlaib gave this trope-laden speech in Detroit, where Henry Ford laid the groundwork with his infamous "International Jew" pamphlets, scapegoating Jews and deploying classic antisemitic tropes.

Three days later, on Aug. 4, another Squad member, Cori Bush, took the antisemitic baton from Tlaib, and in a speech before Congress invoked the Jew-hatred incitement formula to blame American aid to Israel for the crime, homelessness and poverty in her hometown of St. Louis. Not the $2 trillion the United States spent in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, including over $90 billion for the now-defunct Afghan Army. Not the $3 billion per year on average that the United States has provided to Egypt and Jordan since 1979. Not the near $35 billion that the United States spent just between 2016 and 2019 on maintaining its military presence in Japan and South Korea. Nor anything else in the annual federal expenditure of over $5 trillion.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!  

According to Bush, out of the more than $5 trillion per year that the US federal government spends, the only part responsible for the crime, homelessness and poverty in her congressional district is the part that goes toward America's military aid package for Israel.

The irony is that unlike our aid packages to other countries, almost every dime of the US aid package with Israel is spent in the US on American-made products and benefits the United States in numerous other ways, including shared technological innovations. Blaming the less than one-tenth of 1% of the annual budget used in connection with the one Jewish state for domestic problems like homelessness, crime and poverty is a blatant use of the Jew-hatred incitement formula.

As with Pressley's and Tlaib's use of the formula, not a single Democratic leader stepped forward to rebuke, let alone formerly censure or sanction, Bush for her overt antisemitism. Instead, most of the Democratic Party leadership is silent in the face of this incitement to Jew-hatred.

When another Squad member, Representative Ilhan Omar, received well-deserved criticism for her use of antisemitic tropes – her "all about the Benjamins" or multiple "dual loyalty" claims, and her recent comparison of Israel to the Taliban (though she has been remarkably quiet about the Taliban lately) – the Democratic leadership in Congress quickly backed down from any effort to censure Omar for hate speech (in contrast with how the Republican leadership responded to Marjorie Taylor Green's use of antisemitic conspiracy theories).

Even worse, Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi actually supported the dangerous deflection promoted by other Squad members like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bush, that people were criticizing Omar because of her gender, faith and ethnicity rather than her inflammatory words.

The math is clear. Not only is there a Jew-hatred incitement formula, but also there is a different formula for how Jew-haters are treated depending on whether their hate speech comes from the perceived left or right.

While David Duke is universally and rightly vilified for his Jew-hatred, Louis Farrakhan's anti-Jewish remarks and conspiracy theories get a pass from many members of Congress and other so-called progressives, who refuse to criticize or distance themselves from him. A Republican congresswoman who promotes dangerous conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds is sanctioned almost immediately, while Squad members continue to get a pass for regularly employing antisemitic tropes and using the age-old Jew-hatred incitement formula to blame Israel and the Jews for problems including unclean water, homelessness, racism in America, police brutality and poverty.

The problem is that whether incitement comes from the left or the right, it always leads to violence against Jews. The political ideology of the person engaging in antisemitism should have no bearing on our response to it. When people believe Jews are the cause of their problems, violence against Jews will follow.

We often hear from many of the same progressives who defend the Squad that "silence is violence" or "silence is complicity." They're right. If only they would take their own words to heart when it comes to their own silence in the face of the consistent use of the Jew-hatred incitement formula. Hopefully, they will do so before the cancer of this incitement spreads any further.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post 'The Squad' keeps inciting antisemitism, Democrats keep accepting it appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.