Pelosi Says House Will Condemn All Hate as Anti-Semitism Debate Overshadows Congress
The debate over anti-Semitism and bigotry has dominated discussion on Capitol Hill all week, overshadowing the Democrats’ agenda and giving Republicans an opening to attack the democracy reform bill while Democrats were busy fighting among themselves. Democrats are hoping to get the fight over Ms. Omar out of the way before they vote on one of their signature pieces of legislation, the democracy reform bill known as H.R. 1, on Friday.
Ms. Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has been fending off accusations of anti-Semitism for weeks. But she herself has been the target of Islamophobic bigotry. After leading Jewish lawmakers pushed for a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, liberals and African-American lawmakers pushed back, insisting that Ms. Omar had been unfairly targeted and that any resolution had to condemn all types of bigotry.
“It’s not about her, it’s about these forms of hatred,” Ms. Pelosi said about the resolution.
Tensions boiled over in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats on Wednesday that pitted older Jewish Democrats who want a forthright statement condemning anti-Semitism against younger liberals who say the House has been giving Mr. Trump and Republicans a pass for years over bigoted comments far worse than Ms. Omar’s.
The resolution grew out of Ms. Omar’s suggestion last week that pro-Israel activists were pushing “for allegiance to a foreign country” — a remark that infuriated leading Jewish members of the House, who say it played into the anti-Semitic trope of “dual loyalty.”
The resolution lays out in detail the “insidious and pernicious history” of accusations dual loyalty, including discrimination against Muslims in the wake of 9/11, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, questions that President John F. Kennedy faced about his Roman Catholic faith and the Dreyfus affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery captain, was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background.
It also says: “White supremacists in the United States have exploited and continue to exploit bigotry and weaponize hate for political gain, targeting traditionally persecuted peoples, including African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants, and others with verbal attacks, incitement, and violence,” the resolution states in condemning bigotry in all forms.