Ilhan Omar and Anti-Semitism

Ilhan Omar is the epitome of everything Trump hates, she is a Somali, a woman and she is also a Muslim …

Democracy – as we have been taught during our academic years – is a political order whereby one is allowed to voice their opinions about the matters they believe in or not believe in. But the United States perhaps has a very different meaning of democracy, or so it seems. One is only supposed to state what is in their country’s interest. The upshot of this ideology was recently unleashed when Ilhan Omar, a Somali Muslim refugee, who recently took her oath of office as a Democratic Representative in the US Congress, expressed through twitter how the pro-Israel lobby puts pressure on members of Congress to show “allegiance to a foreign country” for which she later apologized. To quote her exact words, “Anti Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be willing to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity; this is why I unequivocally apologize.”

“At the same time, I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The National Rifle Association (NRA) or the fossil fuel industry. It’s gone too long and we must be willing to address it.” Now anybody with a sane mind and rational perspective would vouch for the fact that what Ilhan Omar said was just a “fair criticism” of the harmful role lobbyists play in policy making and not bigotry. Not only this, the newly elected congresswoman is also being compared to the 9/11 terrorists by the republicans and called as ‘filth’ by an advisor to the President only for wanting to talk about how inequitable it is to have political influence of a foreign country which in turn convinces one to become biased and intolerant towards a certain race.

Professor Gilbert Achcar: Never Again

The lessons from Auschwitz must be understood from a radically anti-nationalistic, anti-racialist and anti-ethnocentric perspective.

For a person of Jewish descent, there are two ways of drawing lessons from the Nazi genocide of the European Jews: one leads to saying “Never again to us, the Jews”; the other “Never again” tout court.

The former conclusion stems from a narrow ethnic outlook, reversing the Nazi perspective by taking the side of “the Jews” against the rest of the world. In both cases, “the Jews” are singled out as a particular group of people with extraordinary features: whereas the Nazis saw them as the embodiment of evil to the point of trying to annihilate them, the holders of the Jewish ethnocentric perspective believe that the defence of “Jewish” interests – which like all brands of collective interest, whether national or class or whatever, is a hotly disputed notion, with rare occasional unanimity on what it could mean – is a value superseding all others. In the name of this defence, they end up denying the humanity of the victims of Israel, the purported “State of the Jews”, just as most oppressors throughout history have denied their victims’ humanity.

The latter conclusion – “Never again” tout court – is the only true repudiation of the Nazi Weltanschauung; not its symmetric reversal, but a radical rejection of all its underlying assumptions.