Counter-Currents
Reps. Rashida Tlaib (left) and Ilhan Omar, the leaders of the Democratic faction that is skeptical about America’s support for Israel.
1,804 words
Democrats are showing skepticism towards America’s Greatest Ally.™
Freshman Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a hijab-wearing Somali, ignited debate on Israel this year simply by noting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) tremendous influence. In February, Omar tweeted that AIPAC controls politicians with its financial contributions. “It’s all about the Benjamins baby!” she said in a since-deleted tweet. Her tweets drew outrage from the political establishment, which howled that the Somali Congresswoman’s views were anti-Semitic. Omar quickly issued an apology after pressure from the Democratic leadership.
A few weeks after that controversy subsided, Omar accused American Zionists of dual loyalty. Omar said of her comments:
I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee. I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel. I find that to be problematic and I am not alone. I just happen to be willing to speak up on it and open myself to attacks.
This time, she refused to apologize in spite of intense backlash from her fellow Democrats. The powerful Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey tweeted at Omar:
Throughout history, Jews have been accused of dual loyalty, leading to discrimination and violence, which is why these accusations are so hurtful. I believe we can debate important policy without using offensive, painful stereotypes.
Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic in which he said:
Representative Omar is repeating some of the ugliest stereotypes about Jews – tropes that have been unleashed by anti-Semites throughout history. She is casting Jewish Americans as the other, suggesting a dual loyalty that calls our devotion to America into question.
The House of Representatives drew up a condemnation of anti-Semitism in response to Omar’s statements, but altered it into a blanket rebuttal of “hate” following Democratic infighting. The condemnation denounced nearly all forms of religious and racial hatred – except hate directed at whites and Christians. Several Democrats, including media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, objected to the condemnation’s initial focus on Omar. “One of the things that is hurtful about the extent to which reprimand is sought of Ilhan is that no one seeks this level of reprimand when members make statements about Latinx + other communities,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
Omar was defended by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Also, other minority groups in Congress demanded that the resolution condemn criticism of their ethnic groups as well, which significantly broadened its scope. Jewish Democrats complained that it was necessary for the resolution to focus on Omar and anti-Semitism – to no avail.
Omar’s person of color status likely helped her withstand this controversy. House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a black Democrat, even claimed Omar’s victimhood status mattered more than the Holocaust. Clyburn said of Omar’s experience as a Somali refugee:
There are people who tell me, “Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.” “My parents did this.” It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.
The New York Times and CNN both said the controversy exposed a “generational divide” within the Democratic Party. The young progressive wing is leery of Israel, while the old establishment continues to wave the Israeli flag.
The divide was further showcased at last week’s AIPAC conference. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a gentile, proudly proclaimed his dual loyalty. “So, ladies and gentlemen, when someone accuses American supporters of dual loyalty, I say: accuse me,” Hoyer said to roaring applause.
Most Democratic leaders made an appearance at the AIPAC conference, including Nancy Pelosi. However, several Democratic presidential candidates chose not to go, including Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and Elizabeth Warren. All of these politicians are serious contenders to be the Party’s 2020 nominee – and they felt attendance was too big a risk. Sanders said he wouldn’t be at the AIPAC event because of “the platform AIPAC is providing for leaders who have expressed bigotry and oppose a two-state solution.” The rest of the pack didn’t explain their absence.
The powerful progressive group MoveOn urged candidates not to attend the conference. The group’s demand was based on AIPAC’s opposition to the Iran deal, its invitation to “Islamophobic” speakers, the injustices of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the group’s apparent refusal to condemn all the “White Nationalists” in President Trump’s circle.
Israel is arguably the most uncomfortable subject for Democrats these days. Many of their mega-donors, such as Haim Saban, are ardent Zionists. Saban claims he’s a “one issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” That single-minded focus, along with his generous contributions, convinced Hillary Clinton and many other powerful Democrats to be fervently pro-Israel.
The progressive base and non-whites do not share Saban’s enthusiasm. Only nineteen percent of blacks and twenty-two percent of Hispanics see Israel as America’s ally. Forty-three percent of whites see Israel as an ally. Young people also aren’t fond of Israel, with only twenty-five percent of those between 18-29 seeing Israel as an ally.
This explains why Omar’s comments were met with a shrug. Five years ago, she would have been censured, stripped of her committee assignments, and dealt a strong primary challenger by the party leadership. Today, she’s let off with barely a slap on the wrist and imagined a heroic martyr.
Democrat leaders are befuddled on how to confront the rising anti-Zionism within their party. The two leaders of this trend, Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, are non-white, Muslim, and women, making them impervious to white criticism. Both champion Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), while their party leaders want to outlaw the movement. Both represent the diverse coalition Democrats built to fight against white America. In spite of being Muslims, neither Omar nor Tlaib deviate from social progressivism. They both enthusiastically support LGBT causes, abortion, and women’s empowerment. One of Omar’s primary causes is fighting to allow trans women to compete in women’s weightlifting.
Omar and Tlaib are likewise fervent advocates for non-white racial grievances, and show no respect for the historic American nation or its founding peoples. Omar believes “white supremacy” is the greatest threat to America and wants the government to shut down White Nationalist websites. Both she and Tlaib want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and champion open borders. Indeed, the one notable difference between them and the party leadership is their attitude toward Israel.
Many on the Dissident Right cheered on Omar’s defiance of AIPAC and the rabid Zionism of the political establishment. It was refreshing to see a politician make basic critical points about Israel and not back down. The ensuing political firestorm demonstrated to the world how intensely loyal the establishment is to Israel. You can’t even point out AIPAC’s influence without being called an anti-Semite. It’s truly dystopian that a basic fact, which any reasonably intelligent person can deduce, cannot be said publicly.
The fight over Omar’s comments weakened this stranglehold and allowed for a conversation to take place – on the Left, at least. The American Right is a different story.
At the same time that Democrats have been fighting over Israel, Republicans have been doubling down on their support for it. President Trump routinely touts all of the things he’s done for Israel. Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. He withdrew from the Iran deal and rattles the saber at Israel’s main geopolitical foe. He safeguarded foreign aid for Israel in the latest budget bill. And he recently recognized the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory.
Trump has done more for Israel than he has for Middle America – and he’s proud of it. His party has hailed these decisions as terrific achievements and vowed to stand even more firmly by Tel Aviv. Republicans have led the censorship effort against BDS, and defended insidious laws that require state employees to swear allegiance to Israel. When it comes to Ilhan Omar, Trump and his party see her as the ultimate anti-Semite. They gleefully claimed that Omar and her “anti-Semitism” are a serious danger to America. They drew up their own condemnation that would specifically condemn her and anti-Semitism. Her opinions became the top conservative media story for weeks, all to paint Democrats as the real anti-Semites.
There are no prominent critics of Israel on the American Right, excluding Pat Buchanan. All Republicans enthusiastically support it and will never question AIPAC. This shows no signs of changing. The Trumpist insurgency challenged conservative orthodoxy on immigration, trade, and foreign policy, but reaffirmed – and in some ways strengthened – the party line on Israel. Indeed, Omar has only made Conservative Inc. and MAGA world more pro-Israel.
There are reasons not to get excited about the Left’s shifting attitudes on Israel. It’s not motivated by the desire to put America first and resist the demands of a foreign power. Rather, Leftists see Israel as an oppressive, racist white power that must be brought down. Anti-Zionism is part of their larger anti-white agenda. It doesn’t matter if Israeli Jews don’t see themselves as white and in fact agree with the Left’s push to transform the West. They oppress people of color and should elicit no support. And the shift on Israel doesn’t necessarily come with greater sense on foreign policy more generally. Omar herself supports intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad, an objective Likudniks also back.
The future leaders of the great rainbow coalition may say some reasonable things about Israel, but that’s the only good thing about them. They will never be our allies and are firmly committed to our people’s dispossession. It is right to admire Omar’s willingness to point out the obvious, but at the end of the day, she symbolizes the anti-white clown world we’ll have as a racial minority. Anti-Zionism is not a worthwhile consolation; our cause is far more important than Palestinian statehood.
The Left’s growing opposition to Israel has possibly convinced Netanyahu to side more closely with Western nationalists. He enjoys good relations with Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, and Jair Bolsonaro. He has encouraged Trump to build a wall. The old Likud mindset of “nationalism for me, but not for thee” is changing. Past Israeli leaders would have brandished the memory of the Holocaust to attack leaders like Orbán. Instead, Netanyahu invites him to Israel and praises his policies. Maybe he knows the only people who will support Israel are whites, and it’s not a good idea to replace them with Third-Worlders who want to drive the Jews into the sea.
The Dissident Right must carefully navigate this new political situation. We must assert that our foreign policy should be America and Europe first – not Israel first. But at the same time, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we have common cause with anti-Zionist Leftists. We don’t. Anyone who advances our dispossession is our enemy. Period.
11 comments
I have long claimed that Zionism is in the process of healing Jews of their pathological historic modus operandi. All of a sudden they have a nation to uphold, all of a sudden they know what it means to be an ethnic state with actual borders that need protecting, all of a sudden they know what it’s like to die for your country, and all of a sudden they see the utility of values and moral conduct when there is no host tribe to live off of. Although ostensibly using the United States as its moloch and guard dog, Zionists are increasingly understanding of honorable national and ethnic conduct and all the good and healthy qualities that awaken in a man once he has embraced nationalism. This is especially the case when looking at the anti-Zionist Jews of today, which are marked by their embrace of cultural Marxism and leftist degeneracy, who proudly proclaim the Jews to be an anti-nationalist race hard-coded to resist “group think” (i.e. basic social etiquette and brotherhood) which the Zionist-Nationalist branch is now gradually warming up to.
Far be it from me to trust Zionism unconditionally, but it does appear to solve at least some of the problems associated with Jewish rootlessness.
I note that New York Times Marxist Jew Krugman also identifies as “white.” Not making this up.
“In spite of being Muslims, neither Omar nor Tlaib deviate from social progressivism. They both enthusiastically support LGBT causes, abortion, and women’s empowerment…”
They don’t really, just as the blacks or the Mexicans, and even most of the Jews, are not really into LGBT, feminism and the like. They support these ideas for tactical reasons, merely because they are part of the anti-white coalition led by the white-liberals (who do indeed believe in these ideas for moral reasons). These minorities are united in their fear and hate of the whites and in their desire to suppress the white majority. For that goal they have (for now) to play along with the progressive vision of the white liberals. The non-white minorities “believe” in these ideas only to the extent they see them as useful to preserve the alliance with the true-believers-liberal-whites, only to the extent they see these ideas as harmful, creating division and weakening the whites in general, and serving to bash, culpabilise and repress the non-liberal whites in particular.
The Jews, who have played historically a huge role ideologically and financially in erecting and maintaining this “united in hate” anti-white coalition, still play today a leading role but have started recently to have problems with their coalition-partners because of the Israel-issue.
It seems that the hate, fear, and loathing of the “white-Christian males” are no longer enough to keep the minorities tightly together. Maybe because now the much weakened percentwise “white-majority” is no longer feared as before, or maybe because its all too apparent that is feared “white majority” is politically impotent, it is chronically unable to hang together so as to defend its white-interests. Thus the minorities have started fighting eachother.
It is a miscalculation from their part, I hope, and it needs to be encouraged.
Jews are hit now from inside the coalition by the true-believers white liberals driven by their honest leftist-ideological/moral reasons, and by the POCs for the strandard ethnic/racial reasons. Of course, in the case of POCs these reasons are disguised just as in the case of their hate for whites (that is, by being embedded in the morality-language of leftism and progressivism).
What should be the strategy of the white-identitarians in this case ?
I would say that the more internal division and conflict there is inside the anti-white coalition the better.
The Jews are now under pressure and they are resisting inside the coalition merely because they are the main financial and media backers of it. Otherwise the Jews would be booted from it and even re-labeled as being ‘privileged’ and ‘oppressors’, and being so both in Israel and US.
In UK, where the Muslim-minority is percentwise larger than in US and it has come to play an important role in the Labour-party, the Jews have already started to leave the Labour-party because of Labour’s “anti-semitism” and anti-zionism.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/18/uk/labour-mps-resign-gbr-intl/index.html
It is all for the better. Without the Jewish brains and money the anti-white coalition will be significantly weakened, and it will have less “fellow white people” to use as frontmen.
“Omar and Tlaib are likewise fervent advocates for non-white racial grievances, and show no respect for the historic American nation or its founding peoples. Omar believes “white supremacy” is the greatest threat to America and wants the government to shut down White Nationalist websites. Both she and Tlaib want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and champion open borders.”
This is the real issue. Most reactions are of the “oy vey, its annudah’ shoah,” variety. In reality, “it’s another potato famine, begorrah.”
White nationalists should rhetorically (but not financially) support Zionism 100%. I have believed this for decades. Isn’t Zionism Jewish ethnonationalism, and isn’t Israel more or less an ethnostate? Other than the Nazi contingent, who think Jews should be planetarily exterminated, don’t most White nationalists want a Jewish homeland, a true home for the Jews OUTSIDE of our own fatherlands? When the most fervent (and fecund) Jews are demanding that ALL Jewry everywhere belong to and in Israel, is that not a double ideological gift to our side? We can encourage Jews to return to their “true ancestral AND religious homeland” (according to religious Zionism, Israel belongs to the Jewish people both theologically and nationalistically), while simultaneously using the example of Israel to justify our own equal ethnostatist demands.
Supporting Israel also helps to drive a wedge between Whites and Muslims – arguably a far more pressing issue than anything to do with irrelevant Jewry. White patriots MUST NOT ALLOW ISLAM TO BECOME NORMALIZED IN THE WEST – EVER. Muslims have no home or place here. We must subtly encourage Islamist terrorism and violence, not via our own violence (eg, New Zealand), which only empowers White race traitors, but by our uncompromising rhetoric. A cycle of violence leading ultimately to continent-wide European civil race war will be the only way that Muslims (and undoubtedly all other racial aliens) will ever come to be removed from Europe (though I support the creation of a North American White ethnostate, no one should fail to understand that our true racial state is all of Europe). The more we support Israel and the War on Muslim Terror, the more we alienate Muslims; the more they will attack us as a consequence; and then the more the Muslims alienate themselves from ordinary diversity-brainwashed Whites.
Finally, while we should be unyielding that WN is a movement BY Whites and FOR Whites, I cannot help thinking that there are emerging possibilities for tactical alliances with Jewry. Many WNs think Jews are bent on White destruction as a “positive good”. Some like Soros certainly are. But I have never believed this about most. I have known many Jews, and they push diversity for two reasons: first, many really do believe their own pablum (ie, are sincere liberals), and second, others push it to normalize themselves and prevent hypothesized future neo-Nazi movements.
Is there not an opening here for genuine “ethno-statesmanship”? It is not in Jewish-Zionist interests to continue supporting mass immigration. Almost every Jew I know recognizes this. Why can’t there be some tit for tat negotiations: Whites will rhetorically and perhaps even strategically support Israel (which helps poison White-Muslim relations), provided Jews stop supporting Western immigration?
A true statesman could make some reconciling of mutual self-interest like this happen.
WNs don’t need to “justify” our own political interests by appealing to a sense of fair play (persuading who exactly?). ‘But look at Israel, they get to ethnostate so why can’t we?’ The antiwhite pig pile of minorities doesn’t care, nor do the Jews, nor the guilt ridden liberal whites. Nobody cares. Our justification for our sovereignty and rights as nations of the white race will derive from our conviction in our own ideas and political power, not because we asked for what only seemed fair. Fairness is a mindset for victims and children.
The ethnostate is a rhetorical oddity that only exists because people have largely been deluded about what a nation is. It is not some new ideology that we have to apply universally to justify applying it for ourselves, or support where it already exists, such as Israel. I’ve seen such comments among WNs online as ‘I support ethnostates for every group, not just ours’, again, as if that matters to anyone. It’s an unnecessary bit of self-censorship, as if to preemptively say “just in case anyone thinks we’re supremacists or Nazis, definitely not, no sir”. We believe what we do because of who we are and what we want for ourselves as a group; how other groups do or don’t organize themselves is only relevant to us as politics, not principles. Ethnostate for me, whatever suits for thee.
Nothing that White Nationalists can do will have any impact on the continuation of a Jewish state in Palestine. So, other than some virtue-signaling about ideological “consistency” – which impresses no one – offering even rhetorical support to Jewish nationalism gains whites nothing and costs whites plenty.
It’s as if every time Jews are weak on an issue, just like typical conservatives, ostensible white nationalists want to pull punches when there is even a slight chance one of those punches may actually land.
Why all of a sudden cold feet when we’re about to land a hit against our most formidable enemy?
I’ve noticed an uptick in comments lately from people claiming that white liberation is best achieved by following some conventional Conservatism Inc. position, whether that’s fighting hamburger socialism, voting straight-ticket GOP, supporting Israel, etc.
This piece overlooks the fact that the Ilhan Omar controversy occurred in the midst of heightened tensions between blacks and Jews. Indeed, tensions haven’t been this bad since the early 1990s.
Around the same time Omar made her statements:
*CNN summarily fired Marc Lamont Hill for giving a speech on Palestinian liberation at the UN
*Jews pressured a civil rights organization to retract an award to Angela Davis
*Alice Walker promoted a David Icke book in the New York Times
Each incident caused serious heartburn in Jew media about the bad relations between blacks and Jews. This is precisely why the Dissident Right needs to amplify the critique of these black people!
One person in the comments said we need to support Zionism because it drives a wedge between Whites and Muslims. The more important wedge is the one growing between blacks and Jews. The more fires Jews have to put out, the better.
If pro-whites are serious that Jews are anti-white and are the intellectual and financial core of the anti-white movement, it would make sense for pro-whites to leverage this divide. Whites should support BDS and should highlight the double standards of Zionist Jews.
What weakens Zionist Jews in Israel weakens Zionist Jews in America (and Europe.) The fewer friends Zionist Jews have in America, the weaker the anti-white coalition is as a whole.
You strike where the enemy is weak, at their weakest point. The weakest point of Jewish power is their hypocritical support for an apartheid state in Palestine; their support for Jewish nationalism while attacking White Nationalism.
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