The fiercely patriotic and morally scrupulous Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Hypocrisy) showed yet again Monday that she is a master at appealing to the Democratic Party’s core constituency. She tweeted: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice.” Yes, that’s right: she equated the United States and Israel, both of which go out of their way to avoid civilian casualties, with jihad terror groups that target civilians and use them as human shields. Where are people supposed to go for justice? Not to Ilhan Omar.
While it is entirely within the realm of possibility that the forces of the United States and Israel may at various times have committed “unthinkable atrocities,” there is one immediate difference between them and Hamas and the Taliban: in the U.S. and Israel, those who commit “unthinkable atrocities,” such as intentionally targeting civilians out of pure malice and hatred, with no conceivable military objective, are arrested and tried, and dishonorably discharged from the military if found guilty. Hamas and the Taliban, by contrast, celebrate people who target civilians among those who are considered the “enemy” as heroes. Go to Gaza, and you’ll find posters on walls celebrating jihad terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians, and streets and city squares named after the murderers.
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One particularly infamous example of this came during a recent conversation between an IDF official and a Palestinian in Gaza. “Listen, we are going to bomb the building,” said the IDF official, intending to give the Palestinians time to evacuate. “You want to bomb?” the Palestinian answered derisively, “Bomb whatever you want.” The IDF official persisted: “No, brother, we need to do everything we can so you don’t die.”
Then the conversation turned chilling:
Palestinian: We want to die.
IDF: But you have a responsibility for children’s lives.
Palestinian: If the children need to die, then they’ll die.
IDF: God forbid! God forbid! What, do you want to die?
Palestinian: This is how we reveal your cruelty.
Ilhan Omar herself couldn’t have said it better. If children were killed in that IDF strike, there is no doubt whatsoever that Omar would have added their number to her tally of Israeli “crimes against humanity,” without any public notice of the Palestinian refusal to move the children to safety.
And while Omar and her colleagues on the Left accuse Israel of targeting civilians, even Matthias Schmale, the head of the viciously anti-Israel United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said he “would not dispute” Israel’s statement that its airstrikes in Gaza during the recent conflict were “very precise,” and admitted that “they didn’t hit, with some exceptions, civilian targets.”
Palestinian Arabs and their supporters reacted furiously to Schmale’s statement, leading him to backtrack, to no avail: Hamas fumed that his observations were “a complete distortion in favor of the Zionists,” and Schmale was recalled from his post. Nonetheless, it remains true that while Hamas launches attacks from civilian areas, as even the UN has noted, in order to draw retaliatory fire that will hit civilians and thus be useful for propaganda purposes, Israel takes care to warn civilians of impending strikes and give them time to evacuate, a unique practice that led Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, to declare that the Israel Defense Forces were “the most moral army in the world.”
Much the same can be said about the United States. The military personnel who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were tried, convicted, and imprisoned. The U.S. in Afghanistan has protected girls going to school, while the Taliban has blown up those schools. The idea that the two are equivalent is hysterical leftist propaganda, not reality. So what is Ilhan Omar’s game? If anyone accuses her of hating the nation that gave her refuge and which she purports to represent in one of its highest legislative bodies, she will hotly deny the charge, accuse her accusers of the Leftist victimhood trifecta of “racism,” “misogyny,” and “Islamophobia,” and claim that she only criticizes America because she loves it and wants to improve it.
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However, Omar’s casual equivalence of the U.S. and Israel with two notorious jihad terror groups demonstrates her bad faith. She may not know — but in her position she has a responsibility to know — the differences between the groups she is equating. She has a responsibility not to retail propaganda, but to tell the truth to the American people. Instead, this.
In a sane world, even Democratic Party leaders would now be calling upon Omar to resign from the House of Representatives, and she would never be able to get elected to any office of the public trust ever again. Instead, she is likely to emerge from this more powerful and influential than ever. After all, smearing America and Israel is throwing red meat to the Democratic Party’s base.
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