Last year, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar visited Qatar, a major sponsor of Hamas and other Islamist groups, to attend the soccer World Cup. According to her recent financial disclosures, the emirate’s government paid for the trip. Zach Kessel comments:

Omar was not the only lawmaker on the trip, but her inclusion is ironic given her past statements about Israel. In a February 2019 tweet . . . Omar intimated that U.S. support for the lone democracy in the Middle East is predicated solely on money from Jewish donors. Soon after, speaking at a Washington, D.C. bookstore, Omar decried “the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

Of course, the “Israel lobby” is not the reason why the United States supports its closest ally in the region—public opinion is—and such arguments stink of Protocols of the Elders of Zion-adjacent conspiracy theories alleging that a Jewish cabal controls world politics. It’s also worth asking why Israel seems to catch all the flak whenever any progressive talks about supposed foreign influence on American politics.

If we turn our attention to foreign countries and their attempts to curry favor with U.S. lawmakers, Israel is . . . low on the list. In reality, nations such as Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and, yes, Qatar spend more money on American politics than Israel does.

Back to Omar’s World Cup trip. The congresswoman, who so often rails against Israel’s supposed human-rights violations, accepted gifts from a regime that sponsors terrorism and exports anti-American propaganda.

And that’s not to mention the country’s abysmal human-rights record, or its de-facto enslavement of thousands of foreign workers.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.