Ilhan Omar and Her Willing Dupes

The Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has received much criticism for her comment—in a speech last month at a Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet—that on, September 11, 2001, “some people did something.” But Abe Greenwald notes a revealing pattern in these remarks that has received less attention:

Omar issues calls for compassion out of one side of her mouth and appeals for contempt out of the other. She is, among other things, a run-of-the-mill flimflam artist. . . . If you set aside the canned baby talk of her speeches and articles, her actions don’t reveal much in the way of understanding and compassion. Or was she “showing up with love,” [to use one of her platitudes], when she claimed that Americans who support Israel are guilty of “allegiance to a foreign country” and that pro-Israel American leaders are somehow being paid off to support the Jewish state, and that—lest we forget—“Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”? Are all these examples of what she sees as a “mission as humans to love one another”?

Whenever Omar gets called out for her anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism, she makes a steady retreat back to her faux compassion and understanding, simultaneously vowing to “learn” from her actions and claiming innocent victimhood. It’s then that her liberal supporters seize on her sunny rhetoric and denounce all the criticism that’s come her way. That’s precisely what’s been happening since she was caught describing 9/11 as a null event.

The con artist will thrive as long her marks are willing to be conned.

Read more at Commentary

More about: anti-Americanism, Anti-Semitism, CAIR, Ilhan Omar, U.S. Politics

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF