The House could vote as early as today on whether to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. The stated reason is that she cannot be an objective decisionmaker in foreign affairs given her anti-Semitism and her bias against Israel. Omar doesn’t defend on the merits, as far as I can see from news accounts, but instead claims she is the victim of Islamophobia. I checked her official website. There’s nothing on there addressing her bias against Israel, so playing the Islamophobia card is her whole case.
Sorry, Representative Omar, not good enough, not even close. The main voice for Islam in America – the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently came out with a statement that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ require proof of bigoted intent. CAIR saidpeople should not be lightly accused of ‘Islamophobia’ without evidence they are bigots. CAIR confirmed this position in a press release.
Where’s your proof, Representative Omar, that everyone who is set to vote against you today harbors bigoted intent? Where’s your proof this is about bigoted intent and not your inability to be impartial toward an important U.S. ally, Israel? She has no proof, so her claims of ‘Islamophobia’ can be thrown in the trash where they belong.
It’s not surprising she’s playing the ‘Islamophobia’ card on this. She has a one-track mind about Islamophobia. She sponsored a bill to monitor and combat Islamophobia that passed the House in 2021. The bill did not attempt to define ‘Islamophobia’, but that’s where the rub is.
CAIR is currently promoting a bill in New Jersey that would define ‘Islamophobia’ for purposes of establishing intent for hate crimes or violations of any anti-discrimination law, policy, or regulation. It’s a bad idea, starting with the free speech problems it would create. An anti-sharia activist I know wrote a letter to a New Jersey state senator stating, among other things:
This legislation would criminalize University cultural studies, political science, and criminal justice studies textbooks, discussions, research papers, theses, and dissertations. For example, see page 11, 38, and 93 of the attached text, The Criminal Investigator-Intelligence Analyst’s Handbook of Islam, for World View discussions that would run afoul of Para 11 and 13…. This legislation criminalizes scholarship and public debate.
Shutting down free speech is only problem with going after ‘Islamophobia’. Defining ‘Islamophobia’ was under consideration in Britain, but the government recently abandoned the attempt. B’nai Brith points out the problems with trying to define the term: “The group says the broad definition could lead to students or staff being punished for expressing dislike for the Republic of Iran’s persecution of LGBTQ people or restrictions placed on women in Saudi Arabia.” British government officials said defining the term would also hamper counterterrorism operations and stoke community tensions. New Jersey lawmakers should reject the attempt in their state that would only serve to shield human rights abuses.
And members of Congress should reject Ilhan Omar’s Islamophobia bill, should she offer it again, for the same reasons.
I have another problem with Ilhan Omar. She is the one who famously dismissed 9/11 as merely “some people did something.” Until she owns up to the fact this was an Islamic jihad attack, carried out under standard Islamic doctrine found in the Quran, and squarely condemns the attack for killing 3,000 people, she should not be serving on ANY congressional committee. In fact, she shouldn’t be in Congress at all.
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