Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –
This week The Southern Poverty Law Center reported from Hatewatch that Trump administration official Stephen Miller spent the period before 2016 sending white supremacist messages to the Breitbart Nazi-lite site. He was upset about the turn against Confederate symbols after the massacre in a church by Dylann Roof, and he forwarded stories from sites that promote the conspiracy of the Great Replacement that posits that rich American Jews are bringing in Latino and other immigrants to work cheaply and “replace” the white population. Miller is of Jewish heritage.
As the Washington Post wrote this week, last April 8 Rep. Omar had called Miller a racist, and had received an avalanche of abuse from Republican Party members. Ironically, one charge against her was anti-Semitism because she critiqued a Jewish member of the Trump administration.
So now it is anti-Semitic to criticize the tiny group of white supremacist Jews for their Nazi-like views? Isn’t that like, a mobius strip fallacy or something?
Today seems like a good day to remember that in April, @IlhanMN was smeared as an anti-Semite by the right for *days* for tweeting that Stephen Miller is a white nationalist
Here's a Breitbart article on the topic.https://t.co/NqONEdbN1N
— courtney hagle (@CourtneyHagle) November 12, 2019
Omar told CNN in September, before it became clear whether the evidence would emerge to impeach Trump, and before support for the impeachment inquiry in the general public outweighed opposition: “It’s not if we are going to impeach this president, it’s when.”
This is the kind of Islamophobic abuse she had to suffer for saying so:
Hey Akmed, impeachment is based on FACTS not feelings and not hearsay! Give it a rest and go back to Somalia!
— Dan Muller (@DanMull64774209) November 13, 2019
But after the testimony of career foreign service officer David Holmes on the phone call between Trump and Sondland that he heard, I don’t think there is any doubt that the House will impeach.The House of Representatives’ impeachment is like an indictment, and the real trial is held in the Senate. Whether the Republican Party in the Senate, which increasingly and disturbingly resembles Mussolini’s Black Shirts, can bring itself to remove their Il Duce is unknown but unlikely.
This week The Associated Press and PBS reported that the Trump administration has caged nearly 70,000 undocumented immigrant children this year, causing severe emotional trauma. No other country has caged so many children. Before Trump, undocumented families were not typically separated because the adults were not treated as criminals and jailed (children can’t be incarcerated in adult cells and so have to be separated).
Rep. Omar had said, “Each and every day. We are under threat by an administration that would rather cage children than pass comprehensive immigration reform.”
This week, Venice was inundated a harbinger of the future as human-caused climate change drives sea levels ever higher and warms the seas, increasing the moisture in the air above coastal cities.
Rep. Omar supports the Green New Deal and touts its benefits for Minnesota.
I could go on and on– her support for labor unions and progressive politics. And she is right about the need for Palestinian human rights, too, despite the way that the Israel lobbies tried to smear her for saying so.
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Bonus video: