RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Historic” political figures may be well worth celebrating, but only if they are something other than ignorant and ill-tempered human wrecking balls. “Historic” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” Barack Obama’s “historic” tenure as our nation’s first black president, for instance, was tainted by the somewhat inconvenient fact that he is a lifelong Marxist who has spent all of his adult years allying himself with America-hating revolutionaries like Bill Ayers and Berhardine Dohrn, and with bilious Jew-haters like Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Al Sharpton. When Hillary Clinton made her own “historic” attempt to become our first female president, her campaign was tarnished by the similarly unpleasant fact that she was the most corrupt presidential candidate who ever breathed. And when Keith Ellison “historically” became the first Muslim elected to Congress, he brought with him a long history of allegiance to the most prolific Jew-hater in living memory, Louis Farrakhan.

And now, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, have stepped forth to become our latest “historic” icons.

Tlaib, who served in the Michigan state legislature from 2009-15, has cultivated noteworthy ties to a number of radical Islamist organizations. In 2009, for instance, she received a Community Service Award from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group she has praised for its “invaluable” and “vital” “advocacy efforts” on behalf of “those who don’t have the resources to defend themselves.” Moreover, Tlaib has spoken at banquets and conferences hosted by CAIR, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Circle of North America. She also has received numerous financial donations from individuals affiliated with CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Most of these entities are affiliated with the notorious Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic supremacist organization and a fountainhead of extremism/terrorism.

In an October 2015 post in her Twitter account, Tlaib linked to an article lauding Black Lives Matter activists in Chicago for supporting “a Palestinian woman threatened with deportation.” The woman in question was Rasmea Odeh, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who had played a central role in a deadly 1969 bombing in Jerusalem.

A proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Tlaib said in February 2018 that she planned to openly run for Congress as a socialist who would help voters understand that “the labor movement was founded on socialism.”

When asked to describe a proper “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Tlaib replies: “One state. It has to be one state. Separate but equal does not work.” In other words, she supports the permanent dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state, in favor of a new nation wherein a Palestinian majority would dominate the Jewish minority. Three weeks ago — on her first official day as a new Member of Congress — someone in Tlaib’s entourage affixed, to a wall map in the congresswoman’s office, a piece of paper bearing the name “Palestine” along with an arrow pointing to the spot on the map where Israel was located.

That same day, Tlaib told a raucous crowd of supporters that Donald Trump’s days as President were numbered: “We’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherfu**er!” One particularly notable attendee at Tlaib’s swearing-in ceremony was Abbas Hamideh, the executive director and co-founder of Al-Awda, an organization that advocates the permanent dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state. Over the years, Hamideh has repeatedly stated his belief that “Israel does not have a right to exist”; equated Zionism with Nazism and the genocidal ideology of ISIS; and voiced support for the terrorist organization Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Tlaib’s fellow freshman in Congress, the Somali-born Ilhan Omar, is a former Muslim Students Association member and a lifelong anti-Semite. On November 16, 2012 – just a few days after Gaza-based Hamas terrorists had launched more than 150 deadly rockets into the Jewish state, prompting an Israeli military response – Omar tweeted that “the apartheid Israeli regime” had “hypnotized the world” in order to conceal its own “evil doings.”

During her tenure as a senior policy aide to Minneapolis City Council member Andrew Johnson from 2013-15, Omar acknowledged that she was a friend of several young men who, several years earlier, had joined al-Shabab, a Somali jihadist terror group allied with al-Qaeda.

In 2016 Omar ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives on the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ticket. Soon after her victory in the primary that summer, she faced highly credible allegations that – in an effort to perpetrate immigration fraud and/or student loan fraud – she had married her own brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in 2009 and was still legally his wife.

A few days after her election to the Minnesota House in November 2016, Omar wrote a letter asking a Minneapolis judge to be lenient in sentencing nine young Somali-born men who had been found guilty of attempting to join the terrorist group ISIS. In her letter, Omar maintained that long prison terms would ultimately lead to the tragedy of unproductive lives and unrealized potential for the perpetrators. “The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people,” she explained. “It is the consequence for [sic] alienation.”

In 2016 as well, Omar stated that she was in favor of completely divesting the University of Minnesota of its Israel bonds. The following year, she opposed a bill designed to counter economic boycotts targeting the Jewish state. While making her case against the legislation, Omar likened Israel to apartheid South Africa and said: “I know a little bit about discrimination. I face it every single day. I carry multiple identities that are constantly, constantly being discriminated against.”

In 2017, Omar was one of only two Minnesota House members (out of 129) to vote against a bill to allow life-insurance companies to deny payouts to the beneficiaries of people who died while committing acts of terrorism. That same year, she was one of just four Minnesota House members to oppose legislation that would make it a felony for parents to subject their daughters to female genital mutilation, a common practice in some Muslim cultures.

A few days after Omar had won her congressional race this past November, the publication Muslim Girl reported that Omar “believes in and supports the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions] movement,” a Hamas-inspired initiative aimed at crippling and destroying the Jewish state economically. When the editor of a local Jewish news organization asked Omar about her stance on BDS, she replied in a text message: “My position has always been the same. I believe and supports (sic) the BDS movement, and have fought to make sure people right to support it isn’t criminalized.”

With each passing election cycle, the left’s incessant promotion of identity politics is yielding ever-more abundant harvests of bitter fruit in the form of race-baiting, Jew-hating, rabidly intolerant big-government Democrats in public office. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are merely the latest hideous incarnations of this trend. If the constituents of the many self-identified “victim” groups that comprise the Democratic base persist in refusing to vote in political elections on some basis other than their shared self-identification as eternally aggrieved, tribalistic “victims,” then they themselves shall be the ones who will finally bring to fruition Abraham Lincoln’s haunting prediction: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”