Pelosi Says House Will Condemn All Hate as Anti-Semitism Debate Overshadows Congress By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/politics/
Democratic leaders are planning to put a far-reaching resolution condemning anti-Semitism and bigotry on the House floor for a vote on Thursday, hoping to put to rest the internal uproar that erupted after Representative Ilhan Omar insinuated that backers of Israel exhibit dual loyalty.
“I see everything as an opportunity,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday morning. “This is an opportunity once again to declare as strongly as possible opposition to anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim statements,” and “white supremacist attitudes.”
The resolution, released hours after Ms. Pelosi spoke, states that “whether from the political right, center, or left, bigotry, discrimination, oppression, racism, and imputations of dual loyalty threaten American democracy and have no place in American political discourse.” It also evokes white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Va., Charleston, S.C., and Pittsburgh as well as numerous attacks on Muslims and mosques.
The carefully-crafted measure — one Democratic aide called it a “kitchen sink resolution” — capped an emotional week for Democrats, who found themselves divided along racial and religious lines as they debated how to respond to Ms. Omar’s remarks. And while Democrats are almost certain to vote overwhelmingly in favor of it, the resolution’s all-inclusive approach disappointed some Jewish Democrats, who had pushed for a measure that would solely condemn anti-Semitism.
“We are having this debate because of the language one of our colleagues, language that suggests Jews like me who serve in the United States in Congress and whose father earned a purple heart fighting the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, that we are not loyal Americans,” Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida, said Thursday morning on the House floor.
“Why are we unable to singularly condemn anti-Semitism?” Mr. Deutch asked. “Why can’t we call it anti-Semitism and show we’ve learned the lessons of history?”
Other Jewish Democrats were less critical. Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the Budget Committee chairman, used the moment castigate Republicans seeking to drive a wedge between Jewish voters and their traditional political home, the Democratic Party.
“I know she now better understands the pain and history of the use of anti-Semitic tropes, as well as the weight of her words as a member of Congress,” Mr. Yarmuth said of Ms. Omar. “But the flood of sanctimony from Republicans who tacitly condone deliberate bigotry at the highest levels of their party and of this government is the height of hypocrisy.”
The resolution, drafted primarily by Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is Jewish and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Cedric Richmond, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, supplants an earlier one that was almost wholly focused on anti-Semitism.
As she announced the vote, Ms. Pelosi took a shot at President Trump and his equivocal statements after the deadly white supremacist march in Charlottesville: “The president may think there are good people on both sides, we don’t share that view.”
The debate over anti-Semitism and bigotry has dominated discussion on Capitol Hill all week, overshadowing the Democrats’ agenda and giving Republicans an opening to attack the democracy reform bill while Democrats were busy fighting among themselves. Democrats are hoping to get the fight over Ms. Omar out of the way before they vote on one of their signature pieces of legislation, the democracy reform bill known as H.R. 1, on Friday.
Ms. Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has been fending off accusations of anti-Semitism for weeks. But she herself has been the target of Islamophobic bigotry. After leading Jewish lawmakers pushed for a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, liberals and African-American lawmakers pushed back, insisting that Ms. Omar had been unfairly targeted and that any resolution had to condemn all types of bigotry.
“It’s not about her, it’s about these forms of hatred,” Ms. Pelosi said about the resolution.
Tensions boiled over in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats on Wednesday that pitted older Jewish Democrats who want a forthright statement condemning anti-Semitism against younger liberals who say the House has been giving Mr. Trump and Republicans a pass for years over bigoted comments far worse than Ms. Omar’s.
The resolution grew out of Ms. Omar’s suggestion last week that pro-Israel activists were pushing “for allegiance to a foreign country” — a remark that infuriated leading Jewish members of the House, who say it played into the anti-Semitic trope of “dual loyalty.”
The resolution lays out in detail the “insidious and pernicious history” of accusations dual loyalty, including discrimination against Muslims in the wake of 9/11, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, questions that President John F. Kennedy faced about his Roman Catholic faith and the Dreyfus affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery captain, was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background.
It also says: “White supremacists in the United States have exploited and continue to exploit bigotry and weaponize hate for political gain, targeting traditionally persecuted peoples, including African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants, and others with verbal attacks, incitement, and violence,” the resolution states in condemning bigotry in all forms.
The vote on the measure comes just weeks after Ms. Omar apologized for tweeting that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby,” a reference to $100 bills that critics said echoed a common anti-Semitic belief that Jewish money is controlling foreign policy.
Ms. Pelosi stopped short of asking for another apology from Ms. Omar, saying, “It’s up to her to explain. But I do not believe that she understood the full weight of her words.”
But if Ms. Pelosi thought she was smoothing over divisions among Democrats, another member of leadership — Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip, gave critics a new cause with an interview in The Hill newspaper. In it, he was quoted as saying that Ms. Omar, who fled war in her native Somalia as a child and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, had more personal experiences with bigotry than those who are generations removed from the Holocaust, the Japanese internment camps of World War II and the other violent episodes of the past.
“I’m serious about that,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Clyburn as saying. “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.’ ‘My parents did this.’ It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.”
Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, one of two Jewish Republicans, responded, “Whip Clyburn’s comments are disgusting, making light of the Holocaust and minimizing its massive importance and impact on victims’ families, survivors, and the world.”
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