Judea Pearl: An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi on Ilhan Omar
The following letter is an adaptation of remarks made at the sit-in protest in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington, DC, on March 14, 2019.‘Stand with Israel’ and ‘Stand with Ilhan' Chants Compete in Nancy Pelosi's Office
As president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and a lifelong Democrat, I urge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to act boldly and decisively on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s antisemitic bigotry.
Our late son, Daniel Pearl, was not an Islamophobe, nor a foreign agent or a trader in “Benjamins.” He was a principled American journalist, a champion of truth, and a relentless peace-seeker, who was murdered for being a Jew and a lover of Israel. I plead with Speaker Pelosi to rid the House of Representative of a new form of bigotry — directed again at Jews and lovers of Israel.
Words matter. And the hateful words pronounced by Rep. Ilhan Omar will continue to haunt and poison the future of American Jewry. However, we are concerned not merely with the harsh consequences of those words, but with the obsessive hatred that produced them, and the ultimate purpose for which they were enunciated — to erode American support for the State of Israel, the miracle that symbolizes Jewish history and Jewish aspirations.
We stand here to remind Speaker Pelosi of words that she has spoken many times in the past — that US support for Israel is not only a matter of mutual interest and shared values, but that American support of a homeland for the Jewish people is a moral imperative — a historical calling that should not be polluted with accusations of dual loyalty or greed.
The resolution passed by the House on March 9 condemns almost every form of hate on earth, except one — the anti-Zionist hatred waged against our brothers and
sisters in Israel. They are six and a half million refugees or descendants of refugees who have been denied normalcy for the past 70 years, besieged by hostile neighbors and confronted by daily existential threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
The anti-Zionist obsession that Rep. Omar now brings to the halls of Congress aims to strip these six and a half million people from sovereignty and abandon them, stateless, to the mercy of genocidal neighbors. Americans cannot allow such moral deformity to stain the halls of their representative government.
Pro-Israel demonstrators poured into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office Thursday, calling on her to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar and antisemitism. They were interrupted by two pink-clad “Stand with Ilhan” counter-protesters.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero of the National Conference of Jewish Affairs organized the sit-in and from outside Pelosi’s office, went after the speaker’s failure to condemn Rep. Omar’s most recent antisemitic comments or even antisemitism itself.
“She failed us. She had a chance to condemn Omar. She didn’t. She had a chance to condemn standalone, by itself, antisemitism. She didn’t,” said Rabbi Spero. “This was a turning point to stand up and do what was right, what was just, what was fair, and she didn’t.”
After the Rabbi’s comments outside of the office, protesters streamed into Pelosi’s front office.
The group began chanting, “Stand with Israel.”
A pink-clad counter-protester responded with shouts of “Stand with Ilhan” while brandishing a “Stop Islamophobia” sign.
Melanie Phillips: Jewish Book Week, Corbynised Democrats
Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the latest developments to roil our crazy world. On our agenda this week are what happened when I appeared at Jewish Book Week in London, and the “Corbynisation” of the US Democrats.
I talk about the discussion in which I took part at Jewish Book Week on Brexit, the rough reception given to myself and my fellow Brexiteer Maurice Glasman, and why I think that the majority support by bBritish Jews for remaining in the EU is profoundly and self-destructively wrong.
We go on to discuss the growing feeling among sections of the British Jewish community that it’s “time to leave”. Then we talk about the similarities between the Labour party’s crisis and the growing difficulties of the US Democrats, whose leadership has conspicuously failed to deal with the antisemitism displayed by certain new members of Congress. I make the point that, as has been observed from the French Revolution onwards and as I observed in my Times column, the Democrats are once again proving the truth of the old adage that “the revolution consumes its own”.
The Libertarian PodCast: Anti-Semitism on the Left
Richard Epstein grapples with a new wave of anti-semitism on the left, and explains why progressive notions of ‘tolerance’ often undermine pluralism.