Two Stories That Back Ilhan Omar's Perspective

Another week, and more disinformation about the place I'm from (as represented by a person from here, Ilhan Omar).

In my opinion, this is a concerted campaign against her because she is Muslim, a woman, black, an immigrant/refugee, and wearer of a hijab. I was thinking about all of these "strikes" against her, relative to others who have come before her or stand beside her: for instance, Keith Ellison was black and Muslim, but American-born and male; Rashida Tlaib doesn't wear a hijab and is not black or an immigrant, as far as I know (and will still get her share in the future, I'll bet).

Islamophobia is a long word and a phenomenon not even acknowledged as existing by many in this country, but that makes its insidious force all the more powerful. Many others in Congress and public life have decried the role of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group Omar is discussing, and even used basically the same words — but no one cared. My own Congress member, Betty McCollum of St. Paul, has publicly feuded with AIPAC, and no one says McCollum is anti-Semitic. But McCollum isn't wearing a hijab and her skin isn't brown. She didn't come from Somalia through a refugee camp. She doesn't have Omar's high profile either; she's a back-bencher or a plugger (depending on how charitably you want to frame it).

Here are two stories I've read over the past couple weeks from unassailable sources who back up Omar's (and McCollum's) critique of AIPAC and Israeli influence in the U.S.

The first is from Ady Barkan. I know him as a disability rights activist who laid his body on the line over health care access in recent years. He has ALS and is organizing until his last breath, literally. But before he became ill, he was a more run-of-the-mill political worker, and in that role encountered AIPAC. He wrote about it on Twitter (where I first saw it) and then in The Nation, quoted here. It was his first political campaign in 2006, when he was working for an underdog Democrat in deep-Red Ohio:

About a month after winning the Democratic primary, we were struggling to gain attention or money. Nobody gave us a chance to win. One political-action organization, however, did reach out to us.... It was AIPAC.

A local [AIPAC] volunteer leader...[told us] he would like to raise $5,000 for our campaign and would also like to see [the candidate] take a public stance on two relatively obscure issues relating to Iranian sanctions, arms sales to Israel, or some other such topic that very few voters in the district cared about.

...We both felt icky about doing it; it was too hawkish and too quid pro quo. But we were desperate. So I read the AIPAC position papers that the volunteer left with us, I wrote up a statement saying that [the candidate] supported AIPAC’s stance on its two pet issues of the cycle, she approved it, I posted it online, and the checks promptly arrived in the mail thereafter. We didn’t win, but the money helped us get close.

It was, I am ashamed to say, definitely about the Benjamins.

There's more where that came from in Barkan's Nation article.

The second story is from Steven Thrasher on Twitter. He's soon to be Daniel Renberg Chair at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, and is a past staff writer for the Village Voice and writer for many other publications since then.

I haven't told my story for awhile about how the Israeli government tried to intimidate me.

In 2010, I wrote a story for the Village Voice about a young woman named Emily Henochowicz, a Jewish American college student who was studying art at Cooper Union. Emily was really bright and interesting and, as an artist, she was obsessed with eyeballs—she drew them, she loved them, and she even went out on Halloween as a giant eyeball.

Well, Emily decided to do a semester abroad at the Cooper Union's program in Tel Aviv, where she became dismayed at the conditions of the Palestinians and especially at the separation wall when she saw them up close. And when a flotilla of aid to Palestine resulted in the death of several people, Emily went to a protest in Israel.

She was shot in the face with a tear gas canister by an Israeli soldier and one of her eyes was blown out of her head; she was left with one eye, like one of her artworks.

I wrote up a profile about her with the photographer CS Muncy, and it was published in our little Village Voice, then in its dying years.

So a couple days after we publish, the Israeli consulate called for and RECEIVED a meeting with the editor in chief of the Voice—at which the consulate suggested I was bad at my job (I wasn't), was wrong about what I'd written (I wasn't) that I should be fired...and that if I wasn't fired, anything I wrote should be run past the Israeli consulate in the future before publication.

(The editor in chief who took the meeting was not Jewish, but another editor who was Jewish tried to intervene on my behalf, tried to stop it from ever happening and defended me rigorously. I mention this because while Zionism and Judaism are often conflated, they shouldn't be.)

I wasn't fired, but the tactic was meant to intimidate me. It was an absurd episode; why on earth should a foreign government have any say in what I write? At a dying alt-weekly, no less?

And while I haven't ever been similarly threatened by another government in that way, I sure as shit have been intimidated by American municipal and state governments repeatedly.

When I've covered the deaths of Eric Garner in NY, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Mike Brown in Ferguson and Oscar Grant in Oakland, I have repeatedly had police threaten me —both as person and as a reporter—with tear gas, brandished guns, handcuffs and the specter of arrest.

None of this is appropriate, in Israel or in the United States. I have been thinking about two Black women as I reflect on these events, nearly a decade apart. Angela Davis teaches us how connected the policing is from Ferguson to Baltimore—and how the tactics of control and intimidation circulate across the U.S. border, as the U.S. sends our police to train in Israel. And Toni Morrison (whose excellent new book THE SOURCE OF SELF REGARD I am currently reading) teaches us that fascism and racism will always try to control not just dissent but any documentation of dissent, critical thought, and writers who try to speak. 

The Israeli government did not want to Palestinians to get food from the flotilla, nor for anyone in Israel for protest that, nor for an American writer to even pen a story about it 4,000 miles away in a dying alt-weekly, just as it does not want for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to express concern...just as the Sacramento police wants not only the ability to kill Stephon Clark with impunity, but to be able to keep clergy from protesting the murder and reporters from covering the protests.

And yet, as much as the state tries to intimidate us, we must speak about what we see and report on what we know to be true to the best of our ability.

The state (be it Israel, Sacramento or the U.S. federal government) and the private market have a shared interest in creating a population which believes "questioning support" of ANYTHING is unacceptable—because if we don't question, they can extort more $ from us for guns (to better police us, etc).

Anyway, this was a long way of explaining why #IStandWithIlhan... We all owe Rep. Omar a debt for speaking her truth with courage.

So go forth and speak your OWN truth, too—even when the world tries to intimidate you.

What happens to Ilhan Omar of course matters deeply but no matter what comes next in her political career, she has done a magnificent job of putting the establishment’s stance on compulsory allegiance to Israel on full display. The more they deny it, the more it shows.

What a head-shaking story that is. The Israeli government (not AIPAC, I note) tried to intimidate an American alternative weekly paper into firing a journalist because he wrote about an American student who was injured by Israeli soldiers during a protest. And when he wasn't fired, they asked for prior approval of his articles. Wow.

And yet we have milquetoast crap being published locally like this column by the Star Tribune's relatively new columnist Jennifer Brooks. She seems to be annoyed that Omar has an opinion at all on human rights in Palestine, and doesn't understand that Omar's words were not what her enemies say they were. Brooks is clearly in the "keep your hijab-covered head down and do the work" camp, rather than the "use the microphone you've earned" camp.

Meanwhile, Omar has an almost literal target on her back, and the Democratic leadership is making it worse by introducing a resolution condemning her words. While Steve King and a host of racists and Islamophobes wander the halls of Congress (and the White House) every day. Whew.