But Ilhan Omar’s “Tropes” Are True

I wrote about Rep. Omar’s first (February 10) Twitter outrage in the new issue of Crescent Magazine:

Ilhan Omar’s ‘all about the Benjamins’ tweet, and the media feeding frenzy that followed, unleashed an unprecedented exposé of Jewish-Zionist money power in America. (“Benjamins” refers to $100 bills; Omar borrowed the line from a hip-hop song by Puff Daddy — which raises questions about her musical and cultural tastes). In the past, the entire America Left, led by people like Noam Chomsky, has denied the power of the Israel Lobby. Anyone who pointed out that Israel runs America’s Mideast policy through its Fifth Column, using its monstrous money power, was denounced with the obligatory nonsensical slur “anti-Semite.” Even Walt and Mearsheimer’s understated The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007) was vilified and marginalized.

But in the wake of Ilhan Omar’s tweet, many voices that would normally denounce “anti-Semitism” have instead admitted that Omar is right: AIPAC’s power really is “all about the Benjamins.” The Nation, America’s leading Establishment Left magazine, published Israeli Jew Ady Barkan’s confession “What Ilhan Omar Said About AIPAC Was Right.” The Jewish Daily Forward responded with Peter Feld’s “No, Ilhan Omar Is Not Anti-Semitic For Calling Out AIPAC.” Feld put it bluntly, “There are plenty of Jews, like me, whose beliefs are voiced by Omar, not AIPAC.” Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept summed it all up, “There Is a Taboo Against Criticizing AIPAC and Ilhan Omar Just Destroyed It.”

On the other side of the political divide, Donald Trump called on Omar to resign. Good luck with that one, Donnie! Most Republicans, and quite a few Democrats, ritually waxed indignant in an effort to please their Zionist paymasters — ironically proving that Omar’s tweet was accurate. Rarely has the saying “if you’re catching flak, you’re over the target” been better illustrated.

Rep. Omar quickly issued the most equivocal “unequivocal apology” ever, in essence saying that she didn’t mean to hurt people’s feelings, but was right to call out AIPAC and its money power. That didn’t satisfy the Zionists—who paid their propagandists to dog whistle up a lynch mob on various pseudo-patriotic and/or pseudo-alternative Israeli-operated platforms including Murdoch’s Fox, made-in-Israel Breitbart, and the Bronfman crime family-linked Infowars.

Many of us felt that Omar never should have apologized at all. Quoting again my Crescent article:

Omar’s apology for inadvertently invoking a “trope” about Jews and money was unnecessary and unfortunate because that “trope” is true. Jews are indeed the richest Western ethnic group. A 2008 Pew Forum study found that Jews are America’s richest religious group; nearly half of US Jews earn six figure incomes, while fewer than one in five non-Jewish Americans earn that much.

As Thomas Dalton writes in “A Brief Look at Jewish Wealth”: “Throughout history, the power and influence of the Jewish Lobby has been legendary. This power in turn derives not from political might, nor from popular support, nor from moral rectitude, nor from God. It is, simply, the power of money… Of the 10 richest Americans, five (50%) are Jews… Of the 50 richest Americans, at least 27 (54%) are Jews.” That is extraordinary, since Jews represent only 2% of the US population. Extrapolating downward, Dalton estimates that the top 1% of the Jewish population, consisting of about 60,000 individuals, owns about $18 trillion in assets, which is roughly equal to the USA’s annual GDP! That kind of money can easily purchase dominance in American politics and media… and unwavering support for Zionist Israel.

Ilhan Omar seems to have been listening to those of us yelling “stop apologizing for telling the truth!” During a talk on February 27 she said “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” The Israel Lobby and the politicians and media outlets it owns (which is pretty much all of them) went berserk. Israel-firster House Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel whined about Omar’s “vile anti-Semitic slur.” Other Israeli-owned Democrats followed suit.

But this time Omar refused to back down. On Sunday, March 3, she tweeted: “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee. I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel. I find that to be problematic and I am not alone. I just happen to be willing to speak up on it and open myself to attacks.” Omar’s words seconded those of former six-term Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who has exposed the fact that new Congressional representatives are ordered to sign a loyalty pledge to Israel, and are told their careers will soon be over if they don’t.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, on a cover-up mission for Israel, smacked Omar with the worst insult imaginable: comparing Omar to President Trump. Obviously both Trump and Omar are geniuses at sparking Twitter controversy. But that is not Milbank’s point. Instead, she accuses Trump and Omar of bigotry: “(Jews) who support Israel’s policies aren’t disloyal to America. When Omar questions their patriotism, she is reading from the same bigoted playbook that launched Trump.”

But Milbank ignores a crucial difference between Trump’s idiotic and mendacious Islamophobia and Omar’s trenchant critique of Jewish-Zionist power. That difference is obvious to any well-informed observer of American politics: There is no significant Muslim power bloc in America supporting any foreign (Muslim) country. The only arguable exception is the execrable House of Saud, which consists of a handful of moronic Zionist-controlled billionaire playboys, and enjoys essentially no support among US Muslims.

But while there is effectively no dual-loyalty problem among Muslims—no “Muslim Lobby” strong-arming the US to support any foreign country—there is a massive, monstrous Jewish Lobby with an absolute stranglehold on US Mideast policy and an unwavering devotion to a foreign nation. When the slaves of the Jewish Lobby try to deny this, claiming that the dual loyalty trope is a canard, they are right in one respect: Accusing them of dual loyalty is unfair. Their loyalty is singular, and it is to Israel.

I recently cited James Petras’s trenchant analysis of the Lobby’s extraordinary power:

As sociologist James Petras has pointed out, the 52 major Jewish American organizations (MJAO) are monolithically pro-Israel. They form the core of what Petras calls the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC): “The ideological influence of the Israel Fifth Column is concentrated on a single issue: Defending Israel and its crimes against humanity.”

According to Petras, the ZPC’s commanding heights include hundreds of billionaires and millionaires, who finance its political and media operations. Below them, national and state-wide networks “influence the nomination and financing of all candidates, elected officials, and the composition of editorial boards of the major media outlets.”

Below these networks, at the local level, “every major and minor U.S. city has local Zionist-councils that use their influence to intimidate local professional, business, political, and media groups into ensuring that critics are censored and Israel’s war crimes are covered up.”

In short, Rep. Omar’s two “anti-Semitic tropes” are both true: Jewish Americans are (compared to other ethnic groups) outrageously wealthy; and Jewish wealth has hijacked America’s policymaking apparatus in service to a foreign power. All of the Zionist-bought-and-paid-for hysteria and hoopla in the world cannot hide the fact that Ilhan Omar’s words on these critically important issues have been massive understatements.

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Original article

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