Edited by: Fern Sidman
The war of words continued on Monday between President Trump and four “radical” members of Congress from the Democratic Party.
“When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!” the president tweeted, according to a WIN report.
Trump was apparently referring to Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rashida Tlaib (MI), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.). The four women of color are known in Congressional corridors as ‘The Squad.’
On Sunday, WIN reported that Trump tweeted a suggestion that they “could go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” Only Omar was born outside the U.S., coming from Somalia. She is a naturalized citizen.
Omar’s attack followed the revelation of an earlier tweet in 2012 in which she said that the Jewish State had “hypnotized the world” into supporting its positions. She has in addition voiced support for the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, according to the WIN report.
On Monday, at the White House Rose Garden, Trump said: “They’re complaining all the time,” and then added: “Very simply, you can leave. You can leave right now. Come back if you want, don’t come back, that’s okay too. But if you’re not happy, you can leave… and you know what? I’m sure that there will be many people that won’t miss them.”
Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel as a state as opposed to simply attacking government policy.
World Israel News reported that Omar has used a number of anti-Semitic tropes in her comments. Both she and Tlaib have been connected to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is said to be linked to Hamas and whose leaders have compared Israel to ISIS.
Ocasio-Cortez has accused Israel of committing a massacre in the Gaza Strip. She also compared the U.S. detention centers along the Mexican borders to concentration camps, according to the WIN report.
In response to the president’s comments, the four held a news conference late Monday afternoon, with Omar coming out hitting with a series of vulgarities: “This is a president who has said ‘grab women by the pu–y,’ this is a president who has called black athletes ‘sons of bit–es,’ this is a president who has called people who come from black and brown countries ‘sh–holes.’” she said, charging that “this is the agenda of white nationalists.”
Fox News noted afterward that “Trump, in fact, had called those who kneel during the national anthem ‘sons of bit–es,’ not black athletes generally. And his comments concerning ‘sh–holes’ referred to places, not individuals.”
Refusing to refer to Trump as president, Pressley told the news conference: “I will always refer to him as the occupant as he is only occupying space.”
She charged that “he does not embody the grace, the empathy, the compassion, the integrity that that office requires and that the American people deserve.”
“He’s launching a blatantly racist attack on four duly elected members of the United States House of Representatives, all of whom are women of color,” Omar said. “This is the agenda of white nationalists.”
Omar and Tlaib, who are the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, explicitly called for Trump’s impeachment, according to a VOA report.
“I urge House leadership, many of my colleagues, to take action to impeach this lawless president today,” said Tlaib.
“He does not know how to defend his policies,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters. “So, what he does is attack us personally. And that is what this is all about.”
Earlier on Monday, Trump rejected widespread criticism that his comments run counter to American values.
“It doesn’t concern me,” he told reporters Monday at the White House, “because many people agree with me.”
The president said of the lawmakers: “If they’re not happy here, they can leave,” adding, “these are people that hate our country.”
Asked whether his comments were racist, Trump said, “Not at all.”
VOA News reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those characterizing the president’s comments as “disgusting attacks.”
“The House cannot allow the President’s characterization of immigrants to our country to stand. Our Republican colleagues must join us in condemning the President’s xenophobic tweets,” Pelosi said in calling for support for a House resolution to condemn Trump’s tweets.
Most lawmakers of Trump’s party have stayed silent on the controversy, according to VOA News. But four Republican senators — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Mitt Romney of Utah —are criticizing Trump’s remarks.
“The president has a unique and noble calling to unite the American people,” Romney, a former Republican presidential nominee, told reporters. “In that regard, he failed badly this weekend and continued to do so today.”
VOA reported that Murkowski tweeted: “There is no excuse for the president’s spiteful comments — they were absolutely unacceptable and this needs to stop.”
“President Trump was wrong to suggest that four left-wing congresswomen should go back to where they came from,” Toomey said in a statement, as was reported by VOA. “The citizenship of all four is as valid as mine.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who golfed with Trump over the weekend, said the president should “aim higher” with his criticism of the four, even as the lawmaker disparaged their views.
On Fox News, Graham said Monday Ocasio-Cortez “and this crowd are a bunch of communists” who “hate Israel. They hate our own country. They’re calling the guards along our border — the border control agents — concentration camp guards. They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins [money]. They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America.”
“As Jews, we are all too familiar with this kind of divisive prejudice,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League. “While ADL has publicly disagreed with these congresswomen on some issues, the president is echoing the racist talking points of white nationalists and cynically using the Jewish people and the state of Israel as a shield to double down on his remarks.”
The four female legislators, who are politically to the left of Pelosi, have squabbled with the House speaker over immigration policy and other issues, according to the VOA report. The dispute has attracted Trump’s attention in recent days, even prompting him to utter rare public support for Pelosi — at least when it comes to her attempt to rein in the newly elected foursome.
On Monday, however, after she said it would be better to rephrase Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” to “Make America White Again,” the president called that “a very racist statement.”
In a Twitter response to Trump on Sunday, Omar reminded him that the United States is the only country to which members of Congress swear an oath, according to the VOA report.
“Which is why we are fighting to protect it from the worst, most corrupt and inept president we have ever seen,” she added.
“You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us,” Ocasio-Cortez responded to Trump on Twitter. “You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”
Concerning the vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel canards that have been spewed forth by “The Squad” on a regular basis, Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration is working on multiple fronts to investigate and combat a rising tide of anti-Semitism in America that top officials warned is spreading across the country via a network of far left, anti-Israel activists, who seek to mainstream hatred against Jews at the nation’s college campuses and elsewhere.
During a daylong conference on Tuesday, the first of its kind for this administration, senior administration officials from across the government gathered with legal experts and scholars to address the growing threat of anti-Semitism, which has resurged in America and across the globe in recent years, according to the WFB report.
The forum comes amid disclosures by the FBI that hate crimes in the U.S. have risen steadily since 2014, with anti-Jewish hate crimes consistently comprising more than half of totals for each year.
Organized by the Justice Department, senior Trump administration officials from the Education, Treasury, and State Departments joined together to discuss a range of actions the government is taking to prevent federal dollars from being spent on college programs that seek to mainstream anti-Israel ideologies, was reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Education Department has already launched a formal investigation into how nearly $250,000 in federal grant dollars were awarded to Duke and the University of North Carolina for a series of events that featured speakers and organizations tied to not just anti-Semites, but also known terror organizations.
The WFB reported indicated that officials provided disturbing information about the uptick in anti-Jewish violence across the U.S.
“Far too often, Jews and Jewish communities in America suffer outside the spotlight,” Attorney General William Barr said as he kicked off the event. “New York City, this past year, has seen a sharp uptick in attacks on Orthodox Jews, particularly in the Crown Heights neighborhood. People are attacking Jews in the streets and vandalizing synagogues. In Massachusetts in March, vandals desecrated 59 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery, knocking over headstones and scrawling swastikas and hateful graffiti.”
“While the tragic attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway appropriately drew national attention, these attacks and others like them in communities across the country are, sadly, less well-known outside the Jewish community,” Barr said. “But they form the daily background of concerns about security and safety that many in the Jewish community feel.”
“As attorney general and a fellow citizen, I want to assure the Jewish community that the Department of Justice and the entire federal government stands with you and will not tolerate these attacks,” Barr vowed.
Already, Barr’s Justice Department has “aggressively pursued anti-Semitic hate crimes,” according to Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen.
“Under his leadership, the Department successfully convicted eight members of hate groups for desecrating a synagogue in Nashville, Tennessee; five individuals for conspiracy to interfere with the rights of a holocaust survivor in San Diego through a vicious campaign of anti-Semitic harassment; numerous skinheads around the country for a variety of anti-Semitic crimes; and convicted the neo-Nazis responsible for the murder of the prominent radio host Alan Berg in Denver, Colorado,” Rosen said. “He also fought against anti-Semitic zoning discrimination in Airmont, New York.”
Charles Small, director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy, called on the Trump administration to launch investigations into grants given by foreign governments to U.S. universities. In many instances, grant money for anti-Israel programs is awarded by some of the Middle East’s wealthiest purveyors of anti-Israel ideology.
“The isolation of Jewish students on campus” is the goal of these groups, said William Jacobson, a clinical professor of law and director of the Securities Law Clinic.
