‘Omar won’t be on Foreign Affairs Committee if GOP wins House,’ says Republican lawmaker

By World Israel News Staff and AP

The battle between House Democrats and Republicans over Ilhan Omar’s most recent anti-Israel and anti-American comments came to a head this week, but the Minnesota Democrat appears to have escaped removal from the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs.

On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., should remove Omar from the committee. Pelosi has shown no interest in doing that.

Speaking on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” McCarthy also said that if Republicans win House control in the 2022 elections, “Omar would not be serving on Foreign Affairs, or anybody that has an anti-Semitic, anti-American view.”

At a closed-door House GOP meeting later Tuesday, no rank-and-file lawmakers went to the microphones to talk about Omar, a Republican aide said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., said late Wednesday that he was abandoning his plan for a House vote censuring Greene.

Omar last week said that Israel and the United States committed “unthinkable atrocities” and compared them to Islamic terror groups Hamas and the Taliban. House Democratic leaders and a dozen Jewish Democratic lawmakers said that those remarks drew a false and damaging equivalence between the two countries and the brutal terror groups.

Omar later claimed she was not drawing “a moral comparison.”

Omar’s comments had prompted progressive lawmakers to rally around her and criticize their Democratic colleagues for mistreating women of color in the party. “Enough with the anti-Blackness and Islamophobia,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. Omar is one of two Muslim women in Congress.

Omar has been accused of anti-Semitism since 2012, when she tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Since then, she has accused the top pro-Israel advocacy group AIPAC of bribing elected officials and promotes the false claims that Israel practices “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”

In 2019 shortly after Omar arrived in Congress, the House approved a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry — without mentioning her — after she made remarks that critics said accused Israel supporters of having dual allegiances. Those included a tweet saying, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” a reference to $100 bills that suggested Israel’s political allies accept bribes.