After Hamas’ violent attacks on Israel last week, Rep. Ilhan Omar finally found someone she can condemn as a “terrorist”: Ohio Republican Jim Jordan.
Omar chose this moment in world events to resurrect and post a quote from former House Speaker John Boehner describing Jordan as a “legislative terrorist” (a description Boehner apparently used to complain about Jordan’s ability to make “Boehner’s life miserable”).
Thankfully, others have stepped up to disavow the heinous behavior of Hamas. A San Francisco Board of Supervisors declaration condemned the “domestic terrorist organization” and blamed its sponsor states for putting “weapons in the hands of those who would harm and terrorize us.” Rep. Jamaal Bowman called for focusing “energy” on fighting “the Nazis” before “anything else.” The National School Boards Association wrote to the attorney general about the “immediate threat” posed by “actions of malice [and] violence,” urging a response to “terrorism and hate crimes.” Whoopi Goldberg of “The View” bravely denounced them as “terrorists.” Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage condemned the “terrorist” at the top.
Omar, to her credit, decried the “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes.”
Just kidding! None of these principled condemnations were directed at the terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians last week. Issued over the past several years, they respectively referred to the National Rifle Association, Republicans in Congress, concerned parents at school board meetings, congressional Republicans (again), and Donald Trump. Omar’s “ethnic cleansing” comment was actually about Israel urging residents and others in Gaza to evacuate before incoming airstrikes against Hamas targets, while her “war crimes” remark slammed Israel for turning off electricity in Hamas-controlled territory.
Meanwhile, left-wing college students, their professors, and other congressional Democrats have found themselves unable to condemn the actual terrorists who killed, raped, and kidnapped unsuspecting Israelis and their families. Student groups and Marxist outfits like Black Lives Matter have aligned themselves with the terrorists, while others have reserved harsher words for the defending Israeli forces than for their attackers.
Why is it so hard to call a terrorist — a real one, who murders families in their homes and, yes, beheads babies — a terrorist? For a known antisemite like Omar, the answer is easy enough to discern.
For Marxists like BLM and their drones in college classrooms, it’s only slightly more complicated. Having been taught to see everything through the lens of oppressors and oppressed, they buy into the lies about Israeli “colonizers” and must therefore stand with the terrorists “freedom fighters.” Hamas, after all, is only doing to Israeli civilians what true Marxists think should be done to all “settlers.”
But there’s another hurdle to leftists admitting the terrorist acts committed by Hamas are, in fact, terrorism. To do so would invite comparison between those terrorists — of the raping, killing, and beheading variety — and the Republican “terrorists” that Democrats have assured us pose the greatest threat to the republic.
It looks pretty silly to call a potential speaker of the House of Representatives a “terrorist” when there’s so much real terrorism going on in the world. It looks equally silly to call Republicans “Nazis” while your own side cheers the deaths of hundreds of Jewish victims. No serious person could take a person like that seriously!
The Hamas attacks in Israel are inconvenient for the narrative that paints Republican congressmen, pro-life demonstrators, and concerned public school parents as terrorists who pray to Donald Trump at night, hide out in booby-trapped compounds in the Texas desert, and work to rain violent jihad on the sexually frustrated elementary school teachers exposed by Libs of TikTok. If there are terrorists actually dragging women’s battered bodies through the streets and taking toddlers hostage, Americans might realize that “terrorism” is a touch hysterical to describe voting for Trump or questioning the effectiveness of Covid lockdowns online. And then where would Democrats’ efforts to defend “democracy” be?
Anyone who honestly opposes “terrorism” should have no problem blasting Hamas’ crimes in the strongest possible terms. But to be honest about the term would also require not applying it to suburban soccer moms, Jim Jordan, and Trump-supporting grandmothers. (To be fair, some leftists do condemn Hamas’ terrorism as such. Draw your own conclusions, I guess, about what that means they think of you when they call you the same word.)
If I were given the choice of being stuck in a room with a Hamas jihadi or one of the Trump voters, parent protesters, or congressmen who have been described as “terrorists,” I’d take my chances with any of the latter three — or heck, all of them combined! I bet most of the people who casually slander American conservatives as “terrorists” would too.
Then again, when people tell you whose side they’re on, you should probably believe them.