Central to the Ilhan Omar issue is the antisemitic trope of dual loyalty.
Across the internet I have seen Jews, both Leftist and Conservative start sentences with “I’m a Jew but I don’t support Israel…”
I can only guess they are trying to distance themselves from accusations of dual loyalty.
I guess part of the issue I have is that, to me, the issue is not dual loyalty but a singular hidden loyalty. The antisemitic idea being that Jews are not loyal to the countries in which they live, and are willing to undermine them for the sake of Israel.
The I read a description of dual loyalty that said it is the accusation that Jews are loyal to their countries of resident and to Israel or Judaism.
Now I am mad.
If that is the definition of dual loyalty, than fuck it, I have dual loyalty and so should most Jews.
I love the United States of America. This is my home. Five generations of my family have lived here, including my children. My grandfather served honorably in WWII as an artillery forward observer in the European theater. I, for a very brief period of swore to defend this nation and its Constitution with my life.
I am a loyal American. At least I am now and hope to be for the rest of my life.
I am also loyal to the Jewish people. My people. People who share my culture, my blood, my heritage, and the same faith going back almost 6,000 years.
I do not believe that any part of being an America means that cannot take to heart the safety and security of my people, wherever in the world they may live.
I will not undermine the United States to that end, but at least for now, the United States has not given me a reason to.
What the current firebrands of the Democrat party want, is literally the mass murder of nearly half the world’s Jews. They want the land that we have prayed for every Passover for a thousand years taken from us and wiped clean of its Jewish presence.
Hamas and the rest of the radical Islamic world has made it clear that what they want is no Jews “from the river to the sea.”
And I gather, I am expected as an American Jew, to stand idly by and say “well, if the majority party of the United States wants to see 5,000 years of my people’s history and 6.5 million of my people wiped out, well… majority rules.”
If I resist this or speak out against it, against the extermination of my people and the total destruction of our holy sites, I am just the embodiment of the antisemitic trope.
This is fucking horseshit.
If the Democrat party were to advocate for the Muslim refugees of Europe to utterly destroy the Holy See, would that make every American Catholic who tried to stop it also guilty of dual loyalty?
If being an American means I have to abandon my concern and support for my people in our ancestral home land – not the Israeli goverment but the Jewish people, as a people – than where do I sign to renounce my citizenship, because I cannot accept that my American patriotism requires me to do nothing in the face of the mass murder of Jews.
I never thought that I would have to chose between being an American or being a Jew. America in modern times has supported the Jewish people and the Jewish people have supported and done great things for America.
Now the Democrats are wanting to make me choose.
That is a bad idea. I believe in, and will never stop believing in, the Second Amendment, and I believe that woke, Jew hating, Progressives facilitating the mass murder of my people is a perfectly good justification for invoking Rule 308.
But, it is OK to be an African American, an Asian American, a muslim-American, an Italian-American,etc… etc… etc…
Just not a Jewish American?
Only if you’re a Democrat-African-American, a Democrat-Asian-American, a Democrat-LGBT-American, etc.
Look at the media, we are not listed as Jewish Americans, we are American Jews, Israeli Jews, German Jews… What other culture/ religion is stigmatized in this way?
My history is a little rusty, or maybe its just that my memory going, but I seem to recall that one one of the accusations that was used to justify the persecution of the Jews in Europe from the ghettos of Italy through the Tsarist pogroms, the Nazi holocaust, and Stalin’s purges was that the Jews couldn’t be loyal to both their country and their religion. I am appalled that fellow Americans politicians seem to be advancing similar arguments.
Really? The Know-Nothings and other anti-Catholic types claimed Catholics couldn’t be loyal to the US “and the Pope”. At least the Pope is also a head of state, but that’s not been the job’s primary role for centuries…
(But wouldn’t that “argument” bring into question the loyalty of Anglicans?)
That was an attack on JFK. American Catholics pushed back against it and by the time of Richard Nixon, nobody cared that he was also a Catholic. The dual loyalty trope for Catholics fell out of favor half a century ago.
…until it comes back. And, I wager that it will once some Catholics grow some hair, and begin to forcefully articulate that infanticide is wrong, abortion is wrong, and other-than-man-and-woman-marriage is wrong. THEN, the tropes will return!
I suspect that only Democrat Catholics are immune to the “allegiance to the Pope” slur, just as they are immune to actually listening to what their claimed faith teaches.
Fair enough. My point was not to be anti Catholic. I was trying to think of another religious group, targeted by Muslims (the news out of Italy as to what the Muslims there are doing to Churches is obscene) that had a defined capital. The Holy See isn’t exactly like Israel is to the Jews, but it was close enough for a comparison.
I doubt if Pelosi said the Vatican needed to be protected she would be accused of dual loyalty, then again, she’s a Democrat.
Maybe a better question is why isn’t Rashida Tlaib not accused of dual loyalty when she said she ran for Congress to represent the a Palestinian people?
But to make it clear, I believe American Catholics have every right to demand protection of their holy places, relics, and missionaries around the world without accusations of dual loyalty.
It has come back. Consider Feinstein’s slur that “the dogma lives loudly in you”.
Nixon wasn’t Catholic. He was a Quaker.