Nolte: NBC Spreads False Claim Ilhan Omar’s District Not Affected by Antisemitic Conspiracies

The Associated Press
The Associated Press

Far-left NBC News covered up its own findings about the effect Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) antisemitic remarks are having in her own home district.

Desperate to craft a puff-piece to protect Omar and the Democrat Party, NBC published the following headline Sunday night: “Far from Washington, Rep. Omar’s constituents see the Israel controversy in a different light.”

The story opens with this Pablum: “Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments about Israel have consumed Washington. But here in Minnesota’s diverse 5th Congressional District, a pillar of progressivism that handed Omar a decisive victory in November’s midterm elections, there has been far less outrage.”

And in the opening graphs, we are told Omar’s antisemitic conspiracy theories about American Jews and Israel, which are no different than the garbage spewed by the alt-right, which have earned Omar the admiration of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, are seen as no big deal back home:

In interviews here, including with residents who are Jewish and Muslim, few of Omar’s constituents voiced any anger at the lawmaker, even if they found the remarks troubling. One Jewish leader said she would be open to a good-faith foreign policy debate.

To the director of the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center, a large mosque 10 miles south of this city, the furor is overblown.
“Anti-Semitism is real in this country,” Mohamed Omar, who is not related to the freshman Democrat, said in an interview in a private study, as children nearby hurried to Friday afternoon prayers. But the controversy, he said, is a “distraction.”

But buried under six paragraphs, we finally learn that Omar’s rabid antisemitism is in fact causing stress and worry at home:

Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman of Temple Israel, a Reform Jewish congregation that is the oldest synagogue in this city, said many of members of her community have called her over the last month to say they were troubled by Omar’s comments.

“I don’t know the intention, but I know the impact. The words have been hurtful,” Zimmerman said in the tranquil lobby of the 141-year-old temple, surrounded by 12 floor-to-ceiling windows that symbolize the Torah’s 12 tribes of Israel. She added that the comments are especially problematic amid a recent spike in anti-Semitic incidents nationwide.

NBC’s cover-up is also contradicted by reporting found elsewhere.

SF Gate found that Omar’s hate is dividing longstanding ties between Minnesota’s Jewish and Somali communities. “Omar’s words sting at home, threatening to strain ties of Jewish and Somali Minnesotans,” the headline reads. The story continues:

In Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Jews and Somali immigrants have been partners for decades.

When Somali refugees arrived in Minnesota, starting in 1993, Jewish leaders saw echoes of their forebears who faced virulent anti-Semitism as newcomers to the state more than a century before. The communities developed strong ties, joining to fight hunger and illiteracy and raising money for one another in response to discrimination and threats of violence.

Then came the election to Congress last year of Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant who spent four years in a refugee camp as a child and arrived in Minnesota as a teenager.

An outspoken critic of Israel, Omar has courted controversy with provocative remarks that some say invoke anti-Semitic stereotypes. The pattern has alarmed many Jews, and as Omar faced yet another firestorm last week, community leaders on both sides voiced pain and confusion, fearing that the comments could damage an alliance they have spent years trying to nurture.

Omar’s hatred of Jews and most especially Israel have forced the Democrat Party to finally reveal its long-simmering antisemitism, which harkens back to the Party’s role in founding and protecting the Ku Klux Klan, especially in the Deep South.

Last week the Democrat Party, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, basically came out of the anti-Jewish closet by refusing to specifically condemn antisemitism after Omar, for the third time in just two months, spewed obscene stereotypes about Jews, Israel, and money.

All the Democrats could bring themselves to do was condemn “all hate.”

That one of America’s two major political parties cannot bring itself to specifically condemn antisemitism has a lot of Americans worried, not just those in Omar’s home district.

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