Aftermath of the Removal of Rep Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee

As of this writing, after several months of threatening the removal of Democratic Congressional Representative from the State of Minnesota, Ms. Ilhan Omar, from the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the California Congressional Republican, finally got his way. Most likely, this racially tinged and politically vacuous show of White-Supremacist Power did not have the exactly desired effect or impact, as the gratuitously vindictive ethnically transplanted petulant, street-brawling 58-year-old California Irishman and speakership addict had hoped. You could even say that this rather largely unremarked display of pathological self-importance that did not even publicly resonate with America’s Jewish Community, the intended target of Speaker McCarthy’s strategic act of vote-cadging ingratiation, was clearly a farcical exercise in futility.

It was highly likely a counterproductive move, as it also coincided with the increasingly internally repressive coalition government of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular the longest-serving Israeli leader’s self-serving and megalomaniacal attempt to drastically vitiate the authority and the judicial powers of Israel’s Supreme Court, at the same time that Mr. Netanyahu is facing bribery and corruption charges before the highest court of the land. It goes without saying that compared to the Somali-born Ms. Omar’s caustic criticism of the Jewish State’s widely perceived mistreatment of its Palestinian neighbors and citizens within the State of Israel itself, Ms. Omar appeared to be more a human and civil rights activist and advocate of an enviable and an emulative status, whereas the Israeli Prime Minister unarguably came off as an overly aggressive leader who was dead-set against the democratic civil liberties of his own people, as globally witnessed in the weeks-long massive public protest demonstrations that fiercely met with this flagrantly anti-democratic Netanyahu executive edict and unilaterally preemptive pronouncement.

In short, Speaker McCarthy’s removal of Rep Omar from the much-coveted Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee must have actually come as a heroic badge of honor, in view of the fact that the Bakersfield, California, Congressman may very well be the least respected Speaker of the House in at least a half century, being that he is only the Second Speaker in the democratic and congressional history of the United States of America to have had to endure a morally and psychologically grueling and humiliating voting-approval rounds in excess of a dozen times, largely fiercely opposed by members of his own Congressional Republican-Majority Caucus prior to his speakership accession.

On the other hand, in addition to commanding the sympathy and the unanimous support of the members of her Democratic Congressional Minority Caucus, Ms. Omar initially also had the active and publicly expressed support of at least three of her Congressional Republican Colleagues who were willing to buck the internal party trend or Speaker McCarthy’s vindictiveness and thus were supportive of Ms. Omar’s expressed reluctance to be removed from her most favorite committee appointment, at least not without a fight. And these politically and ideologically mature allies were Representatives Nancy Mace, of South Carolina; Victoria Spartz, of Indiana; and Ken Buck, of Colorado.

What is even more significant to point out here is the fact that Ms. Omar has had several occasions on both the august floor of Congress and via media appearances to sincerely apologize for some of her widely criticized Antisemitic remarks, as opposed to Speaker McCarthy who continues to luridly and adamantly support the presidential electioneering comeback of an unabashedly Pro-Putin debonair racist and impenitently and irredeemably Neo-Nazi former President Donald John Trump. As well, a morbidly self-righteous Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to unapologetically insist on the moral and political righteousness of the cause and course of his equally self-serving despotic attempt to subordinate the constitutionally and institutionally coordinate powers of the Israeli Supreme Court, by having the latter institutional soul and conscience of the Jewish State flagrantly subsumed under the executive powers of the Office of the Prime Minister, that is, himself (See “Kevin McCarthy’s Bid to Oust Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs in Peril as Third GOP Rep Objects” Axios 1/28/23).

Now, who knows? Speaker McCarthy’s threatened removal of the very vocal fellow California Congressional Representative, Adam Schiff, a religious and ethnic Jew, and a prominent member of the January 6, 2021 Investigations Committee, whose statutory legitimacy the then Republican Minority Caucus Leader Kevin McCarthy flatly rejected, from the highly coveted House’s Intelligence Committee, could very well not be any more diplomatic than some of the most virulent and politically intemperate remarks that the Islam-confessing Ms. Omar has been widely accused of volleying against the State of Israel. The Akan-speaking people of Ghana have a maxim that runs as follows: “Anytime that you point an accusing forefinger at your political opponent [in this particular context], you had better watch the three other fingers pointing squarely at you, the accuser.”

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 11, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]