Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Tuesday blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for devoting more time to her than to anti-Semitic violence in his speech to a pro-Israel conference.
Omar has been a frequent target at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference this year, with attendees including Vice President Mike Pence, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) all taking shots at her without mentioning her name.
Omar responded Tuesday to a tweet from journalist Nathan Guttman noting that Netanyahu had devoted more time in his AIPAC address to Omar than to the 2018 mass shooting in Pittsburgh, when a white nationalist killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue.
“White supremacist violence is on the rise globally. Right-wing extremists killed more people in the US in 2018 than any year since 1995. Anti-Semitic violence accounted for 58% of religious hate crimes. Yet the topic Netanyahu chose to focus on was…me,” Omar tweeted.
“I —like so many others—have not criticized AIPAC because of its membership or the country it advocates for. I’ve criticized it because it has repeatedly opposed efforts to guarantee peace and human rights in the region,” she added.
Omar also criticized Netanyahu for seeking to form a coalition with Israel’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party and remarks by a member of AIPAC’s national council tying Omar and her fellow Muslim representative Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Omar has been at the center of a political firestorm since February, when she tweeted that lawmakers’ support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins, baby” and later expressed concerns about “the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Her critics have accused her of invoking anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish people holding “dual loyalties.”