Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said policy differences toward Israel between her and President Biden won’t stop her from supporting him in the November general election.

“Of course,” Omar said Tuesday, when asked by CNN’s Abby Phillip on “NewsNight” whether she would vote for Biden if the election were held that day, in a clip highlighted by Mediaite. “Democracy is on the line, we are facing down fascism.”

“And I personally know what my life felt like having Trump as the president of this country, and I know what it felt like for my constituents, and for people around this country and around the world,” Omar continued. “We have to do everything that we can to make sure that does not happen to our country again.”

  • juicy@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    lol. Israel is not a democracy. 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are non-citizens without a vote. The PA is entirely under the thumb of Israel, and Palestinians in the West Bank live in apartheid. Gaza has been besieged and abused for 20 years. Your precious “Only Democracy in the Middle East” is a last bastion of proud European colonialism. The one colony that is still establishing new settlements and clearing “savages” from new land. America long ago divested itself of the Phillipines, but we pour money and weapons into our client colonial state between the river and the sea.

      • juicy@lemmy.today
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        9 months ago

        When a third of your population aren’t citizens, and in fact most of their families have lived there since the Ottoman Empire, while your citizens have mostly immigrated from abroad in the mid-1900s, and have pushed the non-citizens who predated them into ghettos, you can call it whatever you want. But it’s repugnant.

        • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          That’s great, let’s agree that all of that is true; nothing will erase the original sin will it?

          The starting point to peace is right now. How we got here does not have to dictate where we go from here.

          What is it that you’re advocating with the land records line of reasoning, that the Israel government is evicted, that democracy in the middle east ends, and gets replaced with an Islamist caliphate, because the Jews did not inhabit the Levant during the Ottoman empire? Hmm, where were they again?1 But moreso, who were the inhabitants at the beginning of recorded history? I mean if you want to go back to the records and do a title search, go back to the first record. Why would you stop less than halfway?


          1. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/dhimmi (“A dhimmi refers to a non-Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire. Derived from Islamic legal conceptions of membership to society, non-Muslims ‘dhimmis’ were afforded protection by the state and did not serve in the military, in return for specific taxes. The dhimmi status was legally abolished in 1839 with the Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane and was formalized with the 1869 Ottoman Law of Nationality as part of wider Tanzimat Reforms. Regardless of these official changes, in various places within the Empire non-Muslim subjects faced various forms of institutional discrimination.”). https://web.archive.org/web/20181214221418/http://jewishhistory.research.wesleyan.edu/i-jewish-population/5-ottoman-empire/ (“As the dhimmi, Jews and Christians were subject to: A special tax (the jizya); A prohibition against carrying arms; A prohibition against riding horses; A prohibition against building new houses of worship or repairing old ones; Prohibitions against public processions and worship; A prohibition against proselytism; A requirement to wear distinctive clothing; A prohibition against building homes higher than Muslim ones.”).
          • juicy@lemmy.today
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            9 months ago

            Nothing will erase the original sin, but Israel can abide by international law and allow the Palestinians to return to their homes and give them equal rights. We are not talking about ancient history. The Naqba was just 75 years ago.