The JTA has an article about the backlash AOC is experiencing for voting against an amendment that would defund Israel's "Iron Dome" defense system. It's interesting reading, and I'm curious whether the backlash will have the desired effect (pushing AOC to a more uncompromisingly anti-Israel position) or the exact opposite (convincing her that there is no pleasing these people and she's better off ignoring them).
But that's not the part I want to talk about. Rather, there was a tiny aside in the article that I suspect most of you didn't notice but which jumped out at me.
While AOC voted against the amendment, the article lists off the six House Representatives who voted in favor. The two sponsors, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar, plus four others:
In addition to Omar and Greene, Democrats Al Green of Texas, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania also supported it, as well as Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who opposes all foreign aid.
Do you see it? It's that explanatory qualifier for Massie. The other five are implied to be motivated by anti-Israel hostility, but Massie is presented as operating on a larger isolationist principle. We shouldn't group him in with the other five.
The thing is, it's true that Massie opposes all foreign aid. But it's also true that he's one of the most antisemitic members of Congress, and his votes against Iron Dome should absolutely be read in that light. He was the sole vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism. He introduced a "Dual Loyalty Disclosure" bill clearly inspired by neo-Nazis who think Jews are secret Israeli agents, for crying out loud.
So why isn't that the relevant explanatory context? Yes, Massie is an isolationist, but there's a long history of paleo-conservative isolationists guzzling antisemitic broth, and Massie seems clearly to be of that ilk. Yet for some reason, the instinct is to elide that history -- no, worse, to actively obscure it. One could defend doing with him what JTA did with his three colleagues -- simply noting their votes without elaboration. But if one is going to single Massie out and say "this guy needs more context", it is absurd to offer a framing that is predominantly exculpatory to the guy who once tweeted about pitting "Zionism" against "American patriotism".
It's often suggested that Republicans think they have a get-out-of-antisemitism-free card so long as they are "pro-Israel", and too many Jewish institutions accept that card as fair currency. But I really think the rot runs deeper than that -- there's just a deep, fundamental resistance to identifying Republican antisemitism at all. Massie is a clear case -- he's certainly not "pro-Israel" under any normal definition, but even he gets favorable framing of the sort that would never be extended to the Ilhan Omars of the world (even though I think Massie's "Zionism" vs "patriotism" tweet is far more egregiously antisemitic than, say, Omar's "Benjamins" remarks). I'm not going to say it's impossible to overcome -- Greene's "Jewish Space Lasers" bit seems to have penetrated -- but it seems that even anti-Israel Republicans still benefit from the halo that assumes, against all evidence and logic, that Republicans who might appear to be acting on hostility to Jews must have some nobler or more reasonable excuse behind their actions.
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