U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., expressed her anti-Semitic views even before she was elected to Congress last year. In 2012, she wrote on Twitter that Israel “has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
In Congress, the Muslim lawmaker has promoted the Boycott, Sanction, Divest movement, which ultimately seeks the elimination of Israel. For that, she recently was banned entry to the Jewish state.
She’s also charged that support in Congress for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” invoking the old trope that Jews control the world’s money.
So it’s no surprise that she’s popular in Turkey, where a secular government has given way to the hard-line regime of President Recep Tayipp Erdogan.
The Middle East Media Research Institute documents the dozens of positive articles about Omar in Turkish media. She’s met with Erdogan, and Turks have been urged to donate to her political campaign, even though it’s illegal in the United States.
One headline in Turkish media read “Ilhan Omar Laid Out the U.S.’s Lies In The Middle East One by One.”
MEMRI said it was the manager of the research center of the Turkish state-run news channel TRT World, Tarek Cherkaoui, who urged readers to donate to Omar’s campaign.
Cherkaoui, on the Turkish-language website Yeni Safak, wrote that “donating money to Omar’s campaign fund would be an adequate way of denying powerful organizations the power to censor alternative voices.”
MEMRI observed that it’s difficult to calculate the reach that the call to donate has had among Turkish readers. But the news website is one of Turkey’s most popular news websites, and, as of September 2018, its Turkish print edition had a weekly circulation of 111,622.
“Given Omar’s popularity in Turkey, and that the article was published in Turkish as well as in English, it is likely that some Turks have sought to donate to Rep. Omar’s campaign fund,” MEMRI said.
Among other indications of her popularity: In 2016 Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu phoned Omar to congratulate her on her election to the Minnesota state legislature and did the same when she was elected to Congress in November 2018.
In September 2017, Omar met with Erdogan when the Turkish president was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Erdogan’s party, the AKP, tweeted about the meeting from its official Twitter account.
On July 1, 2017, MEMRI noted, Omar tweeted that she had met the previous day with Turkish Consul General in Chicago Umut Acar for lunch and a bus tour.
She also spoke at a “human rights” conference in Istanbul.
“Omar has become a favorite of both the Turkish- and English-language media in Turkey. TRT World’s YouTube channel, the English-language channel of the Turkish state-owned broadcasting network TRT, has at least a dozen videos featuring her, including an interview with Omar herself,” MEMRI said.
Cherkaoui, in his article on the website of Yeni Safak, defended Omar in response to Vice President Mike Pence’s insistence that she should not be on the Foreign Affairs Committee if she engages in “anti-Semitic tropes.”
“It is interesting to note that Rep. Omar had not expressed anti-Semitic statements per se,” he wrote.
Cherkaoui praised her as a member of a “new wave of youthful political activism” that seeks to displace an outdated “aging populace of conservative whites.”
Omar also has campaigned against Israel, trivialized 9/11 by saying “some people did something” and allegedly used campaign funds to pay for an extra-marital affair.
Then there was Omar’s advocacy for nine men accused of joining ISIS, her refusal to condemn Hamas and female genital mutilation, and her opposition to legislation to halt insurance payouts to terrorists.
