Noted anti-Semitism expert Meghan McCain lent her much-needed voice to the current discourse on Sunday following this past weekend’s horrifying shooting at a Chabad synagogue in San Diego.
McCain—who, to be clear, is a Baptist, which is not a branch of Judaism I am familiar with—argued on ABC’s This Week roundtable that rising anti-Semitism in the United States is due to some pesky both sides-ing (emphasis mine):
I do think when we’re having conversations about anti-Semitism, we should be looking at the most extreme on both sides, and I would bring up Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her comments that got so much attention. In my opinion, Nancy Pelosi wasn’t hard enough in her response to her trafficking in anti-semitic language, talking about “All about the Benjamins,” and how Jewish people had hypnotized the world.
Omar has received relentless backlash over remarks from earlier this year that criticized politicians for their “allegiance” to Israel in exchange for lobbying money. She “unequivocally apologize[d]” for unintentionally using an anti-Semitic trope (“All about the Benjamins,” also a Puff Daddy song, also an Ice Cube action film), which even Pelosi acknowledged was inadvertent. In exchange, she has battled incendiary tweets and criticism from the President of the United States, and a relentless string of death threats.
Meanwhile, the alleged San Diego shooter is one John Earnest, a 19-year-old college student whose nine-page manifesto praised white supremacy and argued Jews existed to “doom” the white race—a sentiment that sounds a tad familiar, and not because of Omar. Not that #1 Anti-Semitism Fighter Meghan McCain cares: “When you’re talking about rhetoric and you want to talk about President Trump—and by the way, I agree that he needs to have his feet held to the fire as well—but we’re talking about it on both sides of the aisle as well,” she said on This Week.
The issue at hand is not Ilhan Omar. The issue at hand is white supremacy, something McCain—who once claimed on CNN that calling someone a racist is the “worst thing you can call anyone,” but to the best of my knowledge has never had the pleasure of receiving multiple emails from Trump supporters calling her an “ugly Jew cunt”—seems unable to confront or even understand.
The good news is, Omar had the right response:
Bless her heart, indeed.