AOC, Ilhan Omar and the Cricket Test
It was a spectacular, almost aerobic speech from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress last Thursday; Yahoo! provides a transcript for those who are distracted by the arm-waving.
AOC’s ‘New York minute’ protested the motion to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, amid allegations of the latter’s antisemitism (she is a Muslim from Somalia.) To no avail: Omar has been ousted.
AOC framed the proposition as racist, misogynistic and anti-American-Muslim. She may have a point regarding the first two epithets. Back in the Seventies a New York cop told my future wife that a black President wouldn’t live to serve out his first term of office; as to a woman, ‘she wouldn’t last as long as the n——-.’ Thankfully, the US has come a long way since then, but still not far enough, and I expect there are still many dinosaurs, even in Congress.
As to the third, Omar, who entered the House in 2019 at the same time as AOC, was bound to be a potentially controversial appointment to the Foreign Affairs Committee, bearing in mind the US’ long-standing support for Israel. It was too easy to cast her criticisms of Israel into the mould of ideological Jew-hatred, and indeed within two months of her taking up the post a Floridian Congressman introduced a Bill condemning her previous ‘anti-Semitic comments’ - that died a procedural death.
As a newbie in 2019, Omar’s presentational inexperience showed. She is often quoted bitterly as having said about 9/11, ‘some people did something,’ which sounds as though she was unwilling to address the horror or even making light of it. In reality the context is that she was speaking to a California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, noting how Muslims in the US had long been treated as second class citizens and ‘were starting to lose access to civil liberties.’
That theme is assuming greater importance by the day, and not just for Muslims. Since Covid mandates, the alphabet soup of government agencies’ collusion in Russiagate, the Twitter files and other revelations about mass surveillance and censorship, all of us are beginning to understand what it means to have our civil liberties eroded.
But Omar’s new position led her into a diplomatic minefield, too. She said then:
‘This couldn't come at a more critical time. We need to use the committee's human rights jurisdiction to hold the President accountable for deaths in detention centers on his watch. We need to investigate how foreign governments and their lobbyists have violated our laws. And we need to rein in arms sales to human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia.’
Each of those three items has complex implications. ‘Detention centers’ presumably includes Guantanamo, operational since 2002 and so to be laid at the door of Democrat as well as Republican Presidents; the ‘foreign lobbyists’ may be read as alluding to (e.g.) Israel as well as Russia; the Saudi Arabia reference opens a can of worms because of the financial and military-industrial connections with the US that make for a permanently ambiguous relationship between the Enlightenment Republic and the theocratic Islamic Kingdom.
A further complication as that like Christianity, Islam is multiply riven into sects. Omar was raised by relatives in the traditions of democracy and moderate Sunni belief, whereas the Saudis adopted austere and authoritarian Wahhabism back in 1744. The latter - and their partners in the US - would hardly welcome Omar’s liberal criticisms.
Nevertheless it may suit the US (ostensibly Christian) religious Right to set up hate-figures like Omar as a distraction from the country’s failure to benefit the citizens in general - a failure in which the Democrats are also complicit, according to Left commentators. American politics is very dirty and muddy.
And not just American. World affairs are so ticklish now that naive and idealistic young politicians elsewhere are potentially dangerous.
Back here in the UK, my Member of Parliament Jess Phillips earned her spurs as a local councillor in a deprived area, with a special focus on assisting women. Elected to Parliament in 2015 and her ambition encouraged by the chaos in the Labour Party, she has succumbed to the temptation of becoming an instapundit and has appeared a number of times on the satirical news show HIGNFY.
But the growing political influence of ethnic minorities in Britain - significant in Phillips’ constituency - can mislead their representatives into diplomatic overreach:
Human rights, yes - but ‘self determination’? I pointed out that Kashmir borders China, which has claims to the former’s territory; imagine a newly independent Islamic Kashmir being invaded by the forces of an aggressively atheist Communist Beijing Government - and the reaction of foreign nations, the UN etc.
It’s not moderate, non-ethnic nationalism that threatens world peace; it’s foreign loyalties and globalist ideologies that imperil the wellbeing and stability of nations. We’ve been here before: think of all that followed from Henry VIII’s break from the Papacy; the Communist Third International; the Treaty of Rome.
Back in 1990, senior Parliamentarian Norman (now Lord) Tebbit spoke of the ‘cricket test’; that is, those who come to our country need to support it and leave behind their attachments to other places. It’s safer for all, both at home and abroad.
Omar’s aspiration to an ‘ethical foreign policy’ mission may be worthy, but in a world becoming multipolar it may be more useful to opt for realpolitik and ‘mind your own business.’ Given the power and corruption of the US military-industrial complex, there is plenty to do at home to restrain its lethal global adventurism.