Antisemitism vs AntiZionism

     Rachel Maddow once famously made the observation that hypocrisy is the one crime on Capitol Hill for which there's no comeuppance and she was right. Republicans are flaunting their shameless double standards now that they, barely, have control over the House and the various committees.

     But despite their countless hypocrisies since January 3rd, none stands out to me as more odious than their decision to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs committee. We're literally seeing Marjorie Taylor-Greene getting reinstalled on two committees while Omar just got the boot. The irony, if it can be called irony, is that Greene got her two committee assignments back while Omar lost hers even though both women were accused of making antisemitic statements.

     The ones Omar made in 2019 were not antisemitic but perfectly accurate. She made those statements in response to our government's nauseating fealty to Israel that goes back to its founding in 1948. Her mistake was in putting it in terms that was guaranteed to gin up fake right wing outrage, referring to the flood of money coming in from AIPAC as being "about the Benjamins", meaning Benjamin Franklin's likeness on the 50 dollar bill.

     Compare that to the Republican non-reaction to Marjorie Taylor-Greene's ridiculous Jewish space laser conspiracy regarding the Rothschilds and California wildfires and speaking at notorious antisemite Nick Fuentes' event held at the same time as CPAC.

     Here's the difference as the right wing sees it. Omar attacked the state of Israel and at least one of its lobbies, rightly calling them out for bribing lawmakers on both sides of the aisle with their deep pockets. The right wing can't have anti-Zionism. What Greene did was pure antisemitism, attacking Jews in general  even within the parameters of a ludicrous conspiracy theory and the right wing doesn't have so much of a problem with that.