After Speaker Pelosi, under pressure from far-left members of her caucus, took the funding for Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system out of the continuing resolution, nine members of the House of Representatives voted against the appropriation.
Eight of these were Democrats: Omar of Minnesota; Carson of Indiana; Tlaib of Michigan; Newman and Garcia of Illinois; Pressley of Massachusetts; Grijalva of California; Bush of Missouri.
Presumably, a few had legitimate reasons. Not so this Republican, however:
How is THIS not foreign interference in our elections? pic.twitter.com/O5LSToIBUO
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) September 27, 2021
If you have a good reason, an anti-Semitic tweet is not the way to go. Similarly, when the Times of Israel made "repeated requests for comment on the matter," four of the Representatives- Carson, Newman, Garcia, and Grijalva, "did not respond."
Perhaps in this case, discretion is the better part- not of valor, but of something else. Rashida Tlaib claimed Palestinians are "living under a violent apartheid system." Cori Bush maintained that the USA shouldn't send additional funding to "an apartheid state's military," which would make sense were Israel an apartheid state or Iron Dome weren't a system intended to save civilian lives from rocket attack. Bush brazenly equates Israel with the South Africa which institutionalized separateness and segregation, just as she has equated policing in the USA with slavery.
Expression of anti-Semitic sentiment doesn't get much more explicit than the words of Bush, Massie, and Tlaib. Some restraint is inevitable. Even King of Hate Donald Trump claimed to be the "least racist person in the world" and exclaimed "we love our Hispanics." No one outside his cult believed him, and no one should be fooled by the remarks of Cori Bush, Thomas Massie, or Rashida Tlaib.
While Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar cited legitimate concerns, four House members refused to respond to requests for comment while three others made clear their contempt, born of ignorance, about Israel.
Democratic congressman Hank Thompson of Georgia, as well as New York's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voted "present" on the appropriation. Though that won't qualify them as profiles in courage, they avoided the sewer a few of their colleagues have descended into.
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