Ilhan Omar wanted the world to know that there was “no way in hell” that she would be attending the speech Israeli President Herzog is to deliver to a joint session of Congress. And then she proceeded to list the reasons for this decision, revealing certain misconceptions about the Jewish state that deserve to be noted. More on her tweet can be found here: “Ilhan Omar’s Unhinged Tweets Show How Confused She is About Israel,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting, July 13, 2023:

In a clearly not-attention-seeking move, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar took to social media on Wednesday to announce to her 2.9 million followers that there is “no way in hell” she will watch Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to the US Congress next week.

Posting a series of tweets, Omar gave her reasons as to why Herzog won’t be graced with her cheerful presence, like how she refuses to watch a speech from “a President whose country has banned [her] and denied [Rashida Tlaib] the ability to see her grandma,” and because his address comes as the Israeli government is “essentially putting a nail in the coffin of peace and a two-state solution.”

And just to show how serious her tweets are, Omar added — all in block capitals — that Herzog should not be invited because the Israeli government “BARRED THE FIRST TWO MUSLIM WOMEN ELECTED TO CONGRESS FROM VISITING THE COUNTRY.”

Deranged ranting aside, the striking thing about Omar’s thread is just how confused she is about Israel.

For one thing, she claims that her fellow Democrat and “squad” member Rashida Tlaib was barred from visiting her grandmother in the West Bank. Fact check: Tlaib was allowed to see her grandmother but chose not to in order to protest Israel’s “oppressive conditions.”

While Israel back in 2019 barred Omar and Tlaib from entering the country to conduct what would clearly have been a political circus by visiting “oppressed Palestinians” in the West Bank, it later made an exception for Tlaib’s visiting her “grandmother in the West Bank” — a visit for which she claimed to pine. But having obtained that permission, about which she had made such a fuss, Tlaib decided not to take advantage of it, but preferred to continue meretriciously to invoke her “I can’t even visit my grandmother” lament against the Jewish state.

While she appears to grasp that there is a difference between Israel’s prime minister and president, she suggests that Herzog is some kind of shadowy shill for Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, if Omar knew as much about Israel as she thinks she does, she would know that Herzog ran against Netanyahu as head of the Labor Party and has also been the key figure pushing for watering down the controversial judicial reforms, which she dubs a “coup to centralize power and undermine checks on their power.”

Omar appears not to know that the man she is boycotting, President Herzog, is a longtime political opponent of Netanyahu, the man Omar loves to hate, and has spoken against the judicial reform proposal, which he has been trying to water down. But apparently that has made no impression on Ilhan Omar, who thinks all Israeli leaders, no matter what their policies, deserve to be boycotted.

Naturally, Omar lambastes Israel for last week’s Jenin raid, which she notes “killed at least a dozen people,” while failing to mention the fact they were all members of terrorist organizations. She additionally blames the failure to establish a Palestinian state on Israel, apparently blissfully unaware of how many peace deals the Palestinians have turned their noses up at….

The Jenin raid by the IDF, Omar is careful not to mention, was undertaken after a series of deadly attacks on Israeli civilians by terrorists based in Jenin; most of them were members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The IDF entered the Jenin camp, scrupulously trying to avoid civilian casualties, and killed twelve fighters, all of them, by the Palestinians’ own admission, members of terror groups, with at least eight of them belonging to the PIJ. The main goal of the 44-hour campaign was to locate and destroy all of the PIJ’s weapons, hidden throughout the camp, with an especially large cache hidden underneath the camp’s mosque. None of this is mentioned by Omar, who presents the Jenin raid as an example of Israel’s motiveless malignity, attacking innocent Palestinian civilians in their homes.

In her tweet, Omar yet again blamed Israel for the failure to establish a Palestinian state, still unaware that Israel has repeatedly offered generous peace deals to the Palestinians – in 2000, 2001, and 2008 — but on every occasion was turned down. Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s proposal, just as Mahmoud Abbas turned down the even more generous offer made by Ehud Olmert, that included having Israel relinquish possession of the Old City, placing it under international control.

Omar does not want her followers to know that Israel has given Rashida Tlaib permission to visit her grandmother on the West Bank, and it is Tlaib herself who has ignored the offer, in order to continue making Israel look bad, as supposedly keeping her from visiting her “beloved grandma.” Omar does not care enough to find out that President Herzog opposes the judicial reform proposal, and on almost every domestic policy question in Israel differs from Prime Minister Netanyahu. Omar wants her 2.9 million followers on Twitter to think that it is Israel that has prevented a peace deal with the Palestinians, when it is the Palestinians who have repeatedly turned down — walked out on — every Israeli proposal for peace. Finally, she’s determined not to listen to any Israeli, no matter their political persuasion, and ideally would like everyone in Congress to join her in her boycott. Too bad, because if she were to listen to the eminently reasonable President Herzog, she just might learn something.