Last night, Ilhan Omar won her primary election, setting her up for what will almost certainly end up being her fourth term in Congress. Except she didn’t just win. Omar destroyed her challenger, Don Samuels, who was taking his second swing at Omar. Two years ago, he almost beat her — but this time, Samuels was sent packing by a nearly fourteen-point vote margin.
Omar emerged triumphant despite internal polling that, months earlier, had shown a dead-even race, which Samuels claimed “supports what we already know: We can beat Rep. Ilhan Omar.” It turns out he could not.
The outcome isn’t so much a loss for Samuels, a relatively weak and undisciplined candidate, as it is a loss for the pro-Israel lobby. Samuels leaned into criticism of Omar’s opposition to the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza during the campaign, denouncing a Minneapolis City Council cease-fire resolution that Omar supported, attacking her for voting against a one-sided pro-Israel resolution in the war’s first month, and accusing her of ignoring “the sensibilities of the Jewish community.” He got the backing of some major pro-Israel donors, a money surge following Squad member Cori Bush’s defeat, and an eleventh-hour assist from a group of wealthy donors, some of them Donald Trump backers, who called themselves “Zionists for Don Samuels.”
Omar, meanwhile, had done virtually everything that, according to the narrative propagated by AIPAC and others, should have made her political poison. Omar has been a lightning rod for right-wing and pro-Israel attacks the past six years. We’ve been virtually guaranteed at least one firestorm every year — often involving accusations of antisemitism — over the Somali-born Congresswoman’s comments, such as when she accurately called out the influence of pro-Israel donors in 2019.
That includes this year, when Omar briefly faced all that and the threat of censure for saying that “we should not have…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
