“Hold it, hold it, hold it,” Sanders insisted. “I’ve talked to Ilhan about twice in my life.”
His reaction reflects the broader Democratic Party’s conflicted embrace of Omar. That struggle has especially been apparent in the House, where Jewish Democrats have tangled with Omar and Democratic leaders have grappled with how to handle the freshman Democrat from Minnesota, who is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.
When Omar, 36, pushed for a House rules change to permit her to wear her hijab on the House floor, she was heralded as a powerful symbol of the Democratic Party’s inclusiveness. But her support of the boycott Israel movement and her attacks on supporters of Israel have made her a complicated figure to defend. Democratic leaders, as well as many in the rank and file, are choosing their words with caution.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced the president for invoking the “painful images of 9/11 for a political attack” without mentioning Omar, and waited until Sunday — two days after Trump’s tweet — to issue a statement saying she had asked the Capitol Police to assess the congresswoman’s safety. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the House Democratic leader, waited three days before calling on the president to apologize to Omar.
“They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only other Muslim woman of Congress, wrote on Twitter, responding to someone who complained about Omar’s “lack of support” from the Democratic leadership. “However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored. To truly honor our diversity is to never silence us.”
In many respects, Omar, a Somali refugee whose family received asylum in the United States when she was a teenager, represents a new direction for the Democratic Party. Her allies on the left argue that Trump’s war with Omar is a defining issue for the party.
“This is a proxy for who counts as an American and who doesn’t, and that is a fight that the Democratic Party needs to be leading on,” said Waleed Shahid, spokesman for Justice Democrats, a liberal advocacy group that helped elect Omar. “The Democratic Party can’t run away from the fight regarding Ilhan Omar, because she represents the country. In the story between Make America Great Again or the new America we are becoming, she is a pivotal character.”
Trump appears to agree. Using Omar as his foil, he and his team are deploying the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message for the 2020 re-election campaign that they used to ride to the White House in 2016. The congresswoman has said she has “experienced an increase in direct threats on my life” since the president’s tweet Friday.
“This is endangering lives,” she said in a statement Sunday night. “It has to stop.”
But centrist Democrats have a more complex relationship with Omar. Her leftist brand of politics does not go over well in the swing districts that delivered Democrats the House majority. Her views on Israel make many Jews — an important component of the Democratic base — deeply uneasy. And her insinuations that U.S. policy toward the Jewish state is driven by money — “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she wrote on Twitter — have drawn charges of anti-Semitism, prompting her to apologize.
So while Omar’s more moderate colleagues have denounced the threats against her, they have been tepid in their remarks. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a centrist Democrat from New Jersey and strong supporter of Israel, spoke carefully when asked about Omar.
“The response to different points of view in our country must never be threats of physical harm or violence,” he said.
But if the party is conflicted about Omar, it is not reflected in the fundraising report she filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.
During the first quarter of 2019, she raised $832,000, roughly half of which was from donors giving under $200. Overall, Omar took in nearly twice the median amount raised by incumbents who are in races rated a tossup by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, according to Michael Beckel, who analyzes money in politics for Issue One, a bipartisan group that advocates election overhaul.
The current controversy around Omar stems from remarks she made to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, describing how the group was founded after the Sept. 11 attacks “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” (The group was actually founded in 1994.)
Last Tuesday, Rep. Daniel Crenshaw, a freshman Republican from Texas, seized on the “some people did something” phrase, and posted a tweet suggesting Omar was minimizing the attacks. Conservative news outlets — including The New York Post and Fox’s “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite television program — picked up on it. On Friday, Trump tweeted the edited video, which interspersed graphic images of the burning World Trade Center towers with a clip from Omar’s speech.
In an interview on Tuesday with CNN, Pelosi rejected the notion that Omar was anti-Semitic, and expressed concern for her well being, but she said she had not spoken to the congresswoman about the CAIR speech. “I don’t even know what was said,” Pelosi said. “But I do know what the president did was not right.”
Omar’s supporters say there is a danger to the Democratic split.
“Some of these institutional Democratic leaders can’t find, frankly, the spine to speak up quickly and strongly in defense of one of their colleagues,” said Zahra Billoo, a spokeswoman for CAIR. “If we don’t find alignment soon, knowing that Donald Trump is already passing Democratic candidates in his own fundraising, I worry that we are looking at a second term because the leaders of our party did not do the right thing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.