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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn called on her colleagues in Congress to condemn those who make inflammatory statements about Palestine, citing a recent comment by one GOP lawmaker who told Fox News that Palestine was going to get “eviscerated” and “turned into a parking lot.”
Omar, along with other members of the progressive “Squad,” have come under fire for their criticism of Israel, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. facing a censure resolution over her remarks at a pro-Palestinian protest at the Capitol.
In an attempt to call out the double standards in Congress, Omar on Thursday reposted a short clip of Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio’s Oct.10 interview on The Ingraham Angle. Miller was criticizing Tlaib — who is Palestinian American — for hoisting a Palestinian flag outside her office.
“I don’t even want to call it the Palestinian flag because they’re not a state, they’re a territory, that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot,” Miller said.
His comments mostly gained some traction on TikTok with pro-Palestinian users calling him “disgusting.” But his remarks resurfaced on Thursday when UK-based outlet Middle East Monitor tweeted the interview clip on X, saying that Miller was speaking “openly about genocide against Palestinians.”
Reposting the clip, Omar said, “For once, can people say they condemn calls to completely wipe out Palestinians? It shouldn’t be hard to condemn genocidal rhetoric.”
Miller responded to Omar on Friday, saying she “lacks integrity to condemn the most vile evil,” and that “Israel has never called for the eradication of all Palestinians.” (Omar strongly condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israelis as “horrific.”)
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Omar was removed from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee in February, over controversial remarks she made about Israel, which both Republicans and Democrats believed invoked antisemitic tropes.
A day after Hamas’ attack on Israelis, Tlaib, whose parents are Palestinian immigrants, expressed grief over the loss of lives on both sides and called for “ending the occupation and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.”
She has since faced widespread criticism, including from some Democrats, for a social media post blaming an explosion at a Gaza hospital on an Israeli airstrike. U.S. officials later attributed it to a Palestinian rocket and a number of subsequent independent news analyses either said that was the likeliest explanation or that the cause was ambiguous.
Amid the conflict, Tlaib and Omar have also faced death threats, NBC News reported, and have been targeted by conservative media and fellow lawmakers who have called them “Jihad squad” and “Hamas caucus.”
The censure resolution against Tlaib was brought by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. In response, Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt. brought a censure resolution targeting Greene — including over a social media post Greene made in 2018 suggesting that a nonexistent space laser controlled by the Rothschild family, a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories, caused wildfires in California. Greene has since said it was not intended to be antisemitic.
