Snark aside, the reality is that she refused to condemn the Armenian genocide.
All the lefty pundits had a field day when Trump failed to condemn Nazis. There’s exactly one thing as clearly condemnable as Nazis – genocide. Let’s watch to see the liberal hypocrisy on this one.
Omar's office has sent this statement to CNN explaining her present vote: pic.twitter.com/Gpj198jx0p
— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) October 29, 2019
I’ve lived in the Bronx most of my life in what is currently Elliot Engels’s district. But I’ve been looking to purchase an apartment and some of those I’ve looked at are in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s district. It’s looking like the one I’ll buy won’t be, but if it is I will do the nearly unthinkable (for me) and register as a Democrat in order to vote against her. She is facing a serious primary challenge from a city councilman. She only won the 2018 primary by a little over 4,000 votes. But moving to MN is a bit farther than I am prepared to go to defeat a member of the squad. I can only hope that Ilhan Omar faces a significant primary challenger of her own.
Knowing nothing else about them, I wouldn’t be upset if every congressperson (Republican or Democrat) who failed to vote yes on the resolution condemning genocide lost a primary election.
The Basic problem is that she’s incoherent, inarticulate, and completely fringe theory driven. And like the Orange Buffoon seems to be big on “fantastic information” (Trump on the Infowars creep). Kind of a Gohmert Left – except people who know him say that Louie in person is the nicest idiot you’ll ever meet.
Scoopy,
Once again your reading is very literal. Ilhan Omar could have meant it the way you define it, but she could also have meant “in this country” in the geographical sense – the space that the nation of the United States now occupies.
I think this is a pretty pointless debate though.
You’re right. I always look at what people say, rather than trying to guess what they would say again after having been caught in a whopper.
The United States was birthed in genocide, suckled by slavery. That’s bad enough without multiplying the real atrocities times a thousand.
Yeah, up is the direction in which she has fucked here. The Turks getting away with slaughtering the Armenians emboldened Hitler. It may also have inspired Stalin’s “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” quote. If you really wanted to vote against this (but WHY?) a better basis would be “way too little, way too late”.
Steven’s right, tho. Just so many Rs voted No, because we…like the Turks too much to call them on this? Want them to be comfortable slaughtering the Kurds?
I don’t agree with her at all, and that’s fine, because quite frankly the more left and independent you are, the more splintered you get because you don’t bow to authoritarianism by nature. Look at the main three candidates – you have an establishment corporate Democrat in Biden, an ‘ethical capitalist’ in Warren, and a democratic socialist in Sanders.
Meanwhile in the Republican primaries, you had a bunch of guys who were taking a verbal beating by Trump, yet were ‘cucked’ and put in line once Trump became President. Everyone except Kasich, Romney, McCain, and the Bush’s have ever had the balls to speak out.
“Liberal hypocracy” is this idiotic ‘gotcha’ generalization conservatives attempt to rationalize to make it seems their bullshit is no worse than the other sides. It’s like someone who bludgeon’s a couple people outside a store with a tire iron and then walks in and says ‘ah, gotcha! same as me!’ for a person who steals a Snickers.
I don’t agree with her, but you know the difference between her statement and Trumps? She’s not there actually PROMOTING and supporting the statement. She didn’t come out and say ‘well there’s both sides to the argument’, and hold rallies across the country inviting those people to her rallies.
If you really want a moral compass of the difference, feel free to do a test. At the next two Trump rallies, go into one with a ‘Hillary won the popular vote’ T-shirt, and the second wear a Neo-Nazi shirt. Then maybe the differences in ‘objectfulness’ will be crystal clear, if you can make it to the second one without getting the shit beat out of you from a cult mob.
Is this really going to be a talking point, because the 11 people who actually voted “No” were all Republicans, including the Vice President’s brother Greg! Gosar is also a Republican. Or are we supposed to know a certain part of the Republican party is always going to be pro-genocide?
Anyway, plenty of liberals, including some of her colleagues, seem to be fine criticizing Omar. Often, she doesn’t seem to do the politically smart thing, though I highly doubt most Americans, let alone her constituents, actually care about the Armenian Genocide enough that this will affect her.
Oh, and she should have voted for the bill.
I wonder what her reason is for not voting for the resolution? I mean, I know she gave an explanation, but that seems more like an excuse than a motivation.
I wondered the same thing. Her explanation is “spin,” a (weak) attempt at justification, and it’s difficult to decipher the true basis for her vote.
One Tweet in response I saw was golden. I may be paraphrasing a bit:
“Sorry, I cannot in good faith attend your fund raiser for breast cancer research because so many people have other types of cancer.”
Perfect!
JUSTICE SERVED – Tony 4 Bags!!!!!!!!
Hundreds of millions in this country ? I would love to see the sources.
Maybe Gen. Flynn is not the only dippy figure to have been on Erdogan’s payroll.
Btw, the academic consensus on the Armenian murder march is about as unanimous as anything for that sort of thing except for the Final Solution.
Has the Tweetmistress from the Bronx pronounced on this yet?
ODIOUS UMPING
A ridiculous Trump-like claim when qualified by “in this country,” as she did.
My guess is that there have not been a hundred million indigenous Americans within the current borders of the United States from the European arrival to the present. The pre-Columbian estimate is about two million. Moreover, many of those who died did so from disease, not genocide, which must by definition be intentional. There is no defense for monsters like Andrew Jackson and some of the leaders of the 7th Cavalry, but we need to keep the numbers in perspective.
I guess you might be able to get the death count to more than a hundred million if you include (1) all of North and South America and (2) those who died of disease.
The ‘two million’ estimate is based on old and discredited calculations.
I attended a lecture last Saturday by Canadian indigenous journalist Tanya Talaga who claims the number of First Nations in ‘North America’ was as high as 90 million (Canada, the United States and Mexico, not sure if she meant Central America as well) prior to the arrival of the European illegal aliens.
I think that is an overestimate, but her lecture got me into reading a book by Indigenous History Professor Arthur Ray called “I Haved Lived Here Since the World Began” in which he explains why the old estimates were so low. He claims with decent evidence that the First Nation population in Canada pre Columbus was between 500,000-900,000 alone.
The more recent estimates I’ve seen of the U.S native population pre Columbus are around 20 million. It is interesting that the same people who had no problem promoting the ‘2 million figure’ now claim stuff like “there really is no accurate way to determine the native population pre Columbus.”
I think there is and I think the estimates of around 20 million in the United States are quite accurate. I don’t know what percentage, but a good deal of Indigenous people who died from disease were intentional killings.
I don’t see the point of this debate though. Genocide is evil anywhere and her argument is no different than when Trump claims “you think the United States is so great?” to justify horrible actions elsewhere.
I don’t have much problem with AOC, Rashida Tlaib doesn’t seem all that bad, and I don’t know how Ayanna Pressley got included with them (she was an advisor to Senator Kerry not long before running for the U.S House, how much more ‘establishment’ could she be?) but I certainly hope Ilhan Omar is defeated in a 2020 Democratic Primary. There are a lot of potentially very good Democrats who can represent Minneapolis and its suburbs. They just need to unite behind a single opponent so that she can’t come up the middle.
Even if the 20 million is accurate, which I doubt, unless you mean throughout all of North America, including areas controlled by France and Spain, it is irrelevant to what she claimed. Remember that Omar stated “in this country,” which is what made the statement truly preposterous.
I would be very surprised if anyone could produce a credible number of as many of a million Native Americans killed intentionally within the United States, even if you extend the number to include the existing borders of the USA, and back-date it all the way to 1492, and include the ones killed by other warring tribes.
If you date it from 1776 to the present, including only those people actually in what was the United States at the time, therefore matching up with Omar’s pronouncement, you might not be able to come up with 100,000. I think the estimate of the entire Amerind population in the USA in 1776 was only 300,000! (The population of the entire country, including white people, was only 2.5 million.)
Yes, all genocide is terrible. Obviously. But there is a big Trumpian difference between 100,000 and “hundreds of millions.”
Yes, those are the outdated estimates based on calculations that relied on bad data. The best estimates for what is now the entire United States is around 20 million. I don’t know how you can claim 2.5 million with any certainty, it’s not like there was ever a census of natives taken in the unsettled areas.
I think it’s not easy to determine ‘intentionality’ here because, while the deliberate use of ‘germ warfare’ against native Americans was not widespread, it was quite evident the European illegal aliens and their descendants knew their mere presence among the natives was giving the natives diseases and killing them off.
So, the further expansion westward may not have been enabled by deliberate use of ‘germ warfare’ but it’s impossible to claim that the settlers did not know this would occur. They, at best, didn’t care, and, at worst, were counting on it to ease their way forward.
Is that deliberate genocide?
Again, that number is not relevant to her claims re “in this country.” The 2.5 million I cited has nothing to do with native Americans. That was the ENTIRE population of the United States, meaning the white people. The native American population within the United States was around 300,000. Probably no more than 100,000 could have been killed “in this country” – a number somewhat short of her “hundreds of millions.” Anyone who has tried to make that calculation has produced a much smaller number, and I don’t even think a million would be a reasonable upper end. As I said, even Trump would be hard pressed to come up with a more ridiculous exaggeration than Omar’s. It makes his crowd size estimates seem to be in the ballpark.
“Within just a few generations, the continents of the Americas were virtually emptied of their native inhabitants – some academics estimate that approximately 20 million people may have died in the years following the European invasion – up to 95% of the population of the Americas.”
From Guns Germs & Steel: Variables. Smallpox.
Not relevant to her remarks.
That all happened between 1492 and 1776, and had nothing to do with “in this country.” Moreover, 80 to 95% was attributable to disease, not willful slaughter. And some of the remainder was the native tribes killing each other. By the time America was founded, there were very few natives left in our part of North America. (About 300,000 in the United States).
Again, the actual number of natives intentionally killed by Europeans “in this country” is assuredly below a million, possibly even below 100,000, despite the best efforts of the 7th Cavalry, Andrew Jackson and various white settlements.
Eddie Bernice Johnson is a Democrat as well.
No hypocrisy — she’s wrong.
Was that so hard?