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Wednesday, 21 August 2019 20:48

Want a definition of the word hubris? Look Up Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Written by Fred Weinberg
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I always hesitate to write about our two freshmen Muslim Congresswomen and Israel because the first reaction of those who will not agree with me is that I’m Jewish and I just don’t understand their attitudes.

 

You would be half right.  I did grow up in a reform Jewish family, my parents were educators, I went to Sunday School every year from Kindergarten to 10th grade, was Bar Mitzvahed at age 13 and am pretty conversant in comparative religion.  But I also understand Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, maybe better than they understand themselves.

 

How do people like these get elected to Congress?

 

The same way Donald Trump became President.  By playing to their base.

 

Only their base is a group of people who simply don’t want to come to America and assimilate.  They want to come here and make us into Somalia.  Or, any number of other failed states in the Middle East.  I know, I know…Tlaib was born in Detroit.  Have you been to Detroit lately?  It bears a strong resemblance to certain cities in the Middle East.  So do a lot of cities run by Democrats these days.  

 

Omar and Tlaib in their tender freshman term have a bad case of hubris.

 

Hubris is a noun which is defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence”—something many politicians are afflicted with but usually as they climb further up the ladder.

 

To repeat a story I’ve told many times, when we had a radio station in Tulsa, we had a regular caller named Jack Jackson.  He used to say that when someone gets elected to the school board, the city council or the county commission, they get down to the school headquarters, city hall or the county courthouse, they see the receptionist and that 10 button phone, they take a whiff of that pink gas and they’re never the same.

 

You can imagine what happened to these women when they got elected to Congress.

 

They took that pink gas out of a mask hooked to a tank they had delivered to their offices.

 

They became the “us” in “us versus them”.  And, of course, we—you and I—are the “them.”

 

It’s an occupational hazard for politicians of all stripes but it is especially contagious among those who are being egged on every day by the fake news media.

 

So what these two clowns have done is to take on Israel.

 

There was a bi-partisan House delegation which went to the Middle East and talked to all sides from August 5th to the 15th.  These women could have easily been part of that group.  But noooooo.  That’s would not have shined a big enough spotlight on them, so they announced they would make a separate trip to Israel to talk with…wait for it…the Palestinians—whoever they actually are.

 

Israel did what any sovereign nation has the right to do.  It said NO.  Then, Tlaib said she wanted to see her Grandmother—who she had never met—living on the West Bank.  Israel immediately said yes to that on humanitarian grounds.

 

Was that good enough for Ms. Tlaib?

 

Ummmm.  No.  “Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me,” she said of her grandmother.  “It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in.”

 

Right.

 

Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri summed it up neatly.  “Last night, she sent me a letter asking her to allow her to visit her 90-year-old grandmother ‘because this could be my last chance to meet her’.  I approved it on humanitarian grounds, but it turns out that it was a provocation to embarrass Israel. Her hatred for Israel overcomes her love for her grandmother.”

 

Hubris is a tough taskmaster.

 

Worse are the American Jews who are—for almost inexplicable reasons—so hard core Democrats that they’ll overlook this and blame Israel.

 

But I have a suspicion that if the Omars and the Tlaibs become the face of today’s Democrat party, you may see what my friend Wayne Allyn Root calls a JEXIT.

 

We are almost 75 years away from the end of the Holocaust which made the need for a Jewish state apparent.  It’s easy for people who have no connection to World War Two to have no passion for this never to happen again.

 

Perhaps it is necessary for everyone to study some history so that it can never repeat itself.

 

And maybe some Democrat elders should explain to Omar and Tlaib that—in the total scheme of things—they are not past grade school and their hubris may well stop them from getting to high school.

 

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Fred Weinberg is a columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. His column has been reprinted in full, with permission.