Austinites greet Omar with 'Southern hospitality'

For Ilhan Omar, the Muslim-American freshman congresswoman from Minnesota who has been the target of a menacing tweet from President Donald Trump and the suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence that she be bounced from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, her weekend in Austin may be remembered as a relatively placid interlude.

Yes, there were more than two dozen demonstrators outside a North Austin hotel where Omar spoke Saturday night at the fourth annual Citywide Iftar, a ceremonial dinner during Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from sunrise to sundown. But while some were armed with rifles and hostile signs, others held banners and banged drums of welcome.

Inside, Mayor Steve Adler, the guest of honor at the dinner, brushed aside criticism earlier in the week from Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller that, as a Jew, Adler should especially keep his distance from Omar. He described the dinner's keynote speaker, the first Somali-American and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, as an “inspiring and wonderful symbol of our country’s progress toward real and meaningful representation in government for people who have not previously seen themselves reflected in our democratic institutions.”

Just before noon Sunday, Omar, 37, spoke for 10 minutes at the convention of Texas Young Democrats at a South Austin hotel. A couple of police cruisers were parked out front, but not a protester was in sight.

In introducing Omar, Jen Ramos, the Texas Young Democrats' unflappable communications director, noted that they had "received a lot of criticism and commentary for inviting our guest speaker. But in case you don’t know, Texas comes from the word Tejas, which means friendship, and that’s the Southern hospitality we are willing to extend to our guests. We welcome everyone. Y'all means y'all."

Omar entered and left to a standing ovation from the hundred Young Democrats in attendance.

Omar talked about the history of the Texas Legislature passing "voter suppression laws," but said, "We are going to defeat those voter suppression laws. We are are going to defeat the people who are against seeing a flourishing democracy. We are going to defeat the xenophobics, homophobics, the racists."

"I tell people our democracy is messy, it's on shaky grounds at the moment, but I know all of us are going to do the work of picking up a broom and cleaning it up," Omar said.

During a recent appearance on the "Fox & Friends" news show, Pence asserted that "Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has no place on the House Foreign Affairs Committee," noting what he characterized as her "anti-Semitic comments, statements against our most cherished ally Israel that ought to be rejected by every American."

In April, Trump tweeted a video interspersing images of the Twin Towers burning on 9/11 with a snippet of a remark Omar made to the Council of American-Islamic Relations in which she said that, "CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something ... "

The rest of her quote was, "and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the tweet placed Omar in danger.

On Tuesday, Miller posted on Facebook that he was "shocked to learn that Austin’s Jewish Mayor Steve Adler plans to share the stage at an upcoming Ramadan dinner with controversial Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar," and called on Adler to "cancel his dinner reservation."

Quite a number of Miller's Facebook followers posted comments indicating that they wished a bad end for Omar.

"We needed chris kyle to deal with her," commented one, referring to the late Texan and Navy SEAL known as the "American Sniper."

At the iftar on Saturday night, Omar said Islamophobia is on the rise around the world and across the U.S., including in Texas. She said that mosques in Texas regularly receive death threats and that there has been a rise in hate speech against Muslims in the Austin area.

The attacks Muslims face, Omar said, are “the same as the ones that Jews face every single day.”

“Attacks on faiths are linked, and we must confront them together,” she added. “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same bigoted coin.”

After Omar's remarks to the Young Democrats, Maxine Cofino, 32, of San Antonio, the outgoing chair of the group's Women's Caucus, said she thought the claims of anti-Semitism against Omar for her criticism of Israeli policies were unfounded.

 "As a Sephardic Jew myself, I stand with the congresswoman on the horrors that are happening to the Palestinian people that no one are addressing," Cofino said. "Throwing rocks shouldn’t be a death sentence."

Cofino said she also was mystified by the brouhaha that surrounded Omar's February tweet that suggested that congressional support for Israel "was all about the Benjamins," which led to denunciations, including from top Democrats, that Omar was indulging in an age-old anti-Semitic trope about Jews and money.

"It's a hip-hop song; it's not an anti-Semitic trope. It's a little showing-her-age trope," Cofino said of the now 22-year-old hit.

The more relevant reference point for Omar, said Ryan Rosshirt, 30, vice president of the Austin Young Democrats, is that "she's sort of a hero of the 2018 congressional class, similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," the freshman Democrat from Brooklyn, N.Y., who has become an obsessive interest of both lovers and haters, and who Rosshirt said, like Omar, has been the victim of a campaign of "character assassination" from the Republican right.

"There's a a lot of disinformation out there," Rosshirt said. "They are both intelligent, kind, well-meaning young women who should be inspiration to a lot of people."