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House Votes to Condemn All Hate as Anti-Semitism Debate Overshadows Congress

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota this week on Capitol Hill. An internal uproar erupted after Ms. Omar insinuated that backers of Israel exhibited dual loyalty.Credit...Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — It started as a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Then, anti-Muslim bias was added in. After that came white supremacy. And by the end, it cited “African-Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants and others” victimized by bigotry.

The resolution condemning “hateful expressions of intolerance,” which passed the House by an overwhelming 407-to-23 vote Thursday afternoon, was as much a statement of Democrats’ values as their factionalism. Caught in the middle was Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who worked for days to quell the internal uproar that erupted after a freshman Democrat, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, insinuated that backers of Israel exhibit dual loyalty.

“I see everything as an opportunity,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters Thursday morning as she announced the vote. “This is an opportunity once again to declare as strongly as possible opposition to anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim statements” and “white supremacist attitudes.”

The carefully crafted measure — one Democratic aide called it a “kitchen-sink resolution” — capped an emotional week for Democrats, who found themselves divided along racial and religious lines as they debated how to respond to Ms. Omar.

In the end, only Republicans voted no. One, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who was stripped of his committee assignments this year after a history of bigoted comments, voted present.

[What do Ms. Omar’s constituents think about her comments on Israel? It’s complicated.]

The resolution states that “whether from the political right, center or left, bigotry, discrimination, oppression, racism and imputations of dual loyalty threaten American democracy and have no place in American political discourse.” It also evokes white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Va., Charleston, S.C., and Pittsburgh as well as numerous attacks on Muslims and mosques.

Republicans mocked its all-inclusive approach. “We left out the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we left out Wiccans, we left out Jehovah’s Witnesses, we left out disabled people!” Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, exclaimed shortly before the measure came to a vote, adding, “What makes you feel good doesn’t always heal you.”

Some veteran Jewish Democrats, who had pushed for a measure that would solely condemn anti-Semitism, were equally dismayed.

“We are having this debate because of the language of one of our colleagues, language that suggests Jews like me who serve in the United States in Congress and whose father earned a purple heart fighting the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, that we are not loyal Americans,” Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida, said Thursday morning in an emotional speech on the House floor.

“Why are we unable to singularly condemn anti-Semitism?” Mr. Deutch asked. “Why can’t we call it anti-Semitism and show we’ve learned the lessons of history?”

Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, one of two Jewish Republicans in the House, voted no, calling the final resolution “spineless and disgusting,” adding, “If a Republican member was pushing the anti-Semitism that Representative Omar keeps peddling, this resolution would name names.”

But Ms. Pelosi told reporters that the resolution was not aimed at Ms. Omar.

“It’s not about her; it’s about these forms of hatred,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Ms. Omar, one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has been fending off accusations of anti-Semitism for weeks. But she herself has been the target of Islamophobic bigotry; a poster recently appeared in West Virginia linking her to the attacks of Sept. 11. She voted in favor of the resolution and left the House floor without saying anything.

But she issued a statement with the two other Muslim members of Congress — Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and André Carson of Indiana — that hailed the day as historic, noting, “It’s the first time we have voted on a resolution condemning anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation’s history.”

The resolution was the product of a deal brokered by Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, whose district has the highest Jewish population of any congressional district; Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a leading Jewish progressive; and Representative Cedric L. Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana and a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Those three members served as a bridge, people familiar with the talks said, between Mr. Deutch and other veteran Jewish lawmakers; the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which wanted no resolution; and the black caucus, whose members complained that black people have been the victim of racism for years — with no congressional resolution condemning it.

As she spoke to reporters Thursday morning, Ms. Pelosi took a shot at President Trump and his equivocal statements after the deadly white supremacist march in Charlottesville: “The president may think there are good people on both sides; we don’t share that view.”

The debate over anti-Semitism and bigotry has dominated discussion on Capitol Hill all week, overshadowing the Democrats’ agenda and giving Republicans an opening to attack while Democrats were busy fighting among themselves. Democrats were hoping to get the fight over Ms. Omar out of the way before they vote Friday on one of their signature pieces of legislation, the democracy overhaul bill, known as H.R. 1.

The fracas erupted over the weekend, after Ms. Omar said that pro-Israel activists were pushing “for allegiance to a foreign country” — a remark that critics in both parties said played into the anti-Semitic trope of “dual loyalty.”

Mr. Deutch and Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on which Ms. Omar sits, conferred with leadership about how to respond and drafted a resolution condemning anti-Semitism.

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transcript

Pelosi: Anti-Semitism Vote Is Not About Omar

Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday that the House will vote on a broad resolution condemning all forms of bigotry that does not focus on remarks by Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota.

I don’t think that the congresswoman perhaps appreciates the full weight of how it is heard by other people. Although I don’t believe it was intended in any anti-Semitic way, but the fact is, if that’s how it was interpreted, we have to remove all doubt, as we have done over and over again. We’re working now on a resolution that we’ll see when we bring it to the floor, that will again speak out against anti-Semitism, anti-Islamophobia, anti-white supremacy and all the forms that it takes, that our country has no place for this. That’s what we’re working on, something that is one resolution addressing these forms of hatred, not mentioning her name because it’s not about her. It’s about these forms of hatred.

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday that the House will vote on a broad resolution condemning all forms of bigotry that does not focus on remarks by Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota.CreditCredit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

But Ms. Omar’s supporters, especially younger black lawmakers, said she was being singled out for unfair treatment. Tensions boiled over on Wednesday in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats.

Mr. Richmond made an impassioned appeal, ticking off episodes of black men being shot down by the police, and racially inflammatory comments by Mr. Trump, none of which, he told his colleagues, resulted in congressional resolutions.

“I’m just trying to figure out what the litmus test is here,” one person in the room recalled Mr. Richmond saying.

The debate before the vote seemed to underline that concern. Among the Republicans who spoke on the House floor were Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who once took a notorious Holocaust denier to a State of the Union address, and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, who falsely accused the Jewish philanthropist George Soros of collaborating with the Nazis. (He was a child during World War II.)

The resolution lays out in detail the “insidious and pernicious history” of accusations of dual loyalty, including discrimination against Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, questions that President John F. Kennedy faced about his Roman Catholic faith and the Dreyfus affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery captain, was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background.

It also says: “White supremacists in the United States have exploited and continue to exploit bigotry and weaponize hate for political gain, targeting traditionally persecuted peoples, including African-Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants and others with verbal attacks, incitement and violence.”

The vote on the measure comes just weeks after Ms. Omar apologized for saying on Twitter that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby,” a reference to $100 bills that critics said echoed a common anti-Semitic belief that Jewish money is controlling foreign policy.

Ms. Pelosi stopped short of asking for another apology from Ms. Omar, saying: “It’s up to her to explain. But I do not believe that she understood the full weight of her words.”

But if Ms. Pelosi believed she was smoothing over divisions among Democrats, another member of leadership — Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip, gave critics a new cause with an interview in The Hill newspaper. In it, he was quoted as saying that Ms. Omar, who fled war in her native Somalia as a child and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, had more personal experiences with bigotry than those who are generations removed from the Holocaust, the Japanese internment camps of World War II and the other violent episodes of the past.

“I’m serious about that,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Clyburn as saying. “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.’ ‘My parents did this.’ It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.”

Mr. Zeldin responded, “Whip Clyburn’s comments are disgusting, making light of the Holocaust and minimizing its massive importance and impact on victims’ families, survivors, and the world.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: House Measure Condemns Hate In All Its Forms. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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