Have you ever married a sibling? Like, say, a Somalian Muslim immigrant, who wears a kerchief over her head to connote deep religious integrity and modesty, marrying her brother?
What is that like? I mean, really. Can you imagine the quarrels at home?
“You know what I hate most about you?”
“What?”
“I hate your parents. They are the worst Satanic in-laws a man ever could be stuck with!”
“Well, the people you are calling Satanic are your parents, too.”
“Don’t you dare speak that way about my parents! I’m talking now about your parents!”
“My parents are just watching out for me. They warned me not to marry you. They had a private detective check you out, and they told me you’re no good. But I didn’t listen to them.”
“Well, all I can say is that now I understand the difference between in-laws and out-laws.”
“And what’s that?”
“Outlaws are WANTED.”
And then the arguments about the siblings. “I hate your sister. She has a big mouth and is so self-obsessed. All she talks about is herself.”
“She’s your sister, too.”
“Oh? So you’re gonna start that again?”
No branches on that family tree. Just a straight bark down to its stump. (For what it’s worth, sibling marriage is banned in the Quran, Surah An-Nisa 4:23.)
Good for Speaker Kevin McCarthy for kicking Ilhan Omar’s keister off the House Foreign Affairs Committee. If Steve King of Iowa could not sit on any House committee, and if Marjorie Taylor Greene could be denied her right to sit on committees, and then Paul Gosar, the day long was overdue to kick Ilhan Omar’s to wherever she would land, be it George Soros’s J Street, Omar’s Minnesota district of Somalian Jew haters, or Somalia itself. She is a disgrace to America, even if one American Congressional district is populated by a majority of Jew haters who can overlook in-breeding.
Rep. Greene tweeted some profoundly foolish things belying ignorance before she gained the opportunity to leave a bubble and learn facts, to self-assess, and even to apologize publicly. Paul Gosar and she both belonged on House committees to serve their constituents. The Democrats had no right to ban them from all possible committee assignments. Likewise, the Democrats had no right to ban Jim Jordan from the January 6 committee and to deny McCarthy the right to name his Republican candidates for that committee. Instead, Nancy Pelosi ran roughshod over all rules of comity and appointed Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger as her pet Republicans.
The entire Democrat caucus stood behind Pelosi’s tyrannical effort at one-party rule. Had even a few decent ones told her they cannot back those decisions, she would have been compelled to retreat for lack of numbers. But they stood behind her, establishing a new precedent that hopefully will end when some kind of collegiality returns to the American Congress.
The only good thing that came from Pelosi’s tyranny — and it is a very good thing — is that she thereby killed the political career of Kinzinger and obliterated Liz Cheney. If Pelosi had not done so, elevating Cheney as her Republican ploy, the GOP mainstream would have remained unaware of how bad she is. Then, when McCarthy later would prove unable to rally a majority to elect him as Speaker, Liz Cheney almost surely would have emerged as the perfect compromise candidate: woman, solid right-wing Wyoming no-nonsense fighter. Instead, Pelosi exposed the RINO — just in the nick of time.
Back to Somalian Brotherly Love.
Can you imagine the headlines if it turned out that George Santos had married a sibling? Or Jim Jordan? Remember all the disgusting Leftist implications that Mr. Trump had a thing for Ivanka merely because he described her as beautiful?
We know this: Ilhan Omar married some guy named Ahmed Hirsi in a Muslim ceremony in 2002. They had two kids and then split in 2008. She married Ahmed Elmi in 2009. Although she is so religious that she covers her hair as a modest and pure Muslim woman, and she speaks of herself as a Muslim, she was married by a Christian minister. Elmi is the brother. She then had another child with Hirsi while married to Elmi.
But let’s not stop with Bro. There’s one Tim Mynett. We are talking foreign affairs here — and domestic. Here’s the scenario:
You arrive in America from some dirt-poor wasteland country. You have no money to speak of. You wear a scarf because you are oh-so-religious, oh-so-pure, oh-so-morally modest. Eventually, you marry someone besides or alongside your brother. Big o’ her, if not bigamy? And then you get elected to Congress because you are in a district that is one-435th of America with a concentration of Jew haters and anti-American ingrates who really can love a person who compares America (and Israel) to Hamas and the Taliban. Now, as a Congresswoman, you need campaign funds to pay for political consultants. You also would not mind becoming really rich. So you hire a guy to do your public — uh, relations — and you pay his company nearly one million dollars for consulting and ad buys. And it’s not your money but that of your campaign donors.
The guy getting that million dollars? Oh, he’s your employed consultant.
But even though you are married — maybe to one guy, maybe to two — you start sleeping with the consultant. So, when the scarf is down, filed in the box labeled “Religious Muslim Piety,” it is adultery time. Meanwhile that guy is married, too — and he has a thirteen-year-old boy. So he’s committing adultery. The love birds finally decide to divorce their spouses and marry each other. And all the wealth transferred to the consultant from the campaign funds now becomes part of the Congresswoman’s life, too. Who says that grime does not pay?
For a religiously devout woman who rues that America is not more like Somalia, the awful place where she grew up to hate Jews, welcome to the American Way.
In an era when a Steve King and a Marjorie Taylor Greene and a Paul Gosar can be denied committee assignments, this ethically and morally repugnant hater does not belong on the House Foreign Affairs Committee or on any committee. OK, maybe a Marital Affairs committee. The issue transcends her First Amendment rights to hate Jews, to accuse us of every stereotype the German Nazis used. She, the foreign affairs expert who referred to 9/11 as the time “some people did something.”
So here’s my take. There was a “Seinfeld” episode where Jerry’s dentist, Dr. Whatley, converts to Judaism. Soon, the dentist is telling Jerry all sorts of Jewish jokes, the kinds only Jews can tell other Jews. Jerry is upset and complains to Dr. Whatley’s former priest: “I am convinced he converted to Judaism just for the jokes,” Jerry kvetches. The priest inquires: “And this offends you as a Jew?” Jerry responds: “No. This offends me as a comedian.”
I also react here on two different levels. As a Jew, I am offended that it took so long to dispatch her. I am offended that Pelosi would not do it and that so-called “Jewish” Democrats like Jerold Nadler and Ted Deutch and Brad Sherman and Adam Schiff did not stand up to her as they do when brazenly criticizing the prime minister of Israel. They are very “courageous” when joining the Left-Wing Anti-Israel Jewish Lynch Mob to attack Israel’s democratically elected government overseas. But they are craven cowards back home when a Jew-hater like Ilhan Omar spews pure Nazi canards against Jews, and not a single one of them votes with the majority to bounce her from Foreign Affairs. I am offended that, even now, not one Democrat joined in voting Omar off, even though they imposed worse sanctions on Rep. Greene and Rep. Gosar, banning them from all committees, not just one.
This is why some 90 percent of Orthodox Jews now are Republican. We who observe Judaism, live Judaism from kosher diets to Sabbath observance, and who dress publicly as Jews (with such garments as yarmulkas) are on the front line of encountering antisemitism. So good riddance to Omar and her phony religious posture, her adultery kerchief.
And as a political conservative, I have awaited some GOP backbone in Washington. For decades, Democrats have broken all rules of civility and rubbed Republican noses in the mud. Look at how they abused and brazenly lied about judges like Robert Bork, Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. They unfairly denied Greene and Gosar committee seats and denied the GOP its right to name its representatives to the January 6 committee. If they had the votes, they were ready to pack the Supreme Court and add Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as states.
However, whenever the tables turn, and Republicans can reciprocate, Democrats and their left-wing media stooges lecture: “Don’t you dare retaliate. You’re too good for that.”
Does this sound familiar to Israel’s majority conservative and Orthodox population of voters? The way the secularist, socialist, even Marxist Left changes all the rules when they can get away with it. Aharon Barak corrupting the Supreme Court rules. The Left forcing changes in the status quo at the Kotel (Western Wall) and the status quo in public transportation on Shabbat and trying to legalize bringing chametz into hospitals on Passover and bribing mercenaries elected on a right-wing platform to vote for Oslo.
And then, when the voters finally elect a Knesset to undo all the unilateral violations of the status quo, the Left comes out crying about the “death of democracy,” merely because their Left-wing secular socialist Jewish slates have lost five consecutive elections to the right-wing Orthodox alliance.
The time has been long overdue for to demonstrate — not by words but by deeds — that, no, we are not “too good for that.” You throw qualified Republicans off committees? Well, we will throw your Jew haters and liars and intelligence risks off committees. You corrupt our judicial system? Well, we will fix it right back. And we will keep reciprocating until you return to the rules of comity, civility, and decency. Until then, we will be just as you are — with only one exception: We won’t marry our siblings.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
To receive Rav Fischer’s Weekly Extensive Torah Commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: [email protected]