1) the US should not be imposing ‘accountability’ on anyone other than itself. 2) contemporary Muslim identity politics, represented above all by a social justice oriented, imperialist, and sectarian brand of religious politics, remains a source of utter confusion to US leftists https://twitter.com/ilhanmn/status/1362136748621463552

The US criminalization of support to Sunni Muslim anti-colonial militia abroad & vast repression of many religious but politically active Arabs domestically combined with overt Islamophobia creates a sense that the US is ‘hostile’ to ‘Islam’

The US is of course not hostile to ‘Islam’ and it never imposed a cynically named ‘Muslim ban’ (unless everyone in Syria and Iraq were Muslims, or the ban was extended to Saudi Arabia, the US’s best client)

The purely religious identity politics rather than anti-imperialist prism through which these events and programs are seen prevents us from seeing their essence, which is imperial and class-based

The ‘ban’ was on states which buck the US geopolitical order and it was the height of opportunism or cynicism to frame it as a ‘Muslim ban’ to lure anti-Islamophobic white liberals into support

What does this have to do with Ilhan Omar? She is a frequent speaker and seems to be an ideologically fellow traveler of CAIR, which like American Muslims for Palestine, adopts an anti-Islamophobic pro-Palestine and pro-imperialist politics https://www.cair.com/action_alerts/cair-joins-in-call-for-no-fly-zone-to-protect-syrian-civilians/

This is enchanting for a US progressive left which is good on islamophobia & decent on Palestine, but sees both as removed from imperialism, while also seeing colonialism as distinct from imperialism

The fact that the avatars of this politics are themselves sometimes criminalized (while sometimes like AMP waving the ... US flag??) sows tremendous ideological & organizational confusion

This however is not without historical precedent including in the case of Palestine, where there has *always* been a wing of the Palestinian national movement seeking to make the cause palatable to US geopolitical ordering

Yes I said it, Palestine has a national movement with contradictory politics which is worth understanding if we want to have a .... strategy for the liberation of Palestine

This explains not just Ilhan Omar’s ‘contradictions,’ but more broadly the ‘contradictions’ of social justice or anti-imperialist pablum spouting USians who reflect, despite posturing about the US being bad, this ultimate (class) interest in a pro-systemic Palestine politics