By Rabbi Dov Fischer, The American Spectator

Everyone in America — left-wing, centrist, right-wing, apolitical — knows that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib hate Jews. That is old news. It no longer needs embedded hyperlinks or cited tweets and quotations to document. Certain names — Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright — instantly translate as “Jew-hater.” So do the names of Omar and Tlaib. The recent Hamas War in the Middle East helped smoke out some more of them: Missouri’s Cori Bush of the same “Squad” is one. That Jew-hater won’t even talk to the local Jewish newspaper. And now we know what the letters “AOC” really stand for:

Anti-Semite of Color.

Many of us have been wondering from Day One how far AOC’s Jew-hatred extends. There was that remarkable interview she gave early on to Margaret Hoover on PBS, in which she reflected such a profound emptiness and ignorance of Mideast realities, merely blabbering slogans of the Left, that she finally had to demand that her interviewer stop that line of questioning. AOC did not know the first thing about the 130 Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria or the 800,000 Jews now living there in cities from Jerusalem to Ariel and in population blocs from Gush Etzion to Karnei Shomron. As the interview progressed, one almost could see little animated birds tweeting around her barista head as in a Looney Tunes cartoon.

But was AOC a full-fledged Jew-hater … or just a slogan-babbling ignoramus?

In fairness to AOC, she has demonstrated remarkable ignorance on a whole swath of issues. Her zero-grasp of basic, simple facts is striking for someone sitting in Congress or, for that matter, even for a coffee shop barista. She says the world will be ending in less than a decade unless we retrofit all our houses and office buildings, stop traveling by plane, and stop eating meat. Really? She has compared compassionate ICE efforts to care for immigrants illegally crossing our southern border to Nazi Germany’s conduct at Auschwitz. Really? When a Holocaust survivor offered to accompany her on a trip to a real former concentration camp — Auschwitz — she was not interested: TMI. Likewise, in another notorious manifestation of her abysmal ignorance of common knowledge, she asserted that the constitutional amendment that limits American presidents to two terms was passed to stop Franklin Roosevelt from seeking reelection. In reality, FDR was long dead by the time the 22nd Amendment was enacted in 1947. So, in and of itself, AOC’s attacks on Israel theoretically could stem from the absence of education she managed to sustain en route to getting her woke graduate degree in economics and foreign relations from Boston University. It really is not a “cheap shot” to say she is abysmally ignorant. She just is. Nothing clinking in the tips plate. Or as they say at railroad crossings, the lights are flashing, the warning bells are clanging, the protective rail arms are lowering — but the train ain’t comin’. So, again, maybe she is not a Jew-hater.

And yet, and yet.

The Rosetta Stone moment when AOC’s Mideast biases translated finally beyond ignorance and the abyss and into Jew-hatred seemed to come when she was invited by Jewish extreme leftists a year ago to attend a memorial for slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Rabin, a lifelong socialist tied to Israel’s Marxist socialist Labor Party, had been assassinated back in 1995, and the Israeli Left was remembering him on an anniversary of his death. Whose presence could be more fitting to memorialize a slain Marxist socialist than Ocasio-Cortez? And indeed, AOC first said she would attend. Then, after being pressed by Jew-haters on the extreme left where she reposes, she backed off and canceled her plans. She decided to boycott the Rabin memorial. She would not even attend a memorial service for an assassinated socialist, the one who gave Yasser Arafat his own polity with an Arafat police force, an Arafat education system to poison the minds of a generation of Arab children, an Arafat media system of television, radio, and newspapers to promote hatred of Jews — simply because Rabin had been a prime minister of Israel.

We now knew that “AOC” stands for Anti-Semite of Color.

And then came the Hamas War.

During this recent war, AOC — New York’s Anti-Semite of Color — repeatedly accused Israel of war crimes and of “apartheid.” To make such accusations, one must be abysmally ignorant of Israel or of apartheid. This AOC is both.

The facts are so simple that even an ignoramus can grasp them. Or, as AOC reflects, maybe not. Facts:

Arabs have sat on Israel’s Supreme Court. When Moshe Katsav, a president of Israel, was tried on criminal charges, an Israeli Arab judge presided over his conviction. Arabs run for office in all national and local Israeli elections. Arabs have established several of their own political parties including Chadash (an acronym for Chazit Demokratit l’Shalom u-l’eShivyon, “The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality,” in Arabic: al-Jabhah ad-Dimuqrāṭiyyah lis-Salām wa’l-Musāwah), Balad (acronym for Brit Leumit Demokratit, “Democratic Alliance,” in Arabic: at-Tajammuʿ al-Waṭanī ad-Dīmuqrāṭī), Ta’al (acronym for “Tnu’ah Aravit LeHit’chadshut,” “Arab Movement for Renewal”), and Ra’am (acronym for Reshima Aravit Me’uchedet, “United Arab List”). All told, from election cycle to cycle, they range from 10 to 20 members in the 120-seat Knesset. Arabs have served as foreign ambassadors of Israel and as generals in the Israel Defense Forces.

The Arabic language has formal “special status” in Israel; all tourists to Israel have seen the proliferation of street signs in Arabic as well as in Hebrew and English. Despite the fact that Arabs make up 20 percent of the total Israeli population, in 2015 they accounted for 35 percent of all doctors and about 35 percent of all pharmacists in Israel. Arab life expectancy has increased 27 years since Israel’ founding in 1948. The Israeli government pays child allowances to encourage Israeli adults to have more children. Those allowances are paid to Arabs, too, and at the same rate as to Jews. That means Israel pays its Arabs to give birth to even more Arabs in Israel. Arabs and Jews live together in many cities like Lod, Acre, and Jaffa. In other cities, ethnic communities prefer to live among people of similar ethnicity, just as is true in New York City’s Harlem, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, and South Bronx regions; Los Angeles’s South-Central, Compton, and East L.A.; and similar enclaves in other cities.

By contrast, Jews are banned from many Arab Muslim countries. For example, there are no synagogues in Saudi Arabia. No Jews in parliament there. No Jews there, period. Talk about apartheid.

There is a big, beautiful wall in Israel along parts of her eastern border that keeps out terrorists. The wall did not exist through Israel’s first half century until 20 years ago when Israel decided it just had to stop the endless importing of explosive devices and the entry of terrorists into the country. The barrier was built during the Second Intifada following a wave of Arab suicide bombings inside Israel. The barrier worked. Arab terrorists and their leftist backers in the West complain that the wall discriminates against the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad by preventing their suicide bombings. Well, it does: “An absolute halt in terrorist activities has been noticed in the West Bank areas where the fence has been constructed.” Since the completion of the fence in the area of Tulkarm and Qalqilyah in June 2003, there have been no successful attacks from those areas. All attacks were intercepted or the suicide bombers detonated prematurely. To the Qatari newspaper Al-Sharq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah opined that the separation barrier “limits the ability of the resistance to arrive deep within [Israeli territory] to carry out suicide bombing attacks, but the resistance has not surrendered or become helpless, and is looking for other ways to cope with the requirements of every stage” of the intifada.

There is nothing remotely close to apartheid in Israel. Tlaib, Omar, Cori Bush, and New York’s Anti-Semite of Color — AOC — are not focused on facts or truth but on destroying the only country in the world with a Jewish majority. For AOC, too, it is about hanging tight with her fellow Squad Sisters because they are a unit, so stick together, as if to say, “OK, I will help you destroy that Jewish country you hate if you support my Green New Deal.” That is how it works. So she uses a term like “apartheid” to describe an Israel that risked its own soldiers’ lives and enormous national resources to liberate between 6,500 and 7,200 Black Jews from Ethiopia and take them out of Africa and bring them into Israel in the 1985 “Operation Moses” and then did so again to liberate another 14,325 Black Jews from Ethiopia in the 1991 “Operation Solomon.”

Countries like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan have opened to Israel. AOC may be boycotting, but they are not. Perhaps most interesting is the way that Arabs inside Israel reacted when news of President Donald Trump’s Mideast “Deal of the Century” leaked out a year ago. One suggestion in the plan was a possible exchange of regions, with more Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”) regions coming under complete Israeli sovereignty and certain heavily Arab towns in northern Israel’s “Arab Triangle” being transferred to Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) and his Palestine Authority. The reaction of Israeli Arabs in the “Triangle” upon learning of their sudden “opportunity” to leave “apartheid” Israel for “Palestine” was unanimous: No way! As summarized by Professor Daniel Pipes:

In February 2004, an Arab research center found that Arab respondents preferred by a 10-to-1 ratio to remain Israeli citizens. Two polls in  agreed on a 4.5-to-1 ratio. A June 2008 poll found that Israeli Arabs preferred Israel to “any other country in the world” by a 3.5-to-1 ratio. A June 2012 poll found a similar ratio to this same question. A January 2015 poll found pride in being Israeli by a 2-to-1 ratio. Mayors of three towns mentioned by name in the plan slammed the idea of being included in a future Palestine and demonstrations erupted. Israeli Arab media reactions was, “without exception” opposed to the idea.

Israel’s most extreme-left daily newspaper, Haaretz, headlined its story at the time this way:

AT RISK OF LOSING THEIR ISRAELI CITIZENSHIP IN ‘DEAL OF THE CENTURY,’ THESE ARABS ARE FEELING BETRAYED

In ‘Triangle communities’ such as Kafr Qasem and Taibeh, locals voice their dismay at Donald Trump’s idea of transferring their hometowns to a future Palestinian state

No Zionist ever expressed as much desire to live under Jewish sovereignty in Israel than did the Arabs of the Triangle when they learned they might be transitioned politically to “Palestine.” Apartheid, AOC? Really?

If someone really cares about the Arabs of Gaza, here are a few thoughts that may be too complex for the sparsely populated mind of New York’s Anti-Semite of Color but really are quite simple for most others:

1. If no one in Gaza shoots rockets at Israel, then Israel won’t shoot back.
2. If they do launch rockets but do not launch them from residential apartment buildings, hospitals, mosques, and schools, then Israel will not have to bomb those locations to take out the launchers.
3. Since Hamas rules Gaza by virtue of having won the 2006 Gaza elections, in which Gaza residents cast more than 90 percent of their votes democratically for contending terrorist groups, the people of Gaza have exactly the situation they voted for.
4. When Hamas loses a war, it cries for and gets a ceasefire and re-arms for the next war. If Israel ever loses a war, there will be no more Israel.
5. Currently, Hamas is holding Avera Mengistu, an Ethiopian Jew, hostage. Mengistu, who is intellectually challenged, wandered into Gaza from Israel in September 2014. Hamas has held him for seven years. If Black lives matter so much, let’s hear New York’s Anti-Semite of Color demand his freedom.