During a town hall event on Monday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) spoke of her commitment to stopping violence in Gaza.
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00:00Are you listening?
00:08Two heads.
00:12I'm Charlie Eiland in Minneapolis.
00:15I have hated genocide since I first learned of the one that Hitler conducted in Germany in the early 1960s.
00:23And I hate the genocide that's going on in Dallas right now.
00:30To my amazing congresswoman, I want to thank you for really giving me thanks in order for stopping that evil.
00:42And particularly the drug resolution of disapproval, which is now sending more 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs to kill people in their tents as they get fled from the rubble.
00:54But I also want to ask a question of the state representatives.
00:57Minnesota now passed a law which prohibits the state from doing business with anyone who wants to boycott, divest, or sanction the genocide going on by Israel and Gaza.
01:11And I want to ask you, if you would support anything, I'm asking the state representatives now, if you would support measures to overturn that thing, which seems crazy to me, for a country that began with the Boston Tea Party.
01:27Thank you so much, and I share your gratitude to our congresswoman for being just a voice of sanity and care and compassion in the world right now.
01:48I feel really strongly that people will look back at this time and what's been happening in Gaza, and we will be judged for how we reacted as a country.
02:05And so I can only speak for myself that I support repealing the BDS state law and taking the Boston state law.
02:19You know, we just talked about this when we talked about the ERA, for example.
02:28There are a lot of different kinds of Democrats.
02:30There are a lot of different kinds of Democrats that Congresswoman, Ilhan works with.
02:36There's a lot of different Democrats we work with.
02:37And we didn't have an ERA supporting majority in the Senate in 2023, and we do not have the votes, we do not have the power, we do not have the agreement as Democrats who serve, because we don't have the agreement of the people who those people represent across the state to do that in the legislature right now.
03:04And, you know, I think that there are, there's a lot of, like, work that we need to do, because, you know, you can be right on an issue, and if you haven't built the power to assert the rightness, then, you know, you're not able to actually make material moves on it.
03:24And so that's our job, is those of us who are anti-genocide, who are reacting with horror at what's happening in the world, is to do the organizing and to do the power-building work that we need to do to build a moral consensus around this issue, and that that needs to infuse its way into governing bodies.
03:44But we're not at that moment right now, unfortunately.
03:46What am I doing to change?
03:48What am I doing to change?
03:50I mean, we have to have conversations, like, we, you know, it's not on us exactly, it's on all of us.
03:58You know, I mean, I have, I have an obligation, and I have been speaking out about Gaza, and Ilhan has been speaking out about Gaza with her much larger platform than any of us have.
04:10But it's right for us all to ask our elected representatives what they're doing, and, you know, I'm happy to tell you more about what I'm doing, but it's like, you know, this is an issue that we don't have agreement on within our own party.
04:26That's a fact of the matter, unfortunately.
04:29Thank you, Aisha.
04:30I think what Representative Gomez says, I think, you know, Charlie, you probably understand, is that when this bill passed, I was in the Minnesota House.
04:47I think I was the only Democrat who voted against it.
04:51Right, so you have to, like, comprehend the level of, um, the, of movements, um, you have to do, because to me, it was against the First Amendment.
05:06Yeah.
05:07Point blank.
05:08Very unconstitutional.
05:10Probably if somebody sued, they would not, and they have, and many countries, like Georgia, many states, like Georgia and others, no longer have it on the books, and they had to, you know,
05:20figure out a way to, you know, trim some silly thing in it right now that doesn't have to, like ours does, because the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional.
05:31And so we should, too, as Minnesolans, and see if we can maybe get rid of it that way.
05:37There is always a different, a different path.