MN-05: Do Rep. Ilhan Omar's Dem critics know Israel probably helped Trump win? - Update

This has been around for a while, but I’m thinking a reminder may be useful.

Much ink has been spilled on the role of the Russia-backed Internet Research Agency’s engaging in disinformation tactics to help the Trump campaign. The intelligence firm and thirteen individuals connected to it are the targets of an indictment brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February (2018). The indictment finds fault with the IRA for “posing as U.S. persons and creating false U.S. personas, operated social media pages and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences” and then using those assets to spread disinformation designed to interfere in the election. But a little known private Israeli intelligence firm may well have done precisely the same thing...

The New York Times was the first to report on a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Erik Prince and George Nader in August 2016 that included Joel Zamel, the founder of PSY-Group, an Israel-based private intelligence firm that sold social-media manipulation services. The meeting was in part to pitch PSY-Group’s proposal to use “thousands of fake social media accounts to promote Mr. Trump’s candidacy on platforms like Facebook.” - Just Security

Those who insist that the current Israeli government was wholly uninvolved in the above may as well keep their heads in the sand.

Addendum: I'm adding a link to an article by someone who was there for Rep. Omar's speech.

Attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar are rising. One of the first Muslim women elected, Omar is also black, an African immigrant, a former refugee from Somalia, and wears her hijab in the halls of Congress. She is under attack from the leaders of her own party for anti-Semitic statements she never made, for anti-Jewish prejudice she never expressed, for hatred of Jews she doesn’t hold. And the Democratic Party leadership is considering a resolution whose early text, at least, while not mentioning Omar by name, is clearly aimed at accusing her of precisely those things, despite the fact—ignored by the Speaker of the House and other top officials—that she never said or believed any of those words. - The Nation

Update: Those who sought a high-profile public shaming of Rep. Omar for telling it like it is have been forced to back down.

Young progressives are the future of the Democratic Party. In fact, they’re its present, when it comes to actually winning elections. And they want, among a lot of other things, for the party’s DC establishment to get its collective nose out of AIPAC’s stinkin’ butt. Now.

It’s no surprise that Minnesota’s corporate “news” media is trying to play this for all it can. (This is no fun to type, but I must regrettably include MPR and TPT with that. In recent years, they’ve become in many ways every bit the false equivalence-mongers that the state’s overtly for-profit media have long been.) They tried the same thing with another African-American Muslim in 2018. What better way to appeal to their own old, white, right-leaning base? But, electorally, it didn’t work with Keith Ellison, and it won't work for 2020.