Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill are once again engaged in one of their favorite activities: bashing Ilhan Omar and setting her up for abuse by the American right. Two years ago, they denounced the Minnesota congresswoman and bullied her into apologizing for an innocuous tweet about the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on public debate. Now they’ve issued a statement condemning Omar “for drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban.”

In a repeat of the pattern from 2019, Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues present the results of their harassment as a justification for it: “We welcome the clarification by Congresswoman Omar that there is no moral equivalency between the US and Israel and Hamas and the Taliban.” The most telling phrase in the statement was “moral equivalency.” It has a long and ignoble history as a tool for whitewashing crimes against humanity.

When the likes of Pelosi complain about “moral equivalency,” what they really mean is this: Under no circumstances can you judge the United States and its allies by the things that they do. You must judge them by their rhetorical claims to support peace, democracy, and goodwill among men. No matter how many innocent people they kill, you can never accuse them of terrorism or criminality. Such labels are the exclusive property of designated “bad guys” like Hamas, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin.