Former Vice President Mike Pence called out Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for her "sickening" attacks on Israel Thursday, following the congresswoman's announcement that she will not attend Israeli President Isaac Herzog's speech to a joint session of Congress next week.
"Israel is one of our greatest and most important allies," Pence tweeted. "Your defense of terrorists and attacks on the Jewish state are sickening. There is no place for antisemitism in our society."
"I will never apologize for standing with Israel," he added. "Stand with me."
The former vice president's tweet links to a WinRed fundraising page for his 2024 presidential campaign, asking people to donate because "we cannot allow Democrats to continue to abandon our most important ally and the only democracy in the Middle East."
It also declared that "antisemitism has taken over the radical Left."
Omar said there was "no way in hell" she would attend the Israeli leader's address in a lengthy Twitter thread Wednesday evening.
"There is no way in hell I am attending the joint session address from a President whose country has banned me and denied Rashida Tlaib the ability to see her grandma," the progressive lawmaker wrote, referring to a 2019 decision to bar her and Tlaib from entering Israel over their support for the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement against the Jewish State.
"We should not be inviting the president of Israel—a government who under its current Prime Minister barred the first two Muslim women elected to congress from visiting the country—to give a joint address to congress," she added.
In her string of messages, Omar also commented on the country's judicial reforms and described them as "a judicial coup to centralize power and undermine checks on their power."
The Minnesota Democrat implied that Israel alone is responsible for "the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank history," and failed to note that many of the Palestinians killed this year have been members of terror groups killed in skirmishes with Israeli soldiers.
Herzog was invited to give a speech to a joint session of Congress last year by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to celebrate Israel's 75th anniversary and current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reissued the invitation.
Omar has previously come under fire by members of her own party. In 2021, she shared a video to Twitter of a conversation she had with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which she seemingly compared Israel and the United States to Hamas and the Taliban.
After 12 Jewish Democrat representatives published a statement criticizing her comments, Omar fired back, saying, "It's shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for 'clarification' and not just call."
She later released another clarification and claimed she was misunderstood.
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