Judea Pearl an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks at his home in Encino, California. PHOTOGRAPH BY MONICA ALMEIDA Judea Pearl, chancellor professor of computer science at UCLA, National Academy of Sciences member and Daniel Pearl Foundation president, called on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Pearl’s statement, which was read aloud by Middle East Women’s Coalition President Rabia Kazan at a sit-in in front of Pelosi’s Washington, D.C. office on March 14, said that his “late son, Daniel Pearl, was not an Islamophobe, nor a foreign agent or a trader in ‘Benjamins.’ He was a principled American journalist, a champion of truth and a relentless peace-seeker, who was murdered for being a Jew and a lover of Israel.”
“I plead with Speaker Pelosi to rid the House of Representatives of a new form of bigotry, directed again at Jews and lovers of Israel,” said Pearl, who described himself as “a lifelong Democrat.”
Pearl added that Omar’s “hateful words” will “continue to haunt and poison the future of American Jewry.”
“We are concerned not merely with the harsh consequences of those words
but with the obsessive hatred that produced them, and the ultimate purpose for which they were enunciated — to erode American support for the State of Israel – the miracle
that symbolizes Jewish history and Jewish aspirations,” Pearl said.
Pearl argued that the anti-Semitism resolution that the House of Representatives passed on March 9 failed to condemn “the anti-Zionist hatred waged against our brothers and sisters in Israel — six and a half million refugees or descendants of refugees who have been denied normalcy for the past 70 years, besieged by hostile neighbors and confronted by daily existential threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.”
“The anti-Zionist obsession that Rep. Omar now brings to the halls of Congress aims to strip these six and a half million people from sovereignty and abandon them, stateless, to the mercy of genocidal neighbors,” Pearl said. “Americans cannot allow such moral deformity to stain the halls of their representative government.”
Pearl’s statement concluded by calling for the Democrat Party to “remain a welcoming home to the many American Jews who have entrusted their energies, talents and dreams to this party.”
“We urge Speaker Pelosi to find Rep. Ilhan Omar unfit to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” Pearl said.
Around 50 people showed up to the sit-in; an additional five people from CodePink and Jewish Voice for Peace protested in favor of Omar, chanting “Stand with Ilhan!”
Rabbi Aryeh Spero, spokesman of the National Conference on Jewish Affairs and organizer of the event, said at the sit-in that “Pelosi had a chance to stand tall, to do what’s right” but “she failed America.”
“This is the people’s House [of Representatives] and she’s allowed the people’s House to have the stench, the odor, of anti-Semitism,” Spero said.
Pelosi’s office did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment as of publication time.
The full sit-in can be seen below:
https://www.facebook.com/asranomani/videos/10161711373405171
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