Arab influencer Loay Alshareef highlighted anti-Semitic Dem. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hypocrisy in a tweet in which she wished a “Happy Hanukkah to the Jewish community in Minnesota and around the world!”

“So, you’re celebrating the revolution led by Yehudah the Maccabee against the Seleucids in ancient Israel, but you question Israel’s legitimacy?” Alshareef wrote. “Good luck lol.”

Omar, who has made numerous blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements, also exposed her hypocrisy with her recent trip to Qatar for the Word Cup, despite the Persian Gulf country’s dismal human rights record, something she regularly accuses Israel of.

Loay Alshareef, originally from Saudi Arabia, had less than positive views about Israel and Jews himself until he ended up spending an exchange year in Paris with a Jewish family.

In an interview with The Circuit, he explained how when he first discovered he had been placed with a Jewish family, his first instinct was to leave and find another family to live at. “To put it mildly, I didn’t have positive views about Israel or the Jewish at the time [2010],” he said.

“I called the school and they said ‘take your time.'” Alshareef decided to take the school’s advice and try it out for longer – a decision that changed his life. Today he is a popular social activist engaged in building bridges between Jews and Israel.

“When I engaged more and more with them [the Parisian Jewish family], it changed lots of negative views,” he said.

It took courage, he said, to leave “the herd,” among whom hatred of Jews was the norm.

“There are good Jews, bad Jews, good Christians, bad Christians, good Muslims, bad Muslims — but this is not what we were taught. We were told that the Jews are conspiring against Muslims and the Jews are evil, the Jews hate Muslims from the bottom of their hearts. And to me, it was very baffling.”

Alshareef didn’t merely drop his prejudices about Jews and Israel but explored the subject further, reading the Bible and learning Hebrew.

“The Bible is all about the story of the relationship between Israel, the people of Israel and their neighbors, and the people of Israel and G-d,” he told The Cirucit. “So when you dig deep into it, you start to realize how connected the Jews are to this land and why this land specifically, and from the times of Joshua bin Nun entering the land to the times of the Maccabees taking control over Judea, you get to know the real history of Israel. And then you start to believe in the legitimacy of the Jewish belonging to the land of Israel, or to the land of Canaan.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)