Published: 18 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DAN COLEMAN: Betty McCollum, an unassuming 67-year-old from Minnesota, is having a moment: for the first time, J Street is backing her legislation
BIGOTRY CAN PLAY TRICKS on the mind. Over the past few years, the Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian far Right, led by then President Donald Trump, focused its fearmongering and vilification on US congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The Sudanese-born Omar, an outspoken Muslim woman, was a ready target for Trump and company’s racist bile.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian cause was unobtrusively taken up by fellow-congresswoman Betty McCollum. Superficially, McCollum is the polar opposite of Omar. Born and raised in the US, she attended a Catholic college.
Her children grown, McCollum, 67, has the grandmotherly appeal of fictional Minnesotan Betty Crocker, the character and symbol of General Mills baking division created in 1921 for advertising campaigns for food and recipes.
Politically speaking, McCollum, while a strong advocate for human rights, is hardly a radical. She stands well within the liberal/progressive tradition once exemplified by vice presidents Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale.
Thus, while Trump was excoriating Omar as one who “hates Israel and the Jewish people”, the non-threatening McCollum has quietly and persistently taken up the Palestinian cause.
In 2015, McCollum wrote a letter, co-signed by 17 other members of Congress, to then secretary of state John Kerry expressing her concern over the treatment of Palestinian children in the custody of the Israeli military and calling for their human rights to be elevated to “priority status” in the bilateral relationship with Israel.
She told the US magazine Jewish Currents, “when I read the 2013 UNICEF report that outlined the systemic military detention of Palestinian children by Israeli security forces and the blatant mistreatment and abuse suffered by those children, some of them 12 years old and younger, I could not ignore it”.
