A rabbi has called out US Rep. Ilhan Omar for retweeting a New York Times op-ed that suggested Jesus was a Palestinian.

The freshman Democrat from Minnesota shared an April 20 tweet from Omar Suleiman, an adjunct professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University, who said a Palestinian relative told him about the “Christian right”: “Don’t they know we’re Christian too? Do they even consider us human? Don’t they know Jesus was a Palestinian?”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate and director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Journal that it’s a “grotesque insult to Jesus born in the land of Israel and to Christianity” to say that Jesus was a Palestinian.

“Palestine was a name made up by Romans after they crucified thousands, destroyed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the People of Israel from their homeland,” Cooper said in an email to the news outlet.

Cooper also took issue with an op-ed in the New York Times written by Eric V. Copage published on Good Friday with the headline, “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes.”

“As I grew older, I learned that the fair-skinned, blue-eyed depiction of Jesus has for centuries adorned stained glass windows and altars in churches throughout the United States and Europe,” Copage wrote.

“But Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.”

Cooper told the Jerusalem Post that “the claim that Jesus was a Palestinian is so bizarre that the question becomes what one gains by making that allegation.”

He added: “For people who have no theological or historical rooting, the idea that Jesus was a Palestinian creates a new narrative for Palestinian history, which otherwise does not date back very far. If one can say that Jesus was Palestinian 2,000 years ago, then that means the Jews are occupying Palestinian land.”

Cooper told the newspaper that for people who “don’t like Jews to begin with, it is a deadly combination of the Jews killed Jesus and now they are doing the same to his progeny. From a political and propaganda point of view, there is something to be gained.”

The myth that Jesus was a Palestinian dates back to the days of Yasser Arafat, the former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, when his Christian-Palestinian adviser Hanan Ashrawi made the claim, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Since then, the idea resurfaces now and again, Cooper said.

“The absurdity of it is breathtaking,” Cooper said. “Jesus was born in Bethlehem, think about who his parents were — his mother, Mary, was betrothed to Joseph, a carpenter. In the Gospels, there is no mention of Palestine, only Judea, which is where Jews lived.”

Cooper said Omar “knows this narrative is false but also that it has an inherent power to it.”

“The ‘Benjamins,’ the big lie of dual loyalty, Jesus is a Palestinian — it is all rewriting history to plant in people’s minds that the Palestinian people go back thousands of years,” he said, referring to Omar’s controversial remarks in February that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins” and accusations of “dual loyalty” by Jewish American legislators.

“She is a very clear person,” Cooper said. “Ilhan Omar is a clever anti-Semite, so truth does not play much of a role anyway.”

He added: “When an elected member of the US Congress retweets such a thing, that takes things to the next level.”