Though she has only been in Congress for little more than four months, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar has once again sparked incredible controversy.
This time Omar did so with a dismissive comment about the 9/11 terrorist attack that enraged conservative Americans while exposing the growing internal discord on the left.
Omar’s statement drew a sharp response from President Donald Trump, and though Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chastised the president for supposedly politicizing the “sacred” 9/11 attacks, her response can rightly be viewed as having equally damning application to the firebrand within her party’s own ranks.
Pelosi blasts so-called politicization of 9/11
Pelosi broke the widely understood, yet unwritten rule that American politics “stops at the water’s edge” by launching a rhetorical attack against the president on social media while visiting with U.S. troops and foreign officials in Stuttgart, Germany over the weekend.
Pelosi tweeted, “The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.”
She followed that with a second tweet, in which she wrote, “As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.”
“WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
The firestorm began when Rep. Omar told the audience at a fundraising event for the Council on American-Islamic Affairs (CAIR) in Los Angeles that the group’s founders had admirably taken action to mobilize after 9/11, “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
In response, President Trump posted to Twitter, and pinned to the top of his page, a video which featured the remarkably tone-deaf comment from Omar about the attacks interspersed with clips of the horrifying tragedy and terror that rocked the United States on that fateful and historic day in 2001. The tweet stated simply, but boldly, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
Not suprisingly, it did not take long for the predominately liberal media to latch onto Pelosi’s rebuke of the president’s response to Omar’s dismissive commentary or for congressional progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) to come swiftly to her defense. President Trump was accused of fanning the flames of hatred and even attempting to incite violence against the outspoken freshman.
Sacred ground
It is worth observing, however, that Pelosi’s sharp critique against the president over his reference to 9/11 is just as applicable to Omar, especially the reminder that the memory of the 9/11 attacks is “sacred ground” upon which everyone should tread lightly.
That is something that Omar failed miserably at doing with her callously insensitive remark that attempted to transform the horror of the attack into a lament about discrimination against Muslim-Americans and to distract attention from the wanton murder of thousands of Americans by radical Islamist extremists.
Omar’s use of the 9/11 terror attacks to make a political attack over anti-Muslim discrimination violated the “sacred ground” of that “painful” memory and her “discussion” of that terrible event was most certainly not done “with reverence” for the thousands of lives lost that day, or tens of thousands of lives permanently changed thereafter.
The significance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is indeed considered “sacred” to millions upon millions of Americans, and virtually everyone who was alive that fateful day will indeed “never forget” the horrific death and destruction that changed the course of America’s, if not the world’s history. If Pelosi wants to criticize the president for politicizing that consequential day, she needs to specifically and directly shift her sights toward the individual who prompted Trump’s critical response in the first place, Rep. Ilhan Omar.
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