President Donald Trump has finally weighed in on the dismissive tone that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) used to describe 9/11, sharing a video on Twitter which contrasts Omar’s speech with archival footage showing United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the south World Trade Center tower on Sept. 11, 2001.
Never forget
Speaking at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) fundraiser in March, Omar used the words “some people did something” to describe how 19 Al Qaeda hijackers commandeered four passenger airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 2,977 people and injuring 6,000 others. The congresswoman’s cavalier attitude provoked an immediate backlash from conservatives, and the New York Post’s Thursday cover story included an image of the burning World Trade Center towers with the caption, “Here’s your something” emblazoned underneath.
The most powerful cover we’ve run in my time here: “Here’s your something,” Rep. Omar! pic.twitter.com/jjPDSuyosJ
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) April 11, 2019
Trump’s video has been viewed more than 9 million times and shows a portion of Omar’s CAIR speech. “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they realize that some people did something,” the congresswoman says. The edited video repeats Omar’s tone-deaf remarks in between short clips showing historical news coverage of the terrorist attack.
Omar’s supporters have accused her critics of taking the Somali-American legislator’s words out of context. However, her complete speech is even more condescending and patronizing, since she suggests that Muslim-Americans were the true victims of 9/11.
“Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen, and frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” Omar said. “CAIR was founded 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.”
A bit of context for the left
Yet, if anyone has failed to put Omar’s words in context, it is the Democrats and progressives who are defending her. For starters, Omar was speaking at an event honoring a group that is considered a terrorist entity by the United Arab Emirates.
In Senate testimony, CAIR has been accurately labeled a “radical Islamic fundamentalist front group for [the Palestinian terrorist entity] Hamas.” The self-styled Muslim civil rights group was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, and the FBI ceased relations with CAIR in 2009 because of its ties to terrorist groups.
Furthermore, CAIR was not founded in the days after 9/11, as Omar incorrectly claimed. CAIR was actually established in 1994, but before then it was a Hamas front group called the Islamic Association for Palestine. CAIR’s future founders recognized the need for a “neutral” entity for influencing U.S. policy without revealing its terrorist roots, because “it [was] known who we are.”
Chilling criticism
Yet, in an act of pure hypocrisy, countless mainstream news articles failed to address CAIR’s terrorist roots while attacking Trump’s tweet for taking Omar’s words out of context.
Moreover, attacks that accuse conservatives like Trump of “Islamophobia” for allegedly twisting Omar’s words are entirely off base. Manipulating the congresswoman’s words suggests that Ms. Omar later expanded upon her description of 9/11.
She did not. In fact, Omar intentionally downplayed the deadliest day for American civilians in U.S. history to insist that Islamic extremism had nothing to do with the attack and that Muslims have become oppressed “second-class citizens” as a result.
Now that the president has weighed in on this controversy, however, the hysterical, hate-Trump faction of the left have been mobilized, and a growing number of liberals are supporting a terrorist apologist. For anyone who remembers that dark and bloody day in America, this is a shameful, inexcusable travesty.
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