Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN)’s lack of remorse over her “some people did something” comment is “terribly troubling,” a former George W. Bush official said Monday.
“I find her lack of explanation for her statement that ‘some people did something’ to be terribly troubling still. She doesn’t get how offensive what she said was,” former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said on Fox’s “America’s Newsroom.”
After the son of a 9/11 victim called out Omar during a September 11, 2001 memorial service last week, Omar doubled down on her comments and pointedly refused to apologize in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday.
Bush press sec: Omar “still doesn’t get” it
Omar has stirred continual controversy since she entered Congress in January, but few of her comments have reverberated quite like her callous description of the worst terror attack in U.S. history as the day “some people did something.” For Nicholas Haros, Jr., the son of a secretary who died in the attacks, Omar’s words “tore [his] heart apart.”
At a Ground Zero memorial service on the 18th anniversary of the attacks, Haros Jr., dressed in a shirt that read “some people did something,” expressed his hurt and demanded an apology from the Democrat and her allies in the “squad,” who rallied to her defense.
During the initial fallout over her comments back in April, Omar and her fellow Democrats claimed that she had been taken out of context and that she wanted to highlight how “some people did something” and that Muslim-Americans were “losing access to our civil liberties.” When confronted about her 9/11 comments on CBS Sunday, Omar again focused the narrative on the alleged discrimination against Muslims. Absent from her response were the words “I’m sorry.”
“What I was speaking to was the fact that as a Muslim, not only was I suffering as an American who was attacked on that day, but the next day I woke up as my fellow Americans were now treating me as a suspect,” Omar said, adding that 9/11 was “an attack on all Americans,” and that “I certainly could not understand the weight of the pain that the victims of the- the families of 9/11 must feel.”
“But,” she added, and it’s a critical “but” — “I think it is really important for us to make sure that we are not forgetting, right, the aftermath of what happened after 9/11,” referring to the alleged incursion on Muslim-Americans’ freedom.
Fleischer dismissed Omar’s claim about people losing their civil liberties under his former boss after 9/11, and criticized the lawmaker for her non-apology. “Nobody had their civil liberties stripped. In fact, they were protected,” he claimed. “She didn’t take back her words. She didn’t say she was sorry. … She made September 11th all about what she was feeling. How can she not understand what it was like for the people who had their families lost? Everybody understands what that’s like.”
Omar deflects blame for controversies
During the memorial service at Ground Zero, Haros Jr. criticized Omar’s flippant description of the attack, saying, “Madam, objectively speaking, we know who and what was done,” namely, that Islamist terrorists killed over 3,000 people. Echoing Haros Jr., Fleischer further rebuked Omar for her refusal to accurately describe just who did what to whom. “What happened was we were attacked by radical Islamist terrorists, and her failure to say that is the beginning of the problem. That’s the original sin that she still won’t atone for,” Fleischer said.
Asked by Bill Hemmer why he thinks Omar still won’t apologize, Fleischer theorized that Omar is “too much of a radical” at heart, noting her anti-Israel statements, her “offensive statements about Republicans” and desire to impeach Donald Trump.
Also in the CBS interview, Omar forwarded an explanation for why people find her so controversial: the fault lies not with Omar for her numerous scandals, flippant anti-Americanism, or dubious sympathy for would-be terrorists, but with her critics for taking offense. “I’m only controversial because people seem to want the controversy,” she said.
No comments: