Dems defend Omar from Trump
His retweeting of edited 9/11 video called ‘incitement’
WASHINGTON — Top Democrats on Saturday rushed to defend Rep. Ilhan Omar after President Donald Trump retweeted video that was edited to suggest she was being dismissive of the significance of the worst terrorist assault on U.S. soil.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scolded Trump for using the “painful images of 9/11 for a political attack” against the first-term Minnesota Democrat.
And presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, campaigning in New Hampshire, accused Trump of “trying to incite violence and to divide us, and every political leader should speak out against that.”
The video Trump retweeted Friday pulls a snippet of Omar’s recent speech to the Council on American-Islamic Relations in which she described the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as “some people did something,” and includes news footage of the hijacked planes hitting the Twin Towers.
Trump also tweeted, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
Omar’s remark has drawn criticism largely from political opponents and conservatives who say the lawmaker, one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress, offered a flippant description of the assailants and the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia and the plane crash in a Pennsylvania field.
Neither Trump’s tweet nor the video included her full quote or the context of her comments.
Omar told CAIR in Los Angeles that many Muslims saw their civil liberties eroded after the 2001 attacks, and she advocated for activism.
“For 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,” she said in the March 23 speech, according to video posted online. “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.”
CAIR was founded in 1994, according to its website, but its membership skyrocketed after the attacks.
The March speech had drawn a protest outside at the time and even news coverage from conservativeleaning outlets such as the Washington Times, which noted that she told fellow Muslims to “raise hell,” and “make people uncomfortable,” as they sought to defend their rights.
But conservatives began to fixate on a different portion of the speech, after CAIR posted a video Tuesday: the four words she used to refer to 9/11, as “some people did something.”
Many Republicans and conservative outlets expressed outrage at Omar’s remarks.
“First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as ‘some people who did something,’ ” tweeted Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, a retired Navy SEAL who lost his right eye in 2012 in an explosion in Afghanistan.
“Here’s your something,” the New York Post blared on its cover beneath a photograph of the flaming towers.
Fellow Democrats, including some who have disagreed with Omar in the past, defended her.
Pelosi, who was in Germany visiting U.S. troops Saturday, said in a statement that “the memory of 9/11 is sacred ground” and should always be discussed “with reverence.”
Omar didn’t appear to be backing down.
She tweeted a quote from President George W. Bush, who said days after the attacks: “The people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
“Was Bush downplaying the terrorist attack?” Omar tweeted. “What if he was a Muslim.”
Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates condemned Trump’s tweet.
Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, said tweet was an “incitement to violence” against Omar, who is Muslim-American, and others like her. O’Rourke, campaigning in South Carolina, likened the tweet to Trump’s rhetoric about Mexicans, described in the past by Trump as murderers and rapists. O’Rourke said “there is a cost and there is a consequence” to Trump’s comments.
Warren, a Massachusetts senator, said Republican leaders in Congress “cannot take a pass on this, cannot look the other way and pretend it isn’t happening. It is happening. And those who don’t speak out in the Republican leadership are complicit in what he is doing. It’s wrong.”
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar noted that a New York man recently was charged with threatening Omar’s life.
“The video the president chose to send out today will only incite more hate,” Klobuchar said. “You can disagree with her words — as I have done before — but this video is wrong. Enough.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Omar “won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we.”
Omar repeatedly has pushed fellow Democrats into uncomfortable territory over Israel and the strength of the Jewish state’s influence in Washington. She apologized for suggesting that lawmakers support Israel for pay and said she isn’t criticizing Jews.
But she refused to take back a tweet in which she suggested American supporters of Israel “pledge allegiance” to a foreign country.