Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday refused to let the controversy die over remarks she made that critics said trivialized 9/11, tweeting out a partial comment that President George W. Bush made after the attacks — and bizarrely asking whether he was a Muslim.
“’The people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!’ President George W. Bush. Was Bush downplaying the terrorist attack? What if he was a Muslim,” the Minnesota Democrat tweeted, apparently comparing her words to his and facetiously questioning his faith.
Her latest tone-deaf 9/11-related comment accompanied an article from the Washington Post that attempted to put her original remarks, made at a Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in California on March 23, into context.
“Here’s the truth. 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. 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,” she told the crowd of nearly 500 people.
CAIR was actually founded in 1994; Omar’s rep said she misspoke about the date.
And she only partially quoted Bush’s famous statement, when he grabbed a megaphone from a firefighter amid the rubble of Ground Zero to address the crowd after some said they couldn’t hear his unamplified voice.
“I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Bush said, in what many called his finest hour in office.
Republicans from the White House to the streets howled in protest over the Somali-American Muslim lawmaker’s clueless description of the worst domestic terror attack on US soil as “some people did something.”
But Omar and her backers, fellow freshman Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, accused her critics of taking her words out of context.
But there has been only crickets from most New York lawmakers, with the exception of Staten Island Democratic Rep. Max Rose, also an Afghan war vet, who rebuked her remarks.
And the article points out that elsewhere in her speech — delivered as hundreds of protesters outside chanted “Burn the Koran,” “Ilhan Omar go to hell” and “Shame on you terrorists” — she defended herself against charges that she was too tough on Muslim nations over human rights abuses.
“It doesn’t matter if that country is being run by my father, my brother, my sister,” she said. “I will still criticize that country because I know every country is capable of living up to its best.”
And she concluded her speech — which she gave about a week after the March 15 shootings by a white-nationalist gunman at two New Zealand mosques that left 50 people dead — by praising American ideals.
“I know as an American, as an American member of Congress, I have to make sure I am living up to the ideals of fighting for liberty and justice. Those are very much rooted in the reason why my family came here.”
But the GOP’s attacks on her continued, with Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, an Afghan war vet, leading the way and other backers of President Trump joining in.
“Rep. Ilhan Omar Must Be Denounced for Outrageous 9/11 Comments,” Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, wrote on Twitter, sharing an article with the same title by disgraced ex-NYPD commissioner Bernie Kerik, who served more than three years in federal prison on tax fraud charges.