Rips Open Emotional Wound for Many
President Donald Trump has sunk to a new low. He just posted a tweet that uses the horrific imagery of planes plowing into New York City’s World Trade Center towers on 9/11, complete with them crumbling to the ground and people crying out in agony, to attack a U.S. Congresswoman.
That Congresswoman is Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota.
The president screams, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” in all caps in his tweet, which includes video that begins with Rep. Omar’s remarks that have come under attack from conservative media.
At issue is Rep. Omar’s describing the founding of CAIR, the Council on American–Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group.
“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,” Rep. Omar says in the actual video – not the one the President posted.
In the version Trump just tweeted, just the words “some people did something” are repeated over and over again, out of context, without the surrounding sentence.
Her words are taken entirely out of context, spawning outrage from the right, including, now, the nation’s president.
The Washington Post notes that “Omar’s 20-minute address was broadcast live (even on Fox News online) when she gave it, but it suddenly became a thing after this tweet by Mohammad Tawhidi, a controversial Australian who calls himself the ‘imam of peace:'”
Rep. Omar made her remarks on March 23.
It wasn’t until April 9 that they became controversial, after Rep. Dan Crenshaw tweeted them:
Nearly every word from the Democratic Congresswoman from Minnesota has come under attack from the far right, in large part because she is Muslim, although she has made anti-Semitic statements in the past, and has issued apologies.
Here’s Trump’s tweet. We urge caution as the imagery can be very upsetting.