WASHINGTON -- If a politician of Japanese extraction were to address a "largely Japanese-American audience" and characterize the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by saying that "some people did something," would you think that those words diminish the loss of life and of property suffered by our country? I would, but apparently Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., would not.
She thinks it is a perfectly respectful -- and accurate! -- way to refer to the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., by 19 Muslim terrorists in 2001. She characterized the 9/11 attacks in this way to a largely Muslim audience just last month. What the terrorists did, for those who might have forgotten, was murder 2,977 people, injure countless thousands more and cause billions of dollars of property loss.
The Hon. Omar, who is Muslim, spoke of the 9/11 attacks in this vague and anodyne way for a political purpose. She was speaking at a Council on American-Islamic Relations meeting, and she went on to say, "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." As a matter of fact, CAIR was founded -- for whatever reason -- seven years before 9/11, and since 9/11 there has been no discernible loss of "access to our civil liberties," by which I assume she means Muslim Americans. Incidentally, CAIR is not a widely recognized humanitarian group, as its name would have you believe, but an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case involving the Holy Land Foundation.
Now, of course, the Hon. Omar is not a very well-informed person. Not only does she not understand what she is talking about but when she talks, she mangles the English language. She is a perfect representative of the Democrats' core constituency, the moron vote.
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Nonetheless, Democrats are scrambling to Omar's defense. They are claiming that "the right" and President Donald Trump have incited violence against her, that they are guilty of Islamophobia and of politicizing a grave tragedy, the tragedy being the cowardly 9/11 sneak attack against not a military target but unarmed citizens going about their peaceful business. It was even more treacherous than the Pearl Harbor attack. All the Democrats said pretty much the same thing, but my favorite is Pocahontas. She, sometimes known as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, said, "The President is inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman -- and an entire group of Americans based on their religion."
I have not seen that the president said anything about "an entire group of Americans" or about inciting violence against any individual. All he did was send out a tweet showing the Hon. Omar addressing CAIR with her now-famous line, "some people did something," which he repeated between clips of the burning twin towers, of the hijacked planes hitting the towers and of survivors staggering from the destruction, many of whom were destined to die of toxic inhalation later, often years later. That day meant tragedy for thousands, perhaps millions. Whoever edited those clips has a talent for dramaturgy, as did President Trump when ended his tweet with this comment: "We will never forget!" Bravo!
Yet obviously, the Democrats have already forgotten. They see nothing wrong with the Hon. Omar diminishing one of America's great tragedies. Let her go on with her anti-Semitic posturing and her ignorant trivialization of American history. What does she think of Valley Forge and the sinking of the USS Maine? Is it all ancient stuff from a faraway, irrelevant past?
The millions of Americans to whom 9/11 matters greatly do not count in the eyes of Hon. Omar's defenders. And apparently, President Trump ought not to have responded with his tweet. The Democratic defenders of the Hon. Omar will tell us all how we are to respond to her outbursts. They will dictate for us what we can say and cannot say.
I am not the only American who has had enough of this congresswoman from Somalia and her defenders in the Democratic Party. We shall see you Election Day 2020.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author, most recently, of "The Death of Liberalism," published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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