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.Enlarge ImageThe April 11 cover of the New York Post
“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.