Our illegitimate forty-fifth president on Friday gave us a sneak preview of his re-election strategy for 2020, when he went after Representative Ilhan Omar for the now-infamous remarks she made not long before during a speech on civil rights and Muslims in America. His tool was a visceral video of the burning World Trade Center towers taken back in 2001. He tweeted it to millions of his followers, which some have argued was an act that may have put her life in danger.
From where things stand today, it seems clear that the political momentum of America is going strong in favor of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump has been a complete disaster for the country, as everyone knew he would be, and it’s all but certain we’ll correct our mistake very soon.
It is, therefore, completely unsurprising to see him grab onto something one of our Democratic leaders have done and begin to fashion a weapon with it. Of course, he is doing this to try and deflect from his own endless blunders and crimes. But that doesn’t help us answer the central question.
What about what Ilhan Omar actually said?
In opening this discussion, we would like to make it clear that Representative Omar is someone we would like to support. She has not been a pest like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who really likes attention, and figures the best way to get it is to go out of her way to be an enemy to good Democrats. I have written good things about Omar since the day she was elected.
She isn’t one of the usual Bernie Sanders suspects, nor is she a socialist, or any of that. This isn’t about that. It’s that we’ve got to cut down on the amount of just dirt that can be slung at the Democratic Party, which means holding our leaders accountable when they start jumping off the deep end. Youthful errors happen. It is not too late for Omar to turn back.
But lately, there has been a lot of trouble.
Recently, conservative Laurie Cardoza-Moore, an Evangelical leader who hosts the popular Christian television program Focus On Israel, said on Wednesday that “while she has already established her credentials as a vehement antisemite, Ilhan Omar is far worse than that.”
That has not been proven true, and we’re inclined to believe that it is not, although certainly that hasn’t been proved either. What is without question is that she’s a representative of our country now, a person at the highest levels of the government of the greatest superpower in the history of mankind, the United States of America, and she’s been giving Trump a lot of dirt against us. This has to stop and fast.
“Omar may be in violation of a federal statute for fundraising for two Muslim Brotherhood charities that seek to destroy America,” she claimed. The Jerusalem Post wrote an article entitled “Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is calling for the release of a terrorist.”
The Jerusalem Post is a highly reputable organization operating in the territories of one of our closest global partners, Israel. We deeply respect them. It’s the most commonly read newspaper for Jews who speak English and has been around since 1932. If they thought enough of it to publish an article of concern, it is going to be necessary to give the matter a good close look.
According to Cardoza-Moore, whose show reaches literally two billion viewers weekly, the recent revelation of Omar’s participation as a keynote speaker at events for Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups Islamic Relief USA and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “suggests her support for subversive factions aligned to destroy America and Western civilization itself.”
From the article- “On her Twitter page last week, Omar demanded that US President Donald Trump push for the release of a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hoda Abdelmonem.”
That is a far bigger deal than what Trump is tweeting about, and that is what our issue is. This is not about Omar’s policies, or her religion, or her hijab, or her friends. Asking for leniency on behalf of that terrorist, even unofficially, is crossing a big line.
She will rapidly lose her support among Americans if she keeps on like this.
It is very important that she quickly correct her course. She must understand after this that she is now a Representative of the United States of America, the greatest country in the world and that as such, what she does will tremendously affect everyone around her. She did not quite use her position in an official capacity, she did it using her personal Twitter account, but just the same. It’s unacceptable, and she should have known better.
Her advisers should definitely have known better, and of course, they did. They knew exactly what they would be doing, and they knew it would put Omar at risk, and they still used it. She is mixed up with rough customers, and that’s the part that’s really troubling.
We have to make it clear these people are not her only option.
None of this is a conspiracy theory. Omar might not be a Muslim Brotherhood member, but she is spending a lot of time around CAIR, which has been found to have ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. Worse, it has close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, who are downright terroristic.
As an aside, this is one of the dozens of things we’re objecting to in the case of Tulsi Gabbard.
Last month, Omar keynoted an Islamic Relief USA emergency fundraising dinner for Yemen in Tampa, Florida. Later this month she will be a keynote speaker at a CAIR fundraiser in Los Angeles. She’s hanging out with these people all the time, they constitute her biggest support.
Most of us will remember well the trouble over the Women’s March last year when it was found out that the person organizing it was foul-mouthed and anti-Semitic political activist Palestinian Muslim-American Linda Sarsour. She got ahold of the Women’s Convention and tried to make Bernie Sanders, who has a record on women right up there with Donald Trump’s, the keynote speaker.
When American women found out about that, there was an outcry unlike anything you have ever seen unless you were there, and St. Bernard the millionaire backed out as fast as his legs would carry him, but that too is another story.
Suffice it to say that after that incident, Sarsour and CAIR were on the radar, and not as friendlies.
At the same time, however, you’re not who your friends are, or at least, not completely. It seems important to point out that Representative Omar is not Tulsi Gabbard. Omar came up on her own. She does not come from a wealthy community of emigres, nor do her parents have money, back home in Somalia. Her mother died when she was two, and her father drove a taxicab-as do many of the smartest people ever met by this Millennial Democrats contributor. There’s just something cool about taxi drivers.
We consider it critical that we carefully monitor our own back yards, and take note of disturbing trends within them. And just as the Justice Democrats always say, it’s important that we hold our leaders accountable and ask that they explain to us their actions and philosophy.
The way that Donald Trump is going after her for this is wrong, but it’s a big exaggeration to say she didn’t make a mistake. She absolutely did make a mistake. “Some people did something” is not an acceptable way to address the most lethal terrorist attack in America’s history, something that has left a permanent scar.
If Omar wants our support, she needs to desist in this vein at once, and from this day forth utterly repudiate terrorism.
As a wise woman once said, we must react the same way as if we found evidence of one of our leaders supporting a white supremacist group.
It couldn’t be less important who the terrorist is, what they’re for, what color their shirt, skin, cause, it doesn’t matter. Civilization demands that we come together behind fighting this type of attack with a united resolve. If we cannot come together behind not cutting slack to those who murder for shock value, then on what can we come together?
All of these factors caused us to conclude that this incident requires direct addressing. It is not enough to point out that Trump is trying to deflect from his wrongdoings and outright crimes using Omar, which undoubtedly he is.
We wish to state clearly that this is not an attack, it’s just the opposite. We do stand with Ilhan, it’s more than just a hashtag for us. She is a Millennial Democrat. She is also someone who rode into office on the Blue Wave that we fought so hard for, in the Year of the Democratic Woman that we lauded.
But even as we hold our hands out to Omar herself, we recognize the importance in a proper observation of this troubling new trend, and we wish to express our ardent hope that Representative Omar will awake to the harm she has done recently, to herself and to the cause, and turn around before it is too late.
Six floors below Mr Reyher, James Logozzo watched with stunned colleagues from the Morgan Stanley boardroom. He recalled that it took three or four jumpers to flash past him before he realised they were people. Then a woman fell, lying flat on her back and staring upwards. ‘The look on her face was shock. She wasn’t screaming,’ he recalled. ‘It was slow motion. After she hit the ground, there was nothing left.’
For those down below, the bodies landed with sickening, almost explosive thuds. Many said it was raining bodies.
One fireman, Danny Suhr, was killed as he made his way to the South Tower after a jumper landed on him, ‘coming out of the sky like a torpedo’ and breaking his neck. Compounding the tragedy, the priest who gave him the last rites was later killed by falling debris.
