The story is a bit more nuanced, but to realize that would require you peeling your eyes away from fox news for more than 5 seconds
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The supposedly controversial comments came in a speech Omar gave at a banquet for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights organization, in late March. In footage of the address uploaded to
YouTube on Tuesday, Omar discusses the need for organizations like CAIR to ensure that Muslims writ large aren’t punished for the actions of a handful of extremists on 9/11.
“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,” Omar said at the event. “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.”
Sounds harmless, right? But if stripped out of the context, Omar’s phrase “some people did something” can be spun as minimizing the significance of 9/11 for both the victims and the country writ large.
This is not remotely accurate if you watch the full video, which I encourage you to do as a counterpoint to the out-of-context attacks. At the end, for example, she speaks movingly about how America’s national values motivated her family to immigrate to the United States.
“As an American member of Congress, I have to make sure I live up to the ideals of fighting for liberty and justice — those are very much rooted in the reason why my family came here,” she says.
Not exactly what an anti-American ideologue would say. But the full context hasn’t stopped Republicans from using the out-of-context version to bash Omar.
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