President Donald Trump has whipped Twitter into a frenzy by posting a video with a quote from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's speech mixed with footage of the 9/11 attacks, prompting accusations of inciting anti-Muslim violence.
The video that juxtaposes a standalone quote from Omar's speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) with footage of the two planes crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, has been since retweeted over 40,000 times, sparking fierce backlash against both Omar and Trump's condemnation of her.
Speaking at the CAIR banquet last month, Omar lamented that American Muslims still have to battle with the stigma hanging over them since 9/11. Advocating a pushback against vilification of and misconception about Muslims in the US, Omar said: "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."
She added: "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." CAIR was actually founded seven years earlier, in 1994. Omar's office said the freshman Minnesota representative "misspoke."
The video posted by Trump features only the second sentence, which prompted many mainstream media journalists to accuse him of deliberately distorting the original message by taking it out of context. Moreover, the second part of the video has the "some people did something" part looped and interspersed with footage of the burning World Trade Center.
The American ideological divide immediately yawned open, with liberal journalists and Omar's fellow freshman representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) instantly jumping to her defense. They went as far as accusing Trump of endangering Omar's life with his tweet.
"Enough is enough. No more silence, with NY Post and now Trump taking Ilhan's words out of context to incite violence toward her, it's time for more Dems to speak up," tweeted Tlaib, the only female Muslim congresswoman besides Omar.
On the media flank, Emily L. Hauser, writer for the Daily Beast, the Week, and a number of other high-profile liberal media, went even further, accusing Trump of endangering "the lives of all American Muslims."
Multiple others echoed the accusations.
On the other side, prominent conservative voices blared the same message implied in the video, borderline accusing Omar of being a terrorist apologist.
Their feud with Omar goes back to her calling out of the inordinate influence of the Israeli lobby in American politics. Similar to liberals' blanket denouncement of Trump's perceived incitement to violence against Omar, conservatives have branded her an anti-Semite for pointing to Israel's deep Washington inroads.
Omar's detractors have implicitly associated her with 9/11 terrorists before – in one example, a poster of her next to an image of the Twin Towers was put up in the rotunda of the West Virginia statehouse, leading to a fight among local lawmakers.
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