Radio Recap: Rep. Omar Trivializes the 9/11 Attack

If you forget your history, your doomed to repeat it. Or worse, allow others to rewrite it.

Today on the show, we discussed the latest controversy involving Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. This time, Rep. Omar trivialized the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil in an offensive, mind-boggling statement that on September 11, 2001, “some people did something.”

Speaking at a fundraising event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Omar said:

“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.”

Radical Islamic terrorists took flight lessons, hijacked commercial airplanes, used box cutters to overpower flight crews, and flew those planes into American buildings, killing thousands of unsuspecting, innocent civilians. That’s more than just “some people” doing “something.” And Rep. Ilhan Omar knows that.

This is where the politics of the moment are right now. Forgetting your history is very dangerous. Recasting history is even more dangerous. And now Rep. Omar is putting herself out in the public eye, shamelessly appearing on late night talk shows, seemingly choosing to ignore the disgusting nature of her words.

And her facts aren’t even correct. CAIR was founded in 1994, 7 years before the Islamic terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.  It doesn’t seem Rep. Omar was interested in sharing accurate history. She was simply trying to distort it.

This is not the first time Rep. Omar has made insensitive, and in some cases hateful comments. We told you about her anti-Israel, anti-Semitic tweets. Rep. Omar needs to be censured after these inexcusable comments, and her blatant disregard for the suffering of families of victims lost in the 9/11 attacks.

Although not surprisingly, fellow Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib from Michigan was quick to defend Rep. Omar and claim her words were “taken out of context” because of racism. This morning in an interview, Rep. Tlaib said:

“My sister Ilhan Omar, what she was talking about up lifting people by supporting their civil liberties and civil rights . . . Taking it out of context, this is just pure racist act by many of those, hateful acts by those because she does speak truth when she talks about different issues they don’t disagree with.”

It’s hard to take her complete disrespect for the murder of 3,000 innocent people as out of context here.

We also discussed breaking news regarding the arrest of Julian Assange, the co-founder of Wikileaks. Assange is accused of conspiring with U.S. Army analyst Manning to break into a highly classified military network to steal sensitive information, which Wikileaks then published. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for espionage, among other charges, but the sentence was commuted by outgoing President Barack Obama.

Assange has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for 7 years, under that country’s protection. Ecuador’s President just withdrew Assange’s asylum for what he called “repeatedly violating international conventions and protocol.”

To date, Assange has only been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion which bears a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. However that would require the U.K. to extradite him to the United States. Assange was also wanted in Great Britain for skipping bail.

You can listen to the entire episode here.