Ilhan Omar and 9/11

US Representative Ilhan Omar addressed a meeting of CAIR in March. During her 20-minute speech she included this:

"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,"

Lots of people have picked up on her reducing the worst terrorist attack on American soil to "some people did something". This was outrageous but it has been remarked on elsewhere by people far more prominent than I am. I'm going to comment on the total ignorance shown in the rest of that passage.

According to Wikipedia, CAIR was founded in 1994 after Arabs were portrayed as terrorists in the movie True Lies. It only took me a minute to look that up but Omar got it wrong while addressing over 500 members of that organization. She's old enough to remember the event. She was already living in America at the time. She should remember that CAIR immediately jumped in and predicted that a wave of Islamophobia was about to blanket the country. Which didn't happen because Americans can tell the difference between Muslims living peacefully here and extremists living in caves in Afghanistan.

She it probably referring to the Patriot Act when she talked about losing access to civil liberties but that had nothing to do with Muslims, either. So she described a attack my radical Muslims as "some people" then implied that American Muslims started losing their civil rights.

When challenged on this, she responded with a quote from President G. W. Bush who promised to get the people who caused the destruction and claimed it was comparable. Again, she's old enough to remember the circumstances of Bush's quote. He was standing in front of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. It was just a few days after the attack and the CIA was still determining who the attackers were. Bush wasn't trying to minimize the attack, he was promising vengeance for it.

The common thread here is that Rep. Omar keeps misrepresenting history. The big question is if she is doing this deliberately or if she is oblivious to her own ignorance. Either way it's scary coming from a member of Congress.