Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) President Morton A. Klein and ZOA Chairman Mark Levenson, Esq. released the following statement:
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has a habit of ludicrously calling people (in both parties) “racist” if they dare to call her out or disagree with her. Omar (like the others in her so-called “squad”) yells “racist” and “Islamophobe” to deflect necessary criticism or discussion of her votes and her vicious antisemitic, Israelophobic and anti-American statements and legislative proposals. Of course, what Omar does is the real racism: Omar’s statements and positions are rightly criticized because of their false, horrendous Israelophobic, Jew-hating and America-hating content. But Omar falsely and absurdly claims that her statements are condemned because she’s “a Muslim woman of color” or because of “what she looks like.” Omar’s recently-resurfaced 2018 Al Jazeera interview once again confirms Ilhan Omar’s anti-white, anti-male racism. In that interview, Omar engaged in racist name-calling, refused to acknowledge the dangers that jihadis pose to Americans, and instead condemned “white men” as the supposed group that we should be “fearful of.” (See “In Resurfaced Interview, Ilhan Omar Answers Question on ‘Jihadist Terrorism’ by Saying Americans Should Be ‘More Fearful of White Men’,” (includes Al Jazeera video) by Nick Givas, Fox News, July 25, 2019.)
During her Al Jazeera interview, Ilhan Omar first falsely and absurdly asserted: “No one from any of these countries [e.g., Iran, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Yemen, etc.] has ever posed a threat for anyone in this country.”
Ilhan Omar thus ignored: Iran’s well-documented role in the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9-11, including planning the attack with Al Qaeda, training pilots in Tehran and arranging the terrorists’ travel; the Iranian assassination plot to bomb a Washington D.C. restaurant; convicted Somali ISIS terrorists in Minnesota for whom Omar demanded compassion and lighter sentences; the Somali (legal) immigrant who trained with a terrorist group in Syria and plotted to execute American soldiers at a Texas military base; the Somali-born refugee who obtained U.S. citizenship and then plotted to bomb a crowded Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon; Yemini-American Anwar al-Awlaki’s recruitment of and violence-promoting “guidance” to numerous terrorists on the Internet and while serving as a Virginia mosque’s Imam, including three 9-11 hijackers, Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hassan, and the Christmas day underwear bomber; and Syrian-born Imam Abdullah Khadra, who preached to murder Jews during his sermon at a North Carolina mosque – to name just a few.
Omar refused to acknowledge Americans’ legitimate fears of Islamic terrorism, and instead lambasted “white men across the country,” saying:
“Our country should be more fearful of white men across the country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so, if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe — Americans safe inside of this country — we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.”
Omar’s response was false, irrelevant and racist. ZOA subscribes to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy that one’s character is what counts – not one’s race or color. Group statistics don’t determine individuals’ character and actions. We thus would have preferred to not have to mention that statistics indicate that Omar’s racist statement was also factually wrong. In fact, the Department of Justice study of U.S. homicide trends showed that from 1980-2008, 55% of all murders in the U.S. were committed by non-whites, even though non-whites were only 17% of the U.S. population.
Also, if Omar thinks that white men are so “fearful,” why did she and her family seek “safety” from Somalia – which has no dangerous and frightening white men – to come to an America filled with “feared white men”?
The Al Jazeera interviewer then tried once again to have Omar address Islamic terrorism. The interviewer pointed out that even the Obama administration focused on Muslim communities, and that in Ilhan Omar’s community in Minnesota, more than 20 Somali-Americans over the past few years have left and went to go and fight for ISIL, Al Shabab and other jihadist groups abroad. [A February 2018 George Washington University report noted that about 300 Americans attempted to join ISIS abroad, some rose to senior positions, and some returned to the U.S. and posed dangers here.]
The Al Jazeera interviewer concluded: “That’s a real threat, obviously. So what do you do about it?”
Ilhan Omar once again deflected, showing sympathy towards Islamic terrorism, and turned the question about Islamic terrorists into an attack on Americans. Omar blamed “how we are engaging with the members of these communities, and the kind of rhetoric that is being spewed out of leaders within city halls, within our state capitols and within our nation’s capital.”
Omar’s racist attack on “white men” adds to Omar’s long, notorious anti-American anti-Jewish record of falsely accusing Israel of “evil doings” and “hypnotizing the world”; sponsoring an outrageous Congressional resolution to support anti-Jewish, anti-Israel boycotts, that analogizes such antisemitic boycotts to anti-Nazi boycotts; belittling 9-11; laughing about al Qaeda, Hezbollah and al Shabaab terrorists; and blaming supposed U.S. “involvement in other people’s affairs” for terrorism against innocent Americans.