A headline on the Huffington Post today reads “Omar: Death Threat Surge Since Trump Attack.” The outrage at Congresswoman Omar’s horrifying statement that reached its crescendo with the President’s Twitter video mashup of the attack (if the HuffPost is wondering what an actual “attack” looks like, they should watch Donald’s video) and Ilhan’s keynote address.
Congresswoman Omar’s office released a statement: “Since the President’s tweet Friday evening, I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life ― many directly referencing or replying to the President’s video. I thank the Capitol Police, the FBI, the House Sergeant at Arms, and the Speaker of the House for their attention to these threats.” Her statement makes it clear that she has federal officers actively investigating the lunatics that are threatening her and protecting her from harm.
Back in Representative Omar’s home state, young five year old Landen Hoffman had no one protecting him when the lunatic scumbag threw him over the railing at the Mall of America to fall three stories onto his back in a puddle of blood. Today, he continues fighting for his young life. That was also “AN ATTACK.” The police arrested a suspect but have not released any statement identifying the scumbag cockroach’s motive. I do not care if it is eventually attributed to the enflamed racial rhetoric of the day, as some have speculated, I will still stand with Free Speech and blame only him for his evil deed. You will never hear me blame political debate or discourse for someone’s decision to engage in criminality. But one Democrat after another has lined up to condemn Trump and everyone else who outcried about Rep. Omar’s alleged minimization of the 9/11 terror and tragedy and they have uniformly drawn a false equivalence between political criticism and violence in a blatant attack on Free Speech.
Massachusetts Congresswoman and fellow “Justice Democrat” Ayanna Pressley tweeted “The occupant of the White House is putting her, her family, her team & Muslim Americans across the country in jeopardy. It’s unconscionable and I’m furious.”
New York Congresswoman and another “Justice Democrat” teammate Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, in an amazingly tone deaf tweet that included a photograph and quote referencing the Holocaust, pronounced “Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today. Ilhan Omar’s life is in danger. For our colleagues to be silent is to be complicit in the outright, dangerous targeting of a member of Congress. We must speak out. ‘First they came...’”
Massachusetts Senator, attorney, Presidential candidate, and former Harvard Law School Professor with a far greater than average understanding of Free Speech, bleated “The President is inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman—and an entire group of Americans based on their religion. It's disgusting. It's shameful. And any elected leader who refuses to condemn it shares responsibility for it.”
Socialist in Chief, Vermont Senator, millionaire, Presidential candidate, and former commune reject Bernie Sanders pounded his pulpit and declared “Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won't back down to Trump's racism and hate, and neither will we. The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.”
Former Texas Congressman and yet another Presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke weighed in at a South Carolina campaign stop, “This is an incitement to violence against Congresswoman Omar, against our fellow Americans who happen to be Muslim. This is part and parcel of what we've seen from an administration that has described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.”
Californian U.S. Senator, gun owner who wants you to know that you owning a gun is not safe, and Presidential candidate number 4 on this list Kamala Harris doubled down with “For two years, this President has used the most powerful platform in the world to sow hate & division. He's done it again. Putting the safety of a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, at risk & vilifying a whole religion is beyond the pale. I'll be blunt — we must defeat him.”
I saved what I felt was the most hypocritical response for last, New York’s junior U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand managed to issue a milquetoast condemnation of Ilhan’s comments and condemn Trump for his condemnation: “As a Senator who represents 9/11 victims, I can't accept any minimizing of that pain. But Trump's dangerous rhetoric against Ilhan Omar is disgusting. It’s a false choice to suggest we can’t fight terrorism and reject Islamophobic hate at once—a president should do both.”
All of these political pronouncements are anti-American disingenuous assaults on the Free Speech Clause of our First Amendment to the United States Constitution. These statements are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to usher in a new political paradigm of repackaging strident political discourse as violence if the target of criticism is of a certain race, religion, gender, sexual preference or ethnicity and seek to silence and criminalize criticism. Do I think our President engages in demagoguery and ushered in a new paradigm of absurdism in American politics? Of course. And AOC and a great number of other politicians on both sides of the aisle have jumped in and zealously joined him. And while I think his tweets are often less than Presidential, two truths remain constant: (1) it got him elected; and (2) the very American concept of free speech is the firmament upon which this Nation was built.
Finally, I want to clearly define MY unique and possibly wholly incorrect criticism of Congresswoman Omar’s March keynote speech to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. She began the speech with an outright lie, “CAIR was founded after 9/11....” I believe her pernicious mendacity was designed to sow the falsehood that CAIR was formed in response to an anti-Muslim tide that allegedly swept over America post-9/11 to paint a false portrait of civil rights righteousness of the group. The truth is the organization was formed in 1994 and, more importantly, in 2007, it was listed by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a financial system designed to funnel millions to Hamas to facilitate the destruction of Israel.
She followed her “mistake” with “...because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” The “some people did something” is the portion that spurred the appropriate outrage she subsequent politically correct bit wholly anti-American rebuke. This statement was perceived by many on the Right as a “minimization” of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Many on the Left parsed and excused the statement as her staking the position that American Muslims should not be blamed for radicalized terror. That position is fundamentally true: bigotry is disgusting and blaming people uninvolved in horrifying behavior because they share a religion or immutable trait with an evil person is ignorant and inexcusable. But I do not believe that was not Congresswoman Omar’s point.
My perception of Ilhan’s opening remark was that she was pandering to those in the room that subscribe to one of the array of disgusting and unfounded theories that the United States government, Israel, or developer and World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein were responsible for the attacks that killed thousands of Americans. I came to this conclusion after repeatedly listening to and deconstructing the entirety of her speech.
The speech spends a significant amount of time identifying horrible acts of targeted violence against Muslims perpetrated by lunatics and posits that it is an organized globalized assault on the Muslim Faith for which President Donald Trump is to blame. The speech pointedly and completely ignores the very real global radicalized Islamist terror cell system that has swept over the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, Africa and is solely responsible for the ATTACKS on 9/11. I believe her speech begins and ends with dishonesty and it has been appropriately vilified. And while I readily celebrate the right of those that disagree to disagree and engage in political debate, I condemn those who seek to silence American political discourse by conflating criticism with violence. It is not violence. It is free speech. It is Americanism.