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Get a link in your mailbox to your weekly NYPD Confidential column as soon as it is published! Click on the button above right on this page — or here — to sign up for this feature. Pity the DemocratsApril 15, 2019 Once again, Republicans are attacking the Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim. Once again, they are helping split the Democratic Party.
It quoted Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a Navy Seal who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan, who tweeted: “First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as ‘some people who did something.' Unbelievable.”
Next up was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time of 9/11, who echoed McDaniel. “Democratic leaders in Congress should have the courage to denounce [Omar] for her outrageous and ignorant comments,” he said. |
Giuliani was accompanied on his tweet by Bernie Kerik, who was police commissioner at the time and whom Giuliani has generally avoided since Kerik subsequently ended up serving four years in federal prison on fraud charges.“As the police commissioner of the City of New York on September 11, 2001,” Kerik added, “I oversaw the NYPD’s response, rescue, recovery, and investigative efforts of that “something” that “some people did.” Even President Trump piled on, retweeting a video of the attack and interposing it with images of Omar. A Trump supporter was subsequently arrested for threatening her. Lost in all this is that Omar has a point about Muslims losing access to civil liberties. Nowhere was this more apparent than in New York City, where Kerik’s successor, Ray Kelly, sent NYPD Intelligence Division detectives not merely into Muslim mosques in the city but up and down the east coast, searching for terrorist plots. On the other hand, Omar, a 37-year-old Somali refugee who came here with her family in 1992, seems naive in failing to understand the fear of all Americans following the 9/11 attacks, something never before seen or even imagined. She and her family were granted political asylum in 1995 after spending four years in a refugee camp in Kenya. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000. As for the anti-Semitism charges, last month Omar apologized for what many perceived as an anti-Semitic tweet. She wrote that “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby” saying that the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee lobbies Washington to take pro-Israel positions. Last week, she attacked Trump adviser Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, as a “white nationalist,” although she said nothing about his Jewish ancestry. That didn’t stop Long Island Republican Lee Zeldin from charging she was “targeting Jewish people.” So far, the most vocal defenders of Omar have been those on the leftist edge of the political spectrum, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But where are the Democratic moderates? After her “Benjamin” line, Speaker Nancy Pelsoi allowed a vote on the house floor that repudiated Omar. More recently, Pelosi criticized Trump for his retweeted video but said nothing about Omar’s latest remarks. It doesn’t look good for Omar. It doesn’t look good for the moderates. It doesn’t look good for the Democratic party. |
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