Democrats slam Donald Trump after he tweets ‘incitement to violence’ video about Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar
- Video showed an out-of-context clip of Omar referring to the September 11 attacks as ‘some people did something’, intercut with footage of the incident
- Presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke were among those who rallied in Omar’s favour
Top US Democrats on Saturday rushed to defend Representative Ilhan Omar after President Donald Trump retweeted video that was edited to suggest she was being dismissive of the significance of the worst terrorist assault on US soil.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scolded Trump for using the “painful images of 9/11 for a political attack” against the first-term Minnesota Democrat.
Former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination to challenge Trump in 2020, said the Republican president’s tweet was an “incitement to violence” against Omar, who is Muslim-American, and others like her.
The video Trump retweeted Friday pulls a snippet of Omar’s recent speech to the Council on American-Islamic Relations in which she described the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre as “some people did something”, and includes news footage of the hijacked planes hitting the Twin Towers. Trump also tweeted, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
Omar’s remark has drawn criticism largely from political opponents and conservatives who say the lawmaker, one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress, offered a flippant description of the assailants and the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
