Again, President Donald Trump has taken to using his platform to stir up violent hatred of his political opponents. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) responded harshly this weekend to those targeting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), which includes the president. He tweeted a video seeming to implicate Omar, who is Muslim, in the 9/11 attacks themselves on account of her faith after she sought to distance Islam at large from the attacks.
Ocasio-Cortez shared in response to Trump and the others pushing that sort of angry response to Omar:
‘One of the ugly aftermaths of 9/11 that is too often ignored is the codified profiling of Muslim-Americans solely bc of their faith. No-fly lists. Warantless mosque surveillance. All of it. To fear+suspect all Muslims due to the actions of terrorists is bigotry. Plain & simple.’
Outside of the realm of rhetoric, Trump has actually pushed precisely what the Congresswoman is talking about. After spending a considerable deal of time coming up with something that could actually make it through the court system, the Trump team got a Muslim-targeting travel ban upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The ban targets foreign nationals from countries including Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia, and Yemen, which have by and large not hosted any terrorist who’s carried out a recent attack on U.S. soil, despite the Trump team’s claims of security reasons for their ban.
To use a few examples, the attackers behind a 2015 shooting in San Bernardino were from the U.S. and Pakistan, the attacker at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016 was born in New York, and the attacker behind a 2017 truck ramming attack in New York is from Uzbekistan. Ironically, it’s the 2015 San Bernardino attack that first gave Trump the platform to launch his idea of a Muslim ban, but the eventual version of that plan he enacted doesn’t even target anywhere that would keep something similar from happening again, making its base in bigotry even more clear.
Trump, of course, has also offered plenty of angrily anti-Muslim rhetoric since rising to the national stage as a presidential candidate. He claimed that “Islam hates us” and lied that he saw American Muslims rejoicing over the 9/11 terror attacks, besides routinely using anti-immigrant rhetoric that could easily be turned against Muslims. Speaking of influxes of mostly Muslims to Europe, for instance, he asserted that immigration in that context was “a shame” and “very, very sad.”
Most recently, he posted a video montage going back and forth between a speech Omar gave denouncing anti-Muslim rhetoric and scenes from 9/11, roping her into the terror attack and in the minds of many, inciting violence against her. The line that Trump and others like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) have zeroed in on has Omar describing the 9/11 attacks as “some people did something.” However, her point was distinguishing the “some people” from Muslims at large, not delegitimizing the impacts of the attack. Trump and others’ assertions otherwise are completely baseless.
Check out Twitter’s response to Ocasio-Cortez below. She attracted a lot of trolls who seem to think that the best way to respond to a terror attack is to target people who have nothing to do with it.
Featured Image via screenshot
