Ilhan Omar Rips Into Kevin McCarthy For Allowing Racist Behavior

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During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union over the weekend, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) condemned the tacit acceptance of anti-Muslim vitriol on the part of Republican leaders like Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), who has resisted criticism of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) after she mockingly compared Omar, who is Muslim, to a suicide bomber. What would McCarthy be willing to condemn? After Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) posted an edited, partly animated video depicting him murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), McCarthy stood by him too. As Omar troublingly — but accurately — put it: “This is who they are.”

Omar commented as follows:

‘McCarthy is a liar and a coward. He doesn’t have the ability to condemn the kind of bigoted Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric that are being trafficked by a member of his conference… This is who they are. And we have to be able to stand up to them, and we have to push them to reckon with the fact that their party right now is normalizing anti-Muslim bigotry.’

While on CNN, Omar also noted that the very few House Republicans who have spoken out against Boebert’s remarks are being “attacked for condemning it, which tells you that their conference condones this, and that’s why it’s dangerous, because people across the world — not just in the United States — are seeing this, and they are worried.” Check out Omar’s remarks below:

It’s a growing trend within the GOP for members to accept or at least gloss over extremism, such as that to which Omar has been subjected. A recent joint statement from over three dozen Democratic members of Congress calling for Boebert to be removed from her committee roles in the House as punishment for her bigoted remarks made the on-point observation that members of Congress “owe it to [Muslim constituents], and to every person who has been the recipient of harassment and verbal abuse based on their religion, race, gender, sexuality, or other identity, to stand up and show them that their votes to send us here mean something — that our values mean something, and are worth defending.”