Donald Trump Isn’t Playing Games With Ilhan Omar—He’s Inciting Violence

"The most fair reading of President Donald Trump’s persistent attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is that the President has entered the Henry II phase of his tyranny. During one of his disputes with Archbishop Thomas Beckett, Henry II is said to have exclaimed, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” (he didn’t really say it that way)—and, later, four knights assassinated Thomas Beckett, believing they were acting on the King’s orders. One assumes that our barely literate, intellectually incurious, spiritually bankrupt President has never heard the story, but one imagines he’d like it if Stephen Miller read it to him at bedtime.



Trump’s incitement against Omar is the latest eruption of Trump’s established pattern of exhorting his followers to violence. During the campaign, he told supporters at a rally that if they saw someone about to throw a tomato, they should “knock the crap out of them,” adding that he would “pay for [the] legal fees.” In fact, Trump did say that he was thinking of paying the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched a man at a rally in North Carolina (Trump didn’t, of course, because Trump is a cheap liar). Trump also warned that the “Second Amendment people” might do something about Hillary Clinton, if she won. Just recently he suggested that there might be violence if he was impeached.



That’s just off the top of my head. There are many, many more comments Trump makes that suggest an affinity for violence. There are many more violent people he supports. Trump uses language, both what he says and what he doesn’t say, to encourage his supporters to commit acts of violence. His aides that go on TV argue that, essentially, Trump is too stupid and glib to know what he’s saying. But, given the pattern, a reasonable observer would be forced to conclude that Trump actively wants violence to be done against his perceived enemies.



Most likely, Trump has already gotten people killed. The Christchurch, New Zealand mass murderer is the most obvious and deadly doppelganger for the four knights who killed Thomas Beckett. The killer directly cited Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” But there are more subtle clues that the very worst people hear President Trump loud and clear. Hate crimes are up 17 percent since 2016. And there was the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville—the one Trump would retroactively describe as including “good people on both sides”—which led to the death of Heather Heyer.



We should call Trump’s statements and tweets “incitement” to criminal behavior, but the standard for such a charge, as interpreted by the Supreme Court under the First Amendment, is that the speech must encourage “imminent” lawless action, or the speech must be likely to produce such imminent crime. Saying “snitches get stitches” in the middle of the street would not be “incitement.” Saying “snitches get stitches” in the middle of the street outside the snitch’s house, while pointing at it, to a crowd of people all armed with stitch inducing paraphernalia—well, now you might be outside the bounds of “protected speech.”



Our current standard here comes from a case called Brandenburg v. Ohio, which was a case where a Klansman, the aforementioned Brandenburg, was convicted under an Ohio law that made it a crime to advocate “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism.” The Supreme Court threw out that conviction and gave us the current standard of “imminent” criminal action.



How do you think the current, conservative Supreme Court would rule on a case where it was a Muslim, not a white supremacist, who was arrested and convicted for advocating “unlawful methods of terrorism”? Do you think we’d hear a lot from conservatives about how the offensive speech was protected because it didn’t immediately result in a crime? These days, Muslims can barely advocate for a set of fashion statements without conservative scholars buying pearls so they have something to clutch.



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We don’t have to imagine the double standard, because we’re seeing it play out in real time. Ilhan Omar has said nothing as offensive or dangerous to anybody as what Trump says about Muslims in general and Omar specifically. Omar hasn’t authored or promised to author legislation to ban people entry to this country based on their religion. Omar hasn’t referred to other people’s countries as “s**tholes.” She hasn’t offered to pay legal fees as a bounty for any of her supporters who commit violence. Her statement, the one she is being punished for—that all Muslims are blamed for the conduct of a few—was not controversial; it’s an obvious fact to most people who achieve non-whiteness through methods that don’t involve shoe polish.



But she’s the one under attack. Trump is literally putting her life in danger, yet the law does nothing to stop him. His threats and attacks are being amplified through inaccurate reporting by the Rupert Murdoch empire, both through The New York Post and Fox News, and yet they hide behind the freedom of the press. Trump is riling up his supporters on Twitter, a platform that is not even subject to the rigorous standards of the First Amendment, and yet people throw up their hands and say “well, freedom of speech.”



What is it going to take before the law does something to stop this growing lynch mob? If I talked about the stupid subway the way Trump talks about Muslims, I’d get a visit from the Department of Homeland Security. If I tweeted about Trump Tower the way Trump tweets about Omar, I’d get a visit from DHS and the Secret Service. Law enforcement, Twitter, and every media organization, big and small, take threats to public officials very seriously—unless those threats are made against brown public officials and come from the White House, apparently. Then it’s just all how some Klan jerkface established the right of white people to threaten whoever they want as long as they’re not physically in the room where it happens.



Just like Henry II, Trump has the good sense not to give the order. Trump is no student of history, but he has intuited that he can accomplish as many of his nefarious goals through the ambition of his sycophants as through the allegiance of his henchmen. He supposes—correctly—that the law is set up to protect his style of white supremacy, as opposed to rooting it out. If you pick four sentences from Donald Trump at random, one of them is bound to be dangerously racist, but he is the one who is protected from threats, not the people he threatens.



Which is why he’s not going to stop until more violence is committed in his name. He’s got a taste for it now. He knows what he’s doing. He’s growing more confident. It’s the power trip that we’ve read about in every good biography of any tyrant throughout history. He says something here and somebody he thinks is “bad” is hurt or dies there. If you want to understand this part of the Trump presidency, you don’t need to read Shakespeare, you need to watch Dexter.



Donald Trump is no longer playing politics. He’s playing God. I’m afraid for Omar. I’m afraid for all of us.'



Donald Trump Isn’t Playing Games With Ilhan Omar—He’s Inciting Violence

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The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar | The New Yorker

"You know how bullying works. The victim is marked long before the bullying begins: it’s the kid no one really likes, the weirdo who is barely tolerated by the larger group. The defenseless, isolated kid. And when the bullying starts to happen, the rest of the children look the other way. Even the ones the victim thought were his friends go silent. Especially the ones he thought were his friends.



Political violence can work the same way. In modern states ruled by autocrats, or aspiring autocrats, political violence is dispersed and delegated. Its first weapons are ridicule and ostracism. Once a person has been marginalized and discredited among allies, physical violence becomes a likely option. In Russia, I witnessed this several times among people I knew, who stood alone and embattled before they were killed. The Parliament member Galina Starovoitova, who had once been a prominent member of Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet, was, by the late nineteen-nineties, portrayed by the Russian media as someone whose ideas were outdated and irrelevant. She was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building, in November of 1998. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an often short-tempered person whose reporting was viewed as partisan and unreliable by many of her more mainstream colleagues. She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, in October of 2006. The politician Boris Nemtsov, once viewed as Yeltsin’s most likely successor, was by the twenty-tens seen as an old-timer who, even as he protested the regime, didn’t quite grasp the new language of protest. He was shot dead on a bridge in central Moscow, in February of 2015. In all three cases, the people convicted or accused of the murder did not have a direct relationship to the Kremlin but were seemingly moved by a desire to act on their loyalty to it.



After their deaths, all three victims were idealized. Most Americans who have heard of them probably imagine that they were widely revered. They certainly deserved to be widely revered, but in fact they had been abandoned, late in life, even by many of those who should have been their political allies. They were difficult people with uncomfortable views; standing by their sides in an increasingly hostile political environment was hard work. But, by omitting this part of the story, we elide a key fact about contemporary political violence: bullies don’t go after the strong. In Russia, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is walking around, not only alive but also mostly free, solely because the government knows that he has the support of hundreds of thousands of people who will protest if he is jailed and may revolt if he is killed. His life depends on this support.



For the past three months, Americans have observed the process of drawing a target on a politician’s back. The politician is Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Two of her fundamental positions—that the United States government and many of its elected officials support an apartheid regime in Israel-Palestine, and that the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. are routinely trampled by entities that include the government—are as uncomfortable for many Americans as they are indisputable. Her way of expressing those positions—unabashed, and at times seemingly unaware of context—makes her the kind of disagreeable person who is easy for presumptive allies to shun. This, in turn, makes her vulnerable to attack.



The first Omar controversy, in February, did not, contrary to popular perception, begin with an Omar tweet. (A piece by Matthew Yglesias, on Vox, did a handy job of untangling the whole story.) In the beginning was the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, who, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (J.T.A.) news service reported, planned to take action against the freshman representatives Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first two Muslim women in Congress. It wasn’t immediately clear what he wanted them reprimanded for, but it seemed that the cause was the two representatives’ support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. In the discussion that stemmed from the J.T.A. report, Omar issued her infamous tweet, which she has since deleted: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” She followed up to clarify that the tweet referred to political donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a body that exerts powerful—and well-financed—pressure on elected officials.



In substance, the only disputable word in the tweet is “all,” as congressional supporters of Israel are not motivated solely by campaign contributions. But the tweet was widely interpreted as tapping into the anti-Semitic trope of linking Jews with money. Democratic public figures, including Chelsea Clinton, condemned the tweet; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic leadership issued a “Statement on Anti-Semitic Comments of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.” It was a wildly disproportionate reaction, seemingly designed to show that Omar was on her own. Omar deleted the tweet and apologized. (She has also deleted a tweet that she sent in 2012: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”)



Less than a month later, speaking at a bookstore event in Washington, D.C., Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country”—meaning Israel. In Washington and in the media, across the political spectrum, her comments were once again condemned as anti-Semitic. (A rare exception was Jordan Weissmann in Slate, who called Omar “tone-deaf” but suggested that she had a point.) Amid much media outrage, the Democrats spent two days debating a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and “the myth of dual loyalty,” then ultimately broadened it to include other oppressed groups.



The third Omar controversy in as many months concerns remarks that the congresswoman made during an event of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said, among many other things. A right-wing activist Web site in Australia pulled the quote, making it look like Omar was diminishing the scale of the events of 9/11. Then President Trump tweeted a video that combined repetitions of that quote from Omar’s speech and footage of devastation that occurred on 9/11, suggesting that “some people did something” was an attempt to dismiss the memory of the terrorist attack. “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!!!” the President’s tweet said.



It doesn’t take much imagination to see Trump’s tweet as an invitation to aggression. Speaker Pelosi responded with a tweet of her own, demanding that Trump take down his and also noting that she had spoken to the congressional sergeant-at-arms to insure that necessary protection is provided to Omar. She seemed to see the threat of violence against Omar as real and immediate."





The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar | The New Yorker

Trump: No regrets about Rep. Ilhan Omar death threats. This is outrageous and the lack of support for representative Omar shows how bigoted America remains. It is sickening .

Trump: No regrets about Rep. Ilhan Omar death threats

Anderson Cooper: If Trump's not worried, why is he tweeting?

Opinion | Demonizing Minority Women - The New York Times

"By Charles M. Blow   April 14th, 2019

Representative Ilhan Omar is the latest target in a trend of conservatives attacking women of color.



Representative Ilhan Omar. White supremacy has routinely painted minority women as pathological and reprobate.



Last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, delivered a speech in which she correctly derided Islamophobia, a real and persistent problem in this country and others.



In that speech, Representative Omar invoked the attacks of Sept. 11, saying the council was created “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”



(As The New York Times pointed out, “The Council on American-Islamic Relations was actually founded in 1994.)



The congresswoman could have used different, more severe language to describe the attacks, but she didn’t. Maybe we could judge her use of language as inartful, but we all succumb to that occasionally, me included. Error is inevitable among the loquacious. But, the Omar of the speech stands. I saw nowhere in it a thread of terror apologia.



And yet, conservative media has pounced on four of Omar’s words — “some people did something” — as just that. Brian Kilmeade, one of the dull and delusional on “Fox & Friends,” questioned her patriotism, saying, “You have to wonder if she’s an American first.”



Donald Trump upped the ante, retweeting a video of Omar saying, “Some people did something,” interspersed with the still-chilling video of the 9/11 attacks. Some things should be too sacred to exploit for political gain, but Trump is an amoralist. Nothing is beyond the pale.



While the unrelenting attacks on Omar are newsworthy unto themselves as a conservative peculiarity, I believe that the attacks should be viewed through a wider and longer lens. Omar is only the most recent minority woman onto whom conservatives have trained their fire.



While white supremacy has historically tried to paint minority men as physically dangerous, it has routinely painted minority women, particularly those strong and vocal, as pathological and reprobate.



There is a pattern here. It is expressed not only in the attacks on, and in elevation of, Omar, but also on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.



Before them, Trump and his cohorts demonized Representative Maxine Waters, who Trump dubbed “Low I.Q.,” and Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida.



And before they tried to make Omar and Ocasio-Cortez the face of the Democratic Party, they did the same to Wilson and Waters. In October 2017, Trump tweeted about Wilson:



“Wacky Congresswoman Wilson is the gift that keeps on giving for the Republican Party, a disaster for Dems. You watch her in action & vote R!”



In June, Trump said, “The face of the Democrats is now Maxine Waters.”



The strategy is simple: While sexism and racism are potent individually, they are devastating in combination, particularly when appealing to a party dominated by white men and which exalts white supremacy and white patriarchy.



The only women they truly honor are white women who obsequiously condone or actively participate in the oppression.



All manner of inhumanity and barbarism have been conducted under the guise of protecting the honor and purity of these white women. There are untold rope-burned necks and fully burned bodies in American history to attest to this.



There is a reason that Trump launching his campaign by calling Mexicans murderers and rapists had such resonance among the people who came to support him.



One of the most memorable scenes in “The Birth of a Nation” was a white woman throwing herself off a cliff to keep from being raped by a black man.



There is a reason that many white people viewed slavery as the guard against the vulnerability of women, and black freedom as the gateway to white woman victimization.



As the Binghamton University historian Diane Miller Sommerville put it in her book, “Rape & Race in the Nineteenth-Century South”: “Black-on-white rape figured prominently in these historical treatments of Reconstruction. Portraying Freedmen as intoxicated with new political power, historians like Claude Bowers described how ‘an awful fear rested upon the [white] women of the communities.’ ”



Sommerville would quote Bowers saying, “Rape is the foul daughter of Reconstruction.”



To advance their oppression, these white men treated white women as victims, and many white women reciprocated by playing the role of victim. In that way, barbarity could be passed off as chivalry.



But for the women who fall outside this constraint — minority women, lesbian and transgender women, liberal women, “nasty” women — the rebuke is brutal. They didn’t need protection, but rather, suppression.



These women herald calamity — both the dislodging of white supremacy and the subversion of male supremacy. Conservatives attack these women because the threat they pose is existential.



We can fuss over the language any of these women have used, and whether some remarks crossed lines of propriety, but to have them as the only arena of discussion about why conservatives are so offended is to be intentionally blind.



These people hate women like Omar because they see them as omens."



Opinion | Demonizing Minority Women - The New York Times

In Attacking Ilhan Omar, Trump Revives His Familiar Refrain Against Muslims - The New York Times

"Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, has emerged as a foil for President Trump before the 2020 election.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock



Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, has emerged as a foil for President Trump before the 2020 election.



As long as President Trump has focused on what he said was the danger lurking at the southwestern border, he has also talked about the supposed threat from one specific group already in the country: Muslims.



During the 2016 campaign, he would not rule out creating a registry of Muslims in the United States. He claimed to have seen “thousands” of Muslims cheering on rooftops in New Jersey after Sept. 11, a statement that was widely debunked. After deadly attacks in Paris and California, Mr. Trump called for a moratorium on Muslims traveling to the United States.



“I think Islam hates us,” Mr. Trump told Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, in March 2016.



Now, with 19 months until the 2020 election, Mr. Trump is seeking to rally his base by sounding that theme once again. And this time, he has a specific target: Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.



Mr. Trump and his team are trying to make Ms. Omar, one of a group of progressive women Democratic House members who is relatively unknown in national politics, a household name, to be seen as the most prominent voice of the Democratic Party, regardless of her actual position. And they are gambling that there will be limited downside in doing so.



On Monday, Mr. Trump will visit Minnesota — a state that some of the president’s aides speak of as a place to expand his electoral map — and will hold an economic round table. The event is outside Ms. Omar’s congressional district, but the president’s decision to appear there is a calculated choice.



His Minnesota appearance comes after his tweet of a video interspersed with Ms. Omar speaking and the burning World Trade Center towers. Ms. Omar’s critics have claimed a portion of the remarks, in which she highlighted Islamophobia faced by Muslims after Sept. 11, were dismissive of the terrorist attacks.



Mr. Trump is banking on painting the entire Democratic Party as extreme. And Ms. Omar has become a point of contention for some members of her own party, after remarks she made about the Israel lobby were condemned as anti-Semitic by some long-serving Democrats, as well as by Republicans and Mr. Trump.



But Mr. Trump’s electoral success in 2016 was based partly on culture wars and fears among an older, white voting base that the country it knew was slipping away. Like his hard line on immigration, his plays on fears of Muslims — including inaccurately conflating them with terrorists — proved polarizing among the wider electorate, but helped him keep a tight grip on his most enthusiastic voters. In the South Carolina Republican primary in February 2016, for instance, exit polls showed that 75 percent of voters favored his proposed Muslim ban.



Now, as he looks toward 2020, he is betting that electoral play can deliver for him again. It is a strategy that risks summoning dark forces in American society, a point Ms. Omar made in a statement Sunday evening.



“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,” Ms. Omar said. “This is endangering lives. It has to stop.”



Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday that she had requested a review of Ms. Omar’s security, while Trump aides insisted that the president meant no harm.



Mr. Trump, who once said, “Islam hates us,” tweeted a video on Friday that interspersed remarks made by Ms. Omar with graphic images of Sept. 11.Tom Brenner for The New York Times





Mr. Trump, who once said, “Islam hates us,” tweeted a video on Friday that interspersed remarks made by Ms. Omar with graphic images of Sept. 11.



“Certainly the president is wishing no ill will and certainly not violence towards anyone,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said on Sunday’s broadcast of ABC News’ “This Week.”



Privately, Mr. Trump’s advisers describe Ms. Omar as his ideal foil. Her remarks about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, combined with her role in a progressive contingent of freshman House Democrats who have sparked intraparty battles, have been treated as a gift by Republicans.



Trump aides and allies say they are pleased that some of the Democratic hopefuls for the 2020 presidential nomination are defending her against the president’s attacks, claiming they think it will be damaging for them in the general election.



Ms. Omar “is the perfect embodiment of the sharp contrast President Trump wants to paint for 2020,” said Sam Nunberg, a 2016 campaign aide to Mr. Trump. He added that Mr. Trump is tethering Ms. Omar to more visible Democrats, like her closest ally in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whom Republicans have sought to make a boogeyman.



“This contrast gives the president a chance to expand his support closer to 50 percent,” Mr. Nunberg insisted.



But on Sunday, Democrats said Mr. Trump was diving into an issue on which he has a shaky standing.



“He has no moral authority to be talking about 9/11 at all,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Mr. Nadler noted that Mr. Trump’s real estate company applied for and received grants after the attacks that were intended for small businesses affected by the devastation.



Mr. Nadler said he thought Ms. Omar’s comments about the Sept. 11 attacks were being taken out of context.



“I have had some problems with some of her other remarks, but not with that one,” Mr. Nadler said.



The controversy arose from Ms. Omar’s remarks at an event last month sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, where she focused on attacks against Muslims after Sept. 11. She said she had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”



“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said. (The organization was actually founded in 1994.)



Critics of Ms. Omar contended that the words “some people did something” were dismissive of the terrorist attacks, but her defenders said her words were taken out of context.



The attack was not Mr. Trump’s first on Ms. Omar. Despite repeatedly being denounced for not making forceful condemnations of white nationalists who traffic in anti-Semitism, the president pounced when Ms. Omar unleashed a firestorm in February with her comments on Israel, rejecting her subsequent apology and calling for her to resign.



“Congressman Omar is terrible, what she said,” Mr. Trump told reporters.



Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic strategist, said the Democratic presidential candidates who had responded to Mr. Trump’s latest attacks on Ms. Omar were keeping the focus on his tactics. And he predicted that the use of such graphic images from one of the nation’s darkest days would backfire for the president.



“Voters are turned off by the use of 9/11 for political purposes, and my guess is that moderate voters are going to see Trump’s use of that as both ugly and extreme,” Mr. Garin said. “I think his over-the-top exploitation of 9/11 is going to turn more voters off than he wins over by attacking the Democrats on this.”



In Attacking Ilhan Omar, Trump Revives His Familiar Refrain Against Muslims - The New York Times

Rep. Ilhan Omar Says Death Threats Have Increased Since Trump's Attack | HuffPost

Rep. Ilhan Omar Says Death Threats Have Increased Since Trump's Attack | HuffPost

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Trump Assails Ilhan Omar With Video of Sept. 11 Attacks - The New York Times

"President Trump on Friday targeted Representative Ilhan Omar for remarks she made during a speech on civil rights and Muslims in America with a graphic video featuring the burning World Trade Center towers and other images from Sept. 11, 2001, that he tweeted to millions of his followers.



The Twitter post from the president stoked and amplified a controversy that has been a focus of conservative news outlets, which have sought to elevate Ms. Omar — a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress — as a political target, as Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign begins in earnest.



At issue were remarks that Ms. Omar made last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. There, she gave a speech in which she addressed lingering fear directed at Muslims, and the rights Muslims have to speak out about being viewed with suspicion.



During the speech, she said that Muslims had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.” She added that the council was created after the Sept. 11 attacks “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” (The Council on American-Islamic Relations was actually founded in 1994.)



Conservative news outlets and some Republican officials have focused on the words “some people did something,” arguing that Ms. Omar was playing down the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people and led to two yearslong wars. The video the president tweeted also focused on those four words from Ms. Omar’s speech.



A spokesman for Ms. Omar has said the speech was addressing civil rights.



Ms. Omar has already been the focus of threats, including one by a supporter of Mr. Trump who was recently arrested.



Ms. Omar’s closest ally in the House, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, used Twitter to defend her colleague and urged others to do the same.



“Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today,” she tweeted. “@IlhanMN’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.”



She included in her post the famous words of a Lutheran minister, Martin Niemöller, who had been a Nazi sympathizer, about turning his head on the Nazis’ actions during World War II.



Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who is running for president as a Democrat, quickly joined Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.



“Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we,” he tweeted. “The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.”



In a series of tweets, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., a Democratic presidential candidate and a veteran who served in Afghanistan, also criticized Mr. Trump.



“After 9/11 we all said we were changed. That we were stronger and more united,” he tweeted. “That’s what ‘never forget’ was about. Now, a president uses that dark day to incite his base against a member of Congress, as if for sport. As if we learned nothing that day about the workings of hate.”



Another 2020 presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, also chimed in.



“The President is inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman—and an entire group of Americans based on their religion,” she tweeted. “It’s disgusting. It’s shameful. And any elected leader who refuses to condemn it shares responsibility for it.”



It was unclear late Friday who made the video that the president tweeted. In recent weeks, his Twitter feed has promoted at least two controversial videos that came from elsewhere on the web."



Trump Assails Ilhan Omar With Video of Sept. 11 Attacks - The New York Times

WaPo: WH proposed releasing ICE detainees in sanctuary cities

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Buttigieg & Pence continue feud over their faith. Buttigieg is right. Pence is a phony hypocrite whop uses religion to divide and discriminate.