By Caroline S. Engelmayer, The Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Rep. Ilhan Omar has been in Congress less than seven months, but the Minnesota Democrat has become a major target of President Trump’s ire.
What’s going on? ….
Didn’t she also say something controversial about Al Qaeda?
In March, addressing the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, Omar referred to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a moment when “some people did something,” which some viewed as minimizing the Al Qaeda attacks.
“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. (CAIR was actually founded in 1994, not after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.)
Critics complained that she was downplaying the horrors of the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, and Al Qaeda’s role in hijacking and crashing the four planes in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
In April, Trump retweeted an edited video of Omar’s speech that only included the phrase “some people did something,” without context about Omar’s comments on the founding of CAIR. After a clip of Omar saying, “Some people did something,” the video cut to footage of the attacks.
Trump cited Omar’s comment again at Wednesday’s rally, twisting it into the false assertion that she supported the terrorist group.
Read more: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-07-18/trump-ilhan-omar-send-her-back
