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muslim advocates
Ilhan Omar Fires Back as McCarthy Confirms She'll Be Kept Off House Committees
"I do not actually think that he has a reason outside of me being Muslim and thinking I should not be," the congresswoman said. "If you look at the comments from Republicans, it's precisely for only that reason."
Jan 11, 2023
Progressive U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said Wednesday that the only reason why Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is moving to ban her from her House committees is because she is Muslim.
McCarthy (R-Calif.) confirmed Tuesday that Omar (D-Minn.), as well as Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) would be blocked from serving on House committees. The speaker first threatened to strip the trio of their assignments last year, a move that supporters and critics alike viewed as retaliation for Democrats removing GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Arizona's Paul Gosar from their committee seats after Greene's numerous white supremacist remarks and conspiracy theories. Gosar was removed after he shared social media posts depicting the animated assassinations of President Joe Biden and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"As crude and as cynical as it is for the nativist factions in our government, targeting Muslims is reliably good politics."
Interviewed by HuffPost for an article published Wednesday, Omar—who was a member of the House Foreign Affairs and Labor and Education committees in the 117th Congress—accused McCarthy of being motivated by bigotry.
"I do not actually think that he has a reason outside of me being Muslim and thinking I should not be," she said. "If you look at the comments from Republicans, it's precisely for only that reason."
\u201c\u201cBy stripping @Ilhan of her committees, McCarthy kills two birds with one stone: He attempts to silence an effective, principled voice\u2026 stokes the ugly culture of anti-Muslim hate for cheap political points.\u201d\n\n@MuslimAdvocates\u2019s Sumayyah Waheed is right.\n\nhttps://t.co/FkDCJZrvOm\u201d— Win Without War (@Win Without War) 1673466691
Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have repeatedly made racist and Islamophobic attacks against Omar, the first Somali-American woman elected to Congress, including calling her a terrorist who might try to blow up Congress.
Omar has consistently condemned Israeli crimes in the illegally occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem and in the besieged Gaza Strip. These include the occupation, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and desert Bedouins, the internationally recognized crime of apartheid, the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza invasions, the unlawful colonization of the West Bank by Jewish settlers, and extrajudicial killings such as that of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Omar has also been a vocal critic of the $3 billion in mostly unconditional annual U.S. military aid to Israel.
For these criticisms, Omar has been branded by both Republicans and Democrats as an "antisemite," a tactic often used by Israeli officials and supporters of Israel in a bid to delegitimize condemnation of the country's human rights crimes.
\u201cSpeaker McCarthy\u2019s promise to remove @IlhanMN from the Foreign Affairs Committee is a continuation of the racist attacks targeting her since her election. GOP efforts to equate her w/@RepMTG are shameful. Omar is a smart thoughtful legislator. MTG is a provocateur & buffoon\u201d— James J. Zogby (@James J. Zogby) 1673443143
Eight U.S. Jewish groups last month released a statement opposing McCarthy's pledge to keep Omar off any committees.
"As Jewish-American organizations, we oppose Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy's pledge to strip Rep. Ilhan Omar of her House Foreign Affairs Committee seat based on false accusations that she is antisemitic or anti-Israel. We may not agree with some of Congresswoman Omar's opinions, but we categorically reject the suggestion that any of her policy positions or statements merit disqualification from her role on the committee," the groups said.
The statement continued:
Leader McCarthy's pledge seems especially exploitative in light of the rampant promotion of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories by him and his top deputies amid a surge in dangerous right-wing antisemitism. He posted (and later deleted) a tweet charging that George Soros and two other billionaires of Jewish descent were seeking to "buy" an election. His newly elected [House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.)] said the same people "essentially bought control of Congress." Meanwhile, Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik [R-N.Y.] has promoted the deadly antisemitic "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory.
Responding to McCarthy's threat, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) tweeted that the speaker "wants to remove [Omar] from her committee while aligning with fascist MAGA extremists."
"This is about Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia," Bowman added. "Ilhan represents everything the Republicans cannot be: leadership, compassion, and integrity."
Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Washington, D.C.-based Muslim Advocates, toldHuffPost that "as crude and as cynical as it is for the nativist factions in our government, targeting Muslims is reliably good politics."
"By stripping Rep. Omar of her committees, McCarthy kills two birds with one stone: He attempts to silence an effective, principled voice on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he stokes the ugly culture of anti-Muslim hate for cheap political points," she added.
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That Most Terrorists Aren't Muslim May 'Come as a Surprise'-if You Get Your News From Corporate Media
Jun 26, 2015
Since the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, the New York Times (6/23/15) reports,
extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States.... But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise.
The "surprise" is that more people are killed by "white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims": 48 vs. 26 since 9/11, according to a study by the New America Foundation. (More comprehensive studies cited in a recent New York Times op-ed-6/16/15-show an even greater gap, with 254 killed in far-right violence since 9/11, according to West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, compared to 50 killed in jihadist-related terrorism.)
The Times suggests that "such numbers are new to the public"-but they won't come as much of a surprise to those familiar with FAIR's work. In articles like "More Terror, Less Coverage" (Extra!, 5/11) and "A Media Microscope on Islam-Linked Violence" (Extra!, 8/13), FAIR's Steve Rendall has debunked the claim that terrorism is mostly or exclusively a Muslim phenomenon, pointing out that white, right-wing Christians are responsible for the bulk of political violence in the United States.
But in a piece all about the "mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases," the entity most charged with making sure these match-the news media-doesn't get much scrutiny, except from "some Muslim advocates" who "complain" of media double standards. There is research on this question-such as a study from University of Illinois communications professor Travis Dixon, summarized in the Champaign/Urbana News Gazette (6/23/15):
Between 2008 and 2012, about 6 percent of domestic terrorism suspects were Muslim, or about 1 in 17, according to FBI reports.
But in that same period, about 81 percent of the domestic terrorists described on national cable and network television news programs were Muslim.
Statistics like these would go a long way toward explaining why there might be readers for whom reports of non-Muslim terrorism "come as a surprise."
Reporter Scott Shane does note that instances of white supremacist terror have "drawn only fleeting news media coverage"-citing lethal incidents that FAIR has sought to call attention to, like the massacre at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin (CounterSpin, 8/9/13) and a shooting spree by a far-right couple in Las Vegas (FAIR Blog, 6/13/14). "To revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why" they didn't get more press attention, Shane says-but why wonder why, when you can just, say, ask an editor?
The answers-of sorts-that the piece closes with come not from the media decision-makers who actually choose which violent incidents get spotlighted, but from academic terrorism experts. William Braniff, head of a terrorism think tank at the University of Maryland, asserts:
We understand white supremacists.... We don't really feel like we understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.
And John Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts/Lowell, gets the last word, saying of extremist violence: "Very often, it comes from someplace you're least suspecting."
The pronouns do a lot of work in these sentences. Who are "we," exactly, that understand white supremacists so well that we don't have to pay any attention to them; are "we" different from the "you" that doesn't suspect that these well-understood white supremacists might be dangerously violent?
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