The Washington Post ran a fact check on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s recent comments on the 9/11 attacks, claiming they were reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s “Bullhorn Speech.”
“When we listened to the whole speech, we were reminded of President George W. Bush’s phrasing in two famous moments after the Sept. 11 attacks,” Glenn Kessler, a fact checker with the Washington Post, wrote Thursday in an article meant to put Omar’s comments into context.
The piece references the “Bullhorn Speech” delivered by Bush on Ground Zero three days after the attack. “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Bush said, using a bullhorn to address a crowd that included rescue workers.
Kessler was comparing Bush’s speech — one the most well-received of the former president’s tenure in the White House — to remarks Omar gave last month about the terrorists who killed roughly 3,000 people in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks during an appearance before a Muslim advocacy lobbying group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The Minnesota lawmaker referred to the terrorists as “some people” who “did something.”
Ilhan Omar mentions 9/11 and does not consider it a terrorist attack on the USA by terrorists, instead she refers to it as “Some people did something”, then she goes on to justify the establishment of a terrorist organization (CAIR) on US soil. pic.twitter.com/ixP3BJfqxS
— Imam Mohamad Tawhidi (@Imamofpeace) April 9, 2019
Omar’s comments have been widely criticized as being dismissive of the 9/11 attacks and the victims.
The Minnesota Democrat is no stranger to controversy.
In recent months Omar has faced Democratic and Republican backlash for comments they viewed as being anti-Semitic.
In 2017, she said the United States was “founded by genocide” and its foreign policy was “neocolonialism.”
[Read more: New York Post cover hits back at Ilhan Omar for 9/11 remarks: ‘Here’s your something’]
