Rep. Ilhan Omar suggested Friday that the United States is to blame for catastrophic floods in other countries around the world.
“When you see flooding happening in a country abroad and you are urgently raising money for these lives to be saved, you don’t think about, ‘How have I contributed to the climate warming that has led to these floodings and these catastrophes that are taking place abroad?'” Omar said at a Democracy Now! and Rising Majority event.
Earlier this month, Omar expressed a similar concern when she warned that climate change inaction will lead to the elimination of human existence.
“Inaction on climate change,” Omar tweeted, “won’t just be costly in dollars — it will cost us our planet,” she said on Twitter.
Inaction on climate change won’t just be costly in dollars — it will cost us our planet.
This is not a drill. We’ve got to pass a #GreenNewDeal. https://t.co/CIxAk4oKlb
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 11, 2020
In her Friday remarks, Omar also blamed the U.S. for causing the problems that caused refugees to flee to America from other countries.
“When you see a Somali refugee or an Iraqi refugee or a Libyan refugee, we often are like, ‘this is my neighbor — they must have survived some struggle.’ We don’t ever pause to think, ‘What American policy made them come over here?'” she added.
Omar has been a consistent critic of America’s actions abroad. The Somalia-born congresswoman has called for a complete overhaul of American foreign policy.
“When I think about foreign policy, we need something equivalent to the ‘Green New Deal,’” Omar said last year.
“It’s important for me to think about what an overhaul of our foreign policy should look like from the standpoint of really thinking how it impacts those around the world and where our values intersect with what’s happening.”
