The traitor class has been particularly vocal ever since Qasem Soleimani was killed. The ever-winsome Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted Friday: “We are outraged the president would assassinate a foreign official, possibly setting off another war without Congressional authorization and has zero plan to deal with the consequences.” Wait, what? Soleimani was a “foreign official”? Isn’t Ilhan Omar aware that Soleimani was no staid and stolid Iranian “official” sitting bored behind a desk somewhere in Tehran, but was responsible for the deaths of over 600 U.S. soldiers in Iraq? Yes, she does know, and clearly she doesn’t care.
We know that she knows because she adds in the tweet quoted above: “But of course you know that.” She was addressing Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), responding to his tweet that said: “According the the [sic] Obama Department of Defense, Qasem Soleimani was a terrorist directly responsible for the murder of over 500 US service men & women. Why are congressional Dems outraged that he’s finally dead?”
As it turns out, Cruz was lowballing the actual figure of the U.S. personnel Soleimani had killed, but since Omar was responding to his tweet, she clearly knows that Soleimani wasn’t some milquetoast bureaucrat caught up in the president’s rabid and unrestrained “Islamophobia.”
Nor does Omar’s insistence that she is only “outraged” because Trump acted without congressional authorization stand scrutiny. As Matt Margolis noted here at PJ Media, Alan Dershowitz, who knows a bit about constitutional law, explained that “there’s no doubt” that Soleimani “fit the description of ‘combatant.’ He [was] a uniformed member of an enemy military who was actively planning to kill Americans; American soldiers and probably, as well, American civilians.” The attack was consequently “legally justified.”
There is also the telling detail that Soleimani was not killed in Tehran, but in Baghdad, where he had arrived in the wake of the Iran-engineered siege of the U.S. embassy, apparently to coordinate new attacks on the American forces that had ended the siege.
Omar, however, is sticking to her story, explicitly denying that she is angry because Soleimani was killed. She warned in a tweet on Friday afternoon: “They’re going to accuse anyone who cautions against war of ‘siding with our enemies’ or ‘supporting terrorists.’ This is the exact rhetoric that got us into the War in Iraq. Don’t fall for it.”
Of course. But compare Omar’s stated “outrage” over the killing of Soleimani unauthorized by a fiercely partisan House of Representatives that has been hysterically hostile and demonstrably unfair to the president to her response to the September 11, 2001, jihad attacks in New York and Washington. Omar famously said at a fundraiser for the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR): “CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognize that some people did something, and then all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. You can’t just say that today someone is looking at me strange, that I am going to try to make myself look pleasant. You have to say that person is looking at me strange, I am not comfortable with it. I am going to talk to them and ask them why.”
Omar demonstrated no outrage whatsoever regarding the 9/11 jihad attacks. The only thing she seemed to be outraged about in her CAIR speech was that Muslims had supposedly lost “access” to their “civil liberties” after 9/11, although she didn’t offer any evidence about this supposed victimization of Muslims. (Her claim that CAIR was founded after 9/11 was also false.)
Omar’s cavalier attitude toward 9/11 makes it harder to believe her claim that she is “outraged” over the killing of Soleimani only because Trump didn’t seek congressional authorization. A thought experiment: what if Soleimani had been a non-Muslim military officer who was responsible for the deaths of over 600 Muslims? Do you think that Omar would express any form of “outrage” for any reason if such a man had been killed? Neither do I. And of course here yet again, the establishment media should be challenging Omar about her statements, and helping Americans discover exactly where she stands. But there is about as much chance of that as of her endorsing Trump for reelection.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 19 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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