Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) hit back at her Republican critics on Sunday, saying that they often try to find controversy in her comments.
CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Omar about a video the National Republican Committee posted on Saturday, which claimed to show Omar comparing the slave dungeons she visited in Ghana to migrant detention centers at the U.S. southern border.
“So I’m only controversial because people seem to want the controversy,” the Democratic lawmaker said in response.
Omar explained that she was saying in the video that the stories of Ghanaian slaves being forcefully separated from their families rang similar to migrant children being separated from their parents when crossing the Mexican-U.S. border.
“But you didn’t mean it as an attack on U.S. border agents?” Brennan asked.
“Absolutely not,” Omar replied. “I think this is always the point, right? There is always an implied intent to every conversation I have.”
“And if you listen to the video, one comparison of what the dungeons looked like and people being sold was to what was happening in North Africa, and the other one was of family separations and of course we obviously have a crisis here with our family separation policies,” she added.
The Muslim congresswoman, who sought asylum from Somalia as a child, is a frequent target of attacks from conservatives over supposedly being “un-American” or “ungrateful” toward the U.S.
Watch Omar below:
Ilhan Omar on her critics: "I’m only controversial because people seem to want the controversy." pic.twitter.com/DDsiOQtkzm
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) September 15, 2019
Omar, Tlaib, AOC…they’re being used. All of this extraordinary exposure is for one purpose and one purpose only.
The GOP tried to shut down Elizabeth Warren by denying her leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and ended up amplifying her voice, possibly sending her to the Oval Office. They really don’t learn from their mistakes…
And yet I find her just the opposite.
ETA: Of ‘The Squad,’ I find Rep. Omar the most interesting and would like to have a long lunch with her some day. A gay, Southern, citified white boy (yes, I still call myself a boy … at heart) Miss Omar could teach me a lot.
I cringe every time an interviewer leans into a question with "…but you did/didn’t mean to imply blabbety, blabbety, blah - (his/her own interpolation)…? - as though already impugning the intent of the interviewee. This strikes me as rather prejudicial. Many do it all the time, and it grates on me every time. Might it not be more professional to simply ask: “Tell us what, if anything, you meant to further imply by making that statement?”
I don’t see the point in making these comparisons — both sides agree on what is happening: children are being separated from their parents and locked in cages in an effort to deter asylum seekers. That is morally outrageous from top to bottom, on its own terms, without drawing tenuous connections to slavery or the Holocaust.