Proving once again that we sent a few individuals with some very strange ideas about this country to Congress last November, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said recently that the 9/11 terrorist attacks made her afraid.
Now that may not sound so strange; the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history had a lot of people afraid in the immediate aftermath. Afraid, in particular, of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the growing scourge of Islamic terrorism. Alas, that wasn’t what put fear into Tlaib’s heart. The Muslim congresswoman said that in the moments after 9/11, she was mostly afraid of her “fellow Americans.”
In an interview with Makers, the Palestinian-American said, “I was probably my second year in law school when 9/11 happened. And I was– I was really terrified of what was going to happen to my husband, who’s only a green card holder at the time. I immediately called my brothers and told them to be very careful who you hang out with, telling my sisters, you know, just be real careful out there, and being really afraid of my fellow Americans.
“It really pushed me to be more involved, and I got really curious and really angry,” Tlaib continued. “And I think that combination got me, you know, in front of a number of issues in the city of Detroit.”
Unreal.
There is a part of us that can understand, barely, feeling concern after 9/11 that American sentiment would turn harshly against Islam and its followers. That’s reasonable enough, given the religion that inspired those hijackers to kill 3,000 people. If you happened to be a Muslim with a Muslim non-citizen husband, yeah, we get that you would probably be worried about what might happen to your family.
But to say it out loud like that? Imagine that! To be an American congresswoman who thinks that the most important thing about 9/11 was how it made Muslims feel? How it made her “afraid” of other Americans? That’s what we don’t get. We don’t get how she could say it…unless that’s how she really feels. Unless she, like her colleague Ilhan Omar, just thinks that 9/11 was “something some people did” and that the real history lesson in that event was how it affected American Muslims.
It’s not only a disgrace to have people like this on Capitol Hill, it is outright dangerous. Every word out of their mouths makes us question their values, their loyalties, and their true feelings about this nation. The voters of Michigan and Minnesota need to do better next time around. Much better.
Comments are closed.