{"id":71046,"date":"2019-04-15T06:00:40","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=71046"},"modified":"2019-05-07T07:26:03","modified_gmt":"2019-05-07T12:26:03","slug":"71046","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=71046","title":{"rendered":"When The &#8220;Context&#8221; Is Worse Than The &#8220;Smear&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What the heck &#8211; let&#8217;s make *everyone* angry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rep. Omar has been taking flak over a video in which she says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Ilhan Omar isn\u2019t just anti-Semitic \u2013 she\u2019s anti-American.<br><br>Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to Islamic terrorists on 9\/11, yet Omar diminishes it as: \u201cSome people did something.\u201d<br><br>Democrat leaders need to condemn her brazen display of disrespect.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/k3meEbUOAk\">pic.twitter.com\/k3meEbUOAk<\/a><\/p>\u2014 Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/GOPChairwoman\/status\/1115733259500044290?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 9, 2019<\/a><\/blockquote>\n<script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;[the Council on American Islamic Relations] was founded after 9\/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, the local media and the Associated Press leapt into action to tell the reader that the video is edited to show the remark out of context &#8211; which is great, and would be even better if they&#8217;d be as diligent on being honest about context on both sides of the aisle. And no, they are not. Only for Democrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it&#8217;s true. Here&#8217;s the part that came before:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I&#8217;m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The part the GOP oppo researchers clipped out basically makes the remark in the video just a little bit dishonest. Let&#8217;s be honest &#8211; Omar is not an articulate woman, and it&#8217;s easy to nitpick peoples&#8217; statements after the fact.  And for those of you who&#8217;ve never had to try to operate on a functional, much less professional, level in a language other than your native one, don&#8217;t get too cocky  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And of course, the media *are* dishonest when they fail to give the same fact-checking diligence to similar smears against conservatives.  They fact that they do not &#8211; nearly never &#8211; is itself proof of corrosive media bias. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But here&#8217;s the deal &#8211; Omar&#8217;s original, in-context statement is even worse than the part in the video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second class citizens? Please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Name a country in the world in which Muslim immigrants have been treated *better*, and been able to more thoroughly integrate into society, than the US? Not &#8220;claiming asylum&#8221; and &#8220;getting benefits&#8221;, mind you &#8211; actually getting accepted in a society and prospering? In what country in the world, with or without a massive terrorist attack by their radical coreligionists, have they been *more* welcomed and, when they so choose, prospered and enjoyed the *real* benefits of our society *more* than in the US?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because one can not &#8220;become&#8221; German or French or Swedish. You can immigrate. You can learn the language, send your kids to school, become a citizen, get a job maybe &#8211; but being a German or Dane or Pole or Italian is a matter of birth, language, shared history and ethnicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You CAN *become* American &#8211; and most Muslim immigrants to the US (Somali teething problems notwithstanding) have, and vastly more successfully than in Europe, which is why there are no &#8220;no go&#8221; Muslim neighborhoods in the US (and none can every be allowed to happen &#8211; for them or any other ethnic group).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What she *actually* said was more ungrateful, more disgusting, more un-American than what the video actually showed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(This post is about Rep. Omar. Not Islam at large. The usual wave of taqqiyah-theory memes will be purged without comment. Don&#8217;t waste your energy. Stay on topic, or find someone else to yap at).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What the heck &#8211; let&#8217;s make *everyone* angry. Rep. Omar has been taking flak over a video in which she says: Ilhan Omar isn\u2019t just anti-Semitic \u2013 she\u2019s anti-American. Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to Islamic terrorists on 9\/11, yet Omar diminishes it as: \u201cSome people did something.\u201d Democrat leaders need to condemn her [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,20,155],"tags":[403],"class_list":["post-71046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-democrats","category-mn-congressional","tag-ilhan-omar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71046"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71053,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71046\/revisions\/71053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}