Krugman’s bafflingly-inaccurate thread shows why it’s important to talk about the way all American Muslims were demonized post-9/11, and why that wasn’t an acceptable response. We can’t just pretend “there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence.” There was! https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1304385740063805440

Unfortunately, whenever Muslims have tried to speak out about this, about how it’s not fair to treat them all with suspicion because of the actions of a tiny few, the same people guilty of perpetuating anti-Muslim sentiment use that to attack the person speaking out.

One of the more frustrating examples of this was when Ilhan Omar gave a speech about collective blame and civil rights. It was an important point! She talked about how Muslims were almost always discussed in society in the context of terrorism.

She talked about how the actions of others, of people who she and other Muslims had nothing to do with, were used to attack the civil rights of people like her.

An excerpt.

(In that speech, she got the date of CAIR’s founding wrong. It was founded before 9/11, but saw a massive uptick in membership after.)

But rather than acknowledge what she said, people twisted it to make it sound like she wasn’t calling the 9/11 attacks terrorism. This, even though she very clearly refers to terrorists in the paragraph before. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/right-wing-media-amplify-absurd-interpretation-something-rep-ilhan-omar-said-about-911

Sadly, that inaccurate, bad-faith portrayal of her words ended up becoming so ubiquitous that it’s now just accepted that she was trying to excuse the attacks (which couldn’t be further from the truth)

I genuinely can't (okay, I can) believe that there are people in the replies on this thread still going, "BUT SHE SAID 'SOME PEOPLE DID SOMETHING' AND DIDN'T SPECIFICALLY SAY TERRORISM" even though she very clearly referred to it as terrorism in literally the prior paragraph.

Meanwhile, she's faced a deluge of legitimate threats to her life because of anti-Muslim sentiment https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/19/islamophobic-trump-supporter-who-threatened-kill-rep-ilhan-omar-pleads-guilty/