Unlike Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler, PolitiFact cited Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) as "False" on Monday for claiming the Council for Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) was "founded after 9/11"....at a fundraiser for CAIR-Los Angeles. They also properly tagged Omar as "False" in a "Share the Facts" item for online distribution, unlike the Post.
PolitiFact Editor-in-chief Angie Drobnic Holan did the honors:
CAIR’s first report came in response to the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, after which some people initially blamed Muslims for the bombing. The actual bomber was a white native-born American, Timothy McVeigh.
We asked Omar’s staff why she made such a clear mistake about an organization that she says she supports. Spokesperson Jeremy Slevin said that CAIR had doubled in size after the Sept. 11 attacks. "It was a misstatement, and she now knows that it was founded earlier," he said.
Omar was clearly wrong in her description of CAIR’s beginning. We rate her statement False.
Omar now has three PolitiFact evaluations of her statements, while her fellow Muslim-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib still has zero.
Holan also rushed to provide "context" for Omar by posting an entire transcript of Omar's CAIR-LA speech: "Omar was speaking about discrimination faced by Muslims and their responsibility to stand up for their own rights." But she did not question the facticity of Omar's claim in the same speech that Trump knowingly encouraged the mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques:
OMAR: We all kind of knew that this was happening. But the reason I think that many of us knew that this was going to get worse is that we finally had a leader, a world leader in the White House who publicly says Islam hates us, who fuels hate against Muslims, who thinks it is okay to speak about a faith and a whole community in a way that is dehumanizing, vilifying. and doesn’t understand, or at least makes us want to think that he doesn’t understand, the consequences that his words might have. Some people like me know that he understands the consequences. He knows that there are people that he can influence to threaten our lives, to diminish our presence.
How does Ilhan Omar "know" Trump is encouraging the slaughter of innocent Muslims? How is that proven, if not "False"?
We have rated this PolitiFact "fact check" as Slightly Skewed. For similar analyses, please visit our Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers site.
