Yesterday, the New York Post, one of the city's largest tabloid newspapers, published a front-page story about representative Ilhan Omar’s remarks at an event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In the course of a roughly 20-minute speech, Omar spoke about a range of topics, all centered around the challenges that Muslim Americans face in the current political environment and how to approach those challenges with resolve, but not without compassion for others. She expressed frustration that many Muslims were treated like “second-class citizens” after 9/11 and, in contextualizing it, noted that CAIR’s institutional momentum happened because “some people did something” and the Muslim community at large suffered for it.
The speech was moving and hopeful, and it stressed the importance of civic activism. But you wouldn’t know it if you only read the Post, a right-leaning publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose editors decided yesterday that it was both appropriate and journalistically sound to publish an image of the World Trade Center in flames on 9/11 just after two planes hit the north and south towers with the headline, "HERE’S YOUR SOMETHING." The implication, of course, was that Omar, a black Muslim woman who wears a hijab, was diminishing the events of 9/11 by alluding to it in passing instead of, presumably, bursting into tears and launching into an unrelated digression about how horrible 9/11 was—and that the full gravity of the atrocity needed to be shoved down her throat. Editors at the New York Post—who are, overwhelmingly, white, male, and conservative—chose one of the most horrific images from the terror attack to run full-page, knowing it would be on every newsstand, blanketing the city with an unwelcome and, for some people, traumatizing reminder.
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Barring serious listening comprehension problems, no one who watches the full video of Omar speaking could possibly take away from it that she was making any sort of comment on the relative importance or horror of 9/11. If anything, the allusion was a respectful avoidance of sensationalism. And it goes without saying that Republicans refer to 9/11 in passing all the time without rending their clothes, publicly grieving in demonstrative ways, and going out of their way to emphasize that the terrorists were evil. They are allowed to use oblique descriptions like “when the towers fell” or “the events of 9/11.” We all know what they’re talking about, and no one thinks they’re reducing the terrorist attacks to a meaningless abstraction.
In Omar’s speech, she was very explicitly talking about the fact that the Muslim community at large suffered from the actions of a few, and there’s nothing about that sentiment that requires her to stop and articulate what exactly happened to ensure that everyone gets the full horror. She was not talking to an audience full of children or idiots. Everyone in the room knew what happened on 9/11, and everyone knew it was unspeakably horrible.
And if you listen to the rest of the speech, wherein Omar articulates the American dream of prosperity and justice for all, it’s completely preposterous to suggest that she does not appreciate the implications of the events, or the values that the terrorists wanted to destroy.
But that is precisely what the Post and many right-leaning commentators and outlets suggested, and it wasn’t a simple misunderstanding, either. The editors at the Post have access to the full speech, which is public, on YouTube, and if only for fact-checking reasons, it’s nearly impossible that someone there didn’t watch the whole thing. They have the full context, and they willfully removed and distorted a single phrase to paint Representative Omar as callous, disrespectful, and most importantly for their purposes, as giving the terrorists a pass as some sort of act of Muslim solidarity. It is utterly implausible that they did not understand what she was saying; they simply didn’t care. They saw an opportunity to smear a Muslim woman whose politics they oppose by weaponizing one of the worst tragedies in New York City’s history for propagandistic purposes, and they took it.
Why? Representative Omar herself answers this question in the speech while discussing President Trump’s repeated slurs against Muslims and Islam, and the administration’s travel ban that explicitly targets Muslims. She believes (as do I) that it’s intentional, that Trump builds political capital with his base by demonizing Muslims and insinuating that by virtue of their religion, they are dangerous and un-American. “He knows that there are people he can influence to threaten our lives,” she said. “To diminish our presence. But what we know and what Islam teaches us, and what I always say, is that love trumps hate.”
In the case of the Post, the person Trump knows who can threaten the lives of Muslims is Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper’s owner. Trump has a long history with the Post, often planting flattering items about himself, and a relationship with Murdoch that became more valuable when Trump entered the Oval Office. And while not everyone at the New York Post takes orders directly from Murdoch, the top editors do.
But even by Murdochian standards, which are often shameless, nihilistic, and appalling, yesterday’s cover was shocking and ugly. It encouraged readers to view Omar as an outsider, as the enemy of those of us who experienced 9/11, and the tone of the headline was “fuck you.” The editors put Representative Omar (who is already receiving death threats) in danger from groups of people predisposed to hate her because of their bigotry, their aversion to her politics, or both—secure in the knowledge that 99 percent of those people are not going to find and watch the CAIR video and see for themselves what she had to say. They will take the Post’s Islamophobic, hateful cover at face value because it reinforces negative sentiments they already harbor and reifies a racist stereotype about Muslims.
As a New Yorker whose apartment was covered in ash for weeks after 9/11 and who spent all of 9/12 with the family of a missing Cantor Fitzgerald employee whose funeral I would later attend, this makes me angry. Nine-eleven is not a political football Rupert Murdoch can use at will to score a cheap bigoted point in a fabricated culture war against fictional “un-American” Muslim Americans on Donald Trump’s behalf. New York City residents voted overwhelmingly against Trump in 2016, and he is widely loathed by many in his hometown, but even if that weren’t the case, the Post has no business taking a tragedy that affected all of us, permanently and indelibly, and repurposing it into crass propaganda in order to toady to an Islamophobic president.
Their callous disregard for the first responders, people who lost family members and friends, people who lost their homes, and people who were otherwise harmed and traumatized by 9/11, and their willingness to put that horribly obscene image of people dying in all of our faces just to bully Omar with a willful distortion of an innocuous comment is what it actually means to disrespect what happened on 9/11. It is not a marketing tool for Trumpism, and I only hope that no one with PTSD had to suffer yesterday thanks to the Post’s vile and cynical stunt.
Ilhan Omar is the embodiment of what we say are American values: She believes in service and is doing it at great personal risk to herself; she is a successful immigrant who has worked hard and contributed to our shared society; she speaks truth to power both here and abroad in defense of justice; and she joyfully exercises her right to practice her chosen religion, which is one of the first things the people who built this country fought for.
If you haven’t watched her speech, I encourage you to do so, because she also does something that is difficult and brave: She encourages people in her community to engage where they can, even in the face of bigotry. “Any time you have the opportunity to go talk to someone, the chances of them hating you lessens,” she says. “You can’t hate up close.” It goes without saying that no Muslim person has any obligation to convince a bigot of his or her humanity, whether it’s a random stranger or a New York Post editor, or to spend a single ounce of energy helping them get past their derogatory preconceived notions about who Muslim people are and what they believe. But Omar does it because she has something the Post editors lack: compassion for others.
