The Muslim American congresswoman Ilhan Omar says she has received an increased number of death threats since a video was tweeted by Donald Trump featuring footage from 9/11 and a clip from a speech she made in March this year, with the president accusing her of downplaying the attacks. Omar said in a statement on Sunday: 'Since the president’s tweet on Friday evening, I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life – many directly referencing or replying to the president’s video'
Continue reading...Category Archives: September 11 2001
Ilhan Omar has had spike in death threats since Trump attack over 9/11 comment
Congresswoman said many threats referenced the president’s tweet as Sarah Sanders praises Trump for ‘calling Omar out’
Muslim American congresswoman Ilhan Omar has said she has received an increased number of death threats after Donald Trump repeatedly tweeted video footage of September 11 and accused Omar of downplaying the terror attacks.
Omar issued a statement on Sunday night saying: “Since the president’s tweet Friday evening, I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life – many directly referencing or replying to the president’s video.”
Continue reading...‘I won’t be silent’: Ilhan Omar answers Trump 9/11 attack
Congresswoman says rightwing vitriol cannot threaten her ‘unwavering love for America’ as president pushes video
In the face of attacks from Donald Trump, Republicans and rightwing media outlets, the Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar said on Saturday no one could “threaten” her “unwavering love for America”.
Related: Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar
Continue reading...Technology is terrorism’s most effective ally. It delivers a global audience | Jason Burke
The suspect’s live broadcast of the New Zealand killings reveals such acts are always as much about instilling fear as inflicting violence
Terrorism is effective because it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal. Ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialised cities of the west in the late 19th century this has been true.
It feels personal because, although statistics may show we are many times more likely to die in a banal domestic accident, we instinctively conclude from an attack on the other side of the street, the city or, in the case of New Zealand, the other side of the world, we might be next.
Continue reading...Germany investigates why deported 9/11 terrorist was given prison wages
Mounir el Motassadeq flew to Morrocco with envelope containing thousands of euros
German prosecutors have launched an investigation into why a Moroccan man convicted of assisting the 9/11 suicide plotters was allowed to leave Germany with an envelope containing thousands of euros in cash.
Mounir el Motassadeq who was deported from Germany in October, having served 15 years in prison for his role in the plot as a member of a terror organisation, was handed the payment of €7,000 – the wages accumulated for the prison work he did, plus a monthly allowance of around €30 – before leaving the country.
Continue reading...Afghanistan’s long road to recovery | Letter
We should not walk away from Afghanistan even if it needs another 25 years of outside support, says Simon Diggins
Simon Tisdall’s denunciation of the US-led western involvement in Afghanistan as “17 or so years of ultimately pointless, criminal mayhem” (The US ruined Afghanistan. It can’t simply walk away now, Opinion, 8 February) is about as far wide of the mark as it is possible to be, unless you are Donald Trump. Even more curious, Tisdall then enjoins the US, presumably the “criminals” in this enterprise, not to scuttle away.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan and am not naive enough to believe that one was the “good war”, while the other one wasn’t. But Tisdall seems to forget why we intervened in Afghanistan in the first place: to remove a monstrous regime, the Taliban, that had allowed the perpetrators of 9/11 to set up camp in their country and also terrorised its own people. Destroying the Taliban regime was the right thing to do.
Continue reading...Lecture on liberal values hard to digest | Letter
Some of the ‘leading intellectuals’ cited supported wars in the Middle East and stayed silent in the wake of draconian anti-terror legislation, notes Liz Fekete
Some signatories to the manifesto on which you report (European liberal values face threat not seen since 30s, warn intellectuals, 26 January) were those who supported the wars in the Middle East and/or stayed silent in the wake of draconian anti-terror legislation that followed September 11.
It was the “civilisational racism” unleashed by these that provided the political space for the far-right parties that now blight the European landscape. And the signatories could note that since 2015, “ordinary” Europeans have taken part in the biggest wave of humanitarian volunteerism since the second world war – supporting refugees, many from Syria, desperate and dying at EU countries’ militarised borders. We need those with powerful voices to speak out not just to defend Enlightenment values in the abstract, but also on the many occasions that the human rights of ethnic and religious minorities, or foreigners, are denied.
Liz Fekete
Director, Institute of Race Relations