Right-wing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is outraged, outraged about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s remarks about 9/11—so outraged, in fact, that he didn’t just take her out of context—he intentionally misquoted her.
Omar described the work of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the wake of 9/11 as coming “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” Stephens takes those words, strips out the part about the loss of civil liberties, twists them into “something some people did,” and applies them to other terrorist attacks, even putting “just” in front of them in a tweet promoting his column. It’s dishonest and disgusting—and his editors at the New York Times should share in the shame for not catching his selective misquoting.
Not that this should be any surprise coming from a writer who previously characterized anti-Semitism as a “disease of the Arab mind” and thinks Omar’s freedom of speech should be limited, while Tucker Carlson, who has called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” is a great example of the importance of free speech.