If someone told you to fear people based solely on the color of their skin, what would that make them? A racist? A bigot? Well, there’s something else they might be.
The representative from Minnesota’s fifth congressional district.
During a 2018 interview with Al-Jazeera, Rep. Ilhan Omar responded to a question about Islamic terrorism by declaring,
Our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.
It’s curious that Omar would say white men are responsible for “most of the deaths within this country,” because the facts say something else.
According to the FBI’s 2017 Uniform Crime Report, white suspects were responsible for forty-four percent of that year’s homicides. In contrast, black suspects accounted for fifty-three percent, despite blacks comprising just thirteen percent of the population. What’s more, whites are far more often the victims of interracial violence than they are the perpetrators of it, with over twice as many blacks murdering whites as whites murdering blacks.
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It also showed that whites were under represented when it came to hate crimes, making up just over half of those arrested (African American ones made up twenty-one percent).
Granted, Omar could be speaking specifically of terrorism-related deaths, and for evidence, she might point to the Anti-Defamation League. The organization reports that white supremacists and right-wing extremists commit the bulk of ideological murders. The problem? Folks there are awfully selective in the crimes they choose to focus on.
In 2016, Damoine Wilcoxson was accused of murdering an elderly white man after making anti-white comments on social media. However, the ADL made no mention of Wilscoxson in its 2016 report on Murder and Extremism in the United States. The next year, Fredrick Demond Scott was accused of killing five whites, something he had previously threatened to do. ADL said nothing about those crimes either. On the other hand, it does count things like the murder of suspected informants by white prison gangs--groups whose primary agenda is criminal rather than ideological. Given this, it's hard to take their analysis seriously.
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Considering her previous statements about Jews and whites, it's not surprising that Ilhan Omar would suggest that white men are the primary threat that this country faces; it's a reflection of her bigotry. But a reflection of the facts?
Not so much.
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