UPDATE: Omar deleted her tweet after thousands of people expressed outrage over her smearing the students and defending a hate group.
Far-left Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) smeared the boys from Covington Catholic High School on Tuesday night, making false claims about the incident that happened over the weekend as she also defended a designated hate group’s attack on the boys.
“The boys were protesting a woman’s right to choose & yelled ‘it’s not rape if you enjoy it,'” Omar tweeted. “They were taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants. Sandmann’s family hired a right wing PR firm to write his non-apology.”
Nearly everything in Omar’s tweet is factually inaccurate.
Rep. Omar’s claim: The boys were protesting a woman’s right to choose & yelled “it’s not rape if you enjoy it”
What actually happened: One boy, who many are claiming did not attend Covington Catholic High School, made the comment as the large group of students was waiting for their bus to arrive. Omar’s statement tries to portray the statement as coming from multiple members of the group, which is factually false.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh provides a summary of what actually happened: “The longer video shows that the comment was made during a back and forth with the racist Black Israelites. They were taunting a black student from Covington, calling him ‘coon’ and ‘Coonye West.’ Of course this fact is ignored by the Left….” Walsh wrote in a series of tweets. “Also another kid immediately says ‘he doesn’t go to Covington’ after the comment was made. Is that true? I don’t know. There are a bunch of girls standing there too and Covington is an all male school, so obviously other non-Covington kids were in the mix.”
Rep. Omar’s claim: “They were taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants”
What actually happened: Everything about this statement is a lie. The boys were not taunting the 5 black men who allegedly belonged to the Black Hebrew Israelites, which the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a “hate group.”
Video of the incident shows the Black Hebrew Israelites screaming bigoted, racist, and homophobic slurs at the students:
The students did not surround Phillips, he approached the students and started beating his drum in their faces, and there is zero evidence of the students making “racist chants.”
Rep. Omar’s claim: “Sandmann’s family hired a right wing PR firm to write his non-apology”
The truth: The Sandmann family did hire a PR firm, but so what? That is common in this type of situation. And what does Sandmann have to apologize for? He did nothing wrong.
Omar — a documented anti-Semite who recently pushed a homophobic conspiracy theory about Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — received intense backlash over her smears against the boys from Covington Catholic High School: