Rep. Ilhan Omar took an interviewer to task Tuesday for asking her to condemn female genital mutilation even though she has done so several times in the past.
Ani Osman-Zonneveld, of the human rights group Muslims for Progressive Values, asked the question of Omar during a panel at the Muslim Caucus Education Collective’s Conference in Washington, D.C.
In a CNN video of the interview, Omar, a Muslim woman from Minnesota, calls the interviewer’s question “appalling.”
“Like, does this need to be on repeat every five minutes? Should I be like, ‘So today I forgot to condemn al-Qaeda, so here’s the al-Qaeda one. Today I forgot to condemn FGM, so here it goes,’” she said. “‘Today I forgot to condemn Hamas, so here it goes.’ … You know what I mean?”
Omar is one of four congresswomen of color who were told by President Donald Trump earlier this month to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Omar said in her recent interview that prejudice is part of the reason she and other Muslim legislators are consistently asked the same questions.
“It is a very frustrating question. It comes up. You can look at my record,” she said. “I voted for bills doing exactly what you’re asking me to do. I have put out statements upon statements.”
She added, “And so I am, I think, quite disgusted really to be honest that as Muslim legislators we are constantly being asked to waste our time speaking to issues that other people are not asked to speak to because the assumption exists that we somehow support.”
