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In January 2020, readers inquired about the accuracy of an article that claimed U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., had given Iran military advice, committing treason against the United States. On Jan. 7, the right-wing website PJ Media published an article with the headline Treason? Ilhan Omar Gives Iran Military Advice, Suggests It Could Target Trump Hotels. The article reported that: Omar has long been a target of misinformation and false allegations, often transparently motivated by Islamophobia and xenophobia. Those attacks escalated and intensified after she became, along with Rashida Tlaib, the first Muslim woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, in 2018. PJ Media's article was written by Robert Spencer, founder of the anti-Muslim JihadWatch website, who routinely conflates Islamic fundamentalist violence with any and all professions of Muslim faith, and falsely presents even moderate Muslims (such as Omar) as being part of a shadowy global conspiracy to conquer Western democracies and impose shariah law throughout the world. In her Jan. 6 tweet, Omar was not giving military advice to Iran, nor was she engaging in anything that remotely resembled treason. That her remarks were singled out by critics did not provide evidence of any anti-Americanism on her part, but rather constituted an elegant illustration of the distortion and double standards to which she is routinely subjected. On Jan. 6, in the aftermath of the U.S. assassination of high-profile Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, and in light of Iranian government vows to avenge his death, Omar tweeted: Trump needs to immediately divest from his businesses and comply with the emoluments clause. Iran could threaten Trump hotels *worldwide* and he could provoke war over the loss of revenue from skittish guests. His business interests should not be driving military decisions. Omar was not making a suggestion to Iran, she was articulating an analysis — that Iran, in seeking revenge for Soleimani's assassination, could potentially target Trump-branded hotels around the world. The same rather obvious point had already been made on several occasions by several other observers in the days between Soleimani's assassination and the congresswoman's tweet. For example, the right-leaning Washington Times cited several security experts as cautioning that Trump hotels and properties could be subject to Iranian revenge attacks. Among them was former FBI Assistant Director Lewis Schiliro, who headed the agency's New York field office and supervised the investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On the subject of potential attacks against Trump properties, he said: The greater danger is the lone jihadist, someone who feels empowered based on recent events to take action, that becomes the more difficult threat to guard against. On Jan. 3, Iran expert Suzanne Maloney, from the Brookings Institution, said: They [Iran] will look for the most opportune chance to strike back in a way that hurts President Trump personally. They take these things in a very personal fashion, and so I would assume that security all around any kind of a Trump property to be — if it has not already been — significantly enhanced. On Jan. 4, Hesameddin Ashena, an adviser to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, prompted speculation that he was hinting at a possible avenue for retaliation, when he tweeted a link to a Forbes article that listed the locations of multiple Trump-owned properties throughout the world. Those concerns had already been articulated when Omar broadly reiterated them on Jan. 6. She made the additional argument that, in light of the potential threat to Trump properties, the president should divest himself of any interest in them, so as to completely avoid any possibility that his financial self-interest might influence his decision-making as regards the Iranian conflict. Nothing in the congresswoman's tweet indicated any measure whatsoever of encouragement of an Iranian attack on Trump properties or gratification at the prospect of such an attack, nor that she was providing advice or making a suggestion with Iran as the intended recipient. The same was true of the insights offered by Maloney, Schiliro, and several others. Therefore, the claim that Omar gave Iran military advice, and that she had engaged in treason, was false. The fact that PJ Media leveled those accusations against Omar, but not against Schiliro or Maloney, for example, and that other websites scrutinized her pronouncements, but not theirs, provided a stark illustration of the distortions and double standards to which the Minnesota congresswoman is routinely subjected. Publicly (and falsely) accusing a Muslim, foreign-born U.S. congresswoman of treasonously providing military advice to Iran also had the predictable effect of prompting some observers to encourage violence against her. Among the user responses to PJ Media's Jan. 7 Facebook post promoting Spencer's article, Snopes found 131 comments, some of them particularly graphic and disturbing, that encouraged, threatened, or expressed a wish for violence, execution, death, disease, or murder against Omar or her family members. Some of those comments had been allowed to remain on the page for five days. A small selection of them can be found here.
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