Friday April 26, 2019
By Keith Griffith
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called Rep. Ilhan Omar personally after President Donald Trump posted a video harshly criticizing her remarks on 9/11, prompting death threats, it revealed on Thursday.
Dorsey made the call on Tuesday and told the Minnesota Democrat congresswoman that Twitter stood firm on its decision to allow the video Trump tweeted on April 12 criticizing her, the Washington Post reported.
The video contrasted the Muslim lawmaker Omar’s recent remarks to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, where she described the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as ‘some people did something’, with searing footage of the attacks themselves.
A furious Omar pressed Dorsey on why Twitter didn’t remove Trump’s video immediately, according to a Twitter source who spoke with the Post.
Dorsey responded that the tweet and video didn’t violate Twitter’s rules, according to the report.
He also pointed out that the video had already been shared widely beyond Twitter.
‘During their conversation, [Dorsey] emphasized that death threats, incitement to violence, and hateful conduct are not allowed on Twitter,’ Twitter said in a statement to the Post confirming the call.
‘We’ve significantly invested in technology to proactively surface this type of content and will continue to focus on reducing the burden on the individual being targeted. Our team has also consistently been in touch with Rep. Omar’s office.’
Omar said on April 14 that she had experienced an ‘increase in direct threats on my life — many directly referencing or replying to the president’s video.’
Dorsey’s phone call to Omar came on the same day that he sat down with Trump in the Oval Office for a face-to-face-meeting.
Trump reportedly spent much of the meeting complaining about losing followers, to which Dorsey responded that the company had only removed spam and fraudulent accounts.
Omar has continued to draw criticism with controversial remarks in recent days.
Earlier this week, a tweet resurfaced from 2017 in which she falsely claimed American soldiers killed ‘thousands’ of Somalis in the first Battle of Mogadishu, the 1993 event chronicled in the book and movie ‘Black Hawk Down.’
The highest published Somali death toll is the UN’s estimate of 500.
Many were militia members battling to kill or capture a handful of U.S. soldiers after two attack helicopters were shot down in Somalia’s capital city during a mission to capture a warlord who attacked UN Peacekeepers.
On Wednesday, a Jewish organization criticized Omar for promoting the notion that Jesus was Palestinian.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center reacted angrily to Omar’s retweet on April 20 of a professor at Southern Methodist University.
‘Palestine was a name made up by Romans after they crucified thousands, destroyed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the People of Israel from their homeland,’ Cooper said.
