House GOP leaders face calls to confront Islamophobia among their ranks

“We cannot pretend that this hate speech from leading politicians doesn’t have real consequences,” said Omar, who recently introduced a bill to monitor and combat Islamophobia globally.

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She played a threatening voice mail that she said she received the previous day, after Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) accused her of “anti-American and anti-Semitic” rhetoric in a video posted on social media.

“I myself have reported hundreds of threats on my life, often triggered by Republican attacks on my faith,” Omar said. “And this week, once again, we saw another increase.”

The embrace of Islamophobic rhetoric on the right is not new. In 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and after winning the White House, Trump quickly acted on that promise by instituting a ban targeting foreign nationals from several Muslim-majority countries.

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