Ilhan Omar
© REUTERS/Jim BourgIlhan Omar
Rep. Ilhan Omar said Americans should be "more fearful of white men" when discussing the threat of "jihadist terrorism."

The Minnesota progressive was asked in a resurfaced interview with Al Jazeera from August 2018 about the rise of Islamophobia, citing the attacks that killed eight people on a Manhattan bike path in 2017 and the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14.

"I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country," Omar answered.

"And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe — Americans safe inside of this country — we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men," she continued.


Omar, a Somalia-born Democrat, along with other first-year Democratic congresswomen — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — have been feuding with President Trump after he tweeted earlier this month that they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came."

Omar was the subject of "Send her back" chants at a recent Trump rally.

Among the foursome, Omar is the only foreign-born, and all are US citizens.

During testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, FBI Director Christopher Wray remarked on the rise in domestic terror attacks carried out by white supremacists.

"A majority of the domestic terrorism cases we've investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence," he said, adding that the FBI has recorded about 100 domestic terrorism events in the past nine months.

In May, Michael McGarrity, head of the FBI's counterterrorism division, said the agency has about 850 open domestic terrorism investigations and about 40 percent are motivated by racial extremism.

"The FBI assesses domestic terrorists collectively pose a persistent and evolving threat of violence and economic harm to the United States. In fact, there have been more arrests and deaths in the United States caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years," McGarrity told the House Homeland Security Committee.