NEW ORLEANS – When President Trump this week tweeted that four, Democratic Congresswomen should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” his tweet was followed soon after by a tweet from Louisiana Representative Ralph Abraham, joining the attack.
“I’ll pay for their tickets out of this country,” Rep. Abraham tweeted, “if they just tell me where they’d rather be.”
The “vicious young Socialist Congresswomen,” as Trump described them in a tweet today, (July 17) are all American citizens– the daughters and grand-daughters of immigrants.
According to journalist and publisher Lamar White, that’s what makes Abraham’s offer to buy them “tickets” to leave the country especially harsh– given that Abraham is, himself, a son of immigrants– from the Middle East.
As White points out in a new report in his digital news publication “Bayou Brief,” Abraham’s paternal grandparents emigrated to Louisiana from Lebanon– as did so many others that they “became an integral part of Louisiana’s culture.”
White notes that Abraham is a member of the “Arab-American Leadership PAC” in Congress (as is fellow Louisiana Republican, Rep. Garret Graves, whose heritage is also Lebanese).
According to White, Abraham is also “one of the founding members of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on U.S.-Lebanon Relations, whose mission is, in part “to protect vulnerable religious communities in the Middle East.” White suggests that, with that in mind, it’s ironic that Abraham would join the chorus of those calling the four beleaguered Congresswomen, including Representative Ilham Omar, (D-MN), a Muslim, “un-American.”
Yet since President Trump’s election, writes White, “Abraham has fully embraced the President’s agenda, even when it targets Arab-Americans” — and immigrants in general.
You can read White’s full report here.