Yesterday, the New York Post, one of the city's largest tabloid newspapers, published a front-page story about representative Ilhan Omar’s remarks at an event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In the course of a roughly 20-minute speech, Omar spoke about a range of topics, all centered around the challenges that Muslim Americans face in the current political environment and how to approach those challenges with resolve, but not without compassion for others. She expressed frustration that many Muslims were treated like “second-class citizens” after 9/11 and, in contextualizing it, noted that CAIR’s institutional momentum happened because “some people did something” and the Muslim community at large suffered for it.

The speech was moving and hopeful, and it stressed the importance of civic activism. But you wouldn’t know it if you only read the Post, a right-leaning publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose editors decided yesterday that it was both appropriate and journalistically sound to publish an image of the World Trade Center in flames on 9/11 just after two planes hit the north and south towers with the headline, "HERE’S YOUR SOMETHING." The implication, of course, was that Omar, a black Muslim woman who wears a hijab, was diminishing the events of 9/11 by alluding to it in passing instead of, presumably, bursting into tears and launching into an unrelated digression about how horrible 9/11 was—and that the full gravity of the atrocity needed to be shoved down her throat. Editors at the New York Post—who are, overwhelmingly, white, male, and conservative—chose one of the most horrific images from the terror attack to run full-page, knowing it would be on every newsstand, blanketing the city with an unwelcome and, for some people, traumatizing reminder.

Barring serious listening comprehension problems, no one who watches the full video of Omar speaking could possibly take away from it that she was making any sort of comment on the relative importance or horror of 9/11. If anything, the allusion was a respectful avoidance of sensationalism. And it goes without saying that Republicans refer to 9/11 in passing all the time without rending their clothes, publicly grieving in demonstrative ways, and going out of their way to emphasize that the terrorists were evil. They are allowed to use oblique descriptions like “when the towers fell” or “the events of 9/11.” We all know what they’re talking about, and no one thinks they’re reducing the terrorist attacks to a meaningless abstraction.

In Omar’s speech, she was very explicitly talking about the fact that the Muslim community at large suffered from the actions of a few, and there’s nothing about that sentiment that requires her to stop and articulate what exactly happened to ensure that everyone gets the full horror. She was not talking to an audience full of children or idiots. Everyone in the room knew what happened on 9/11, and everyone knew it was unspeakably horrible.