Chelsea Clinton was accused of stoking Islamophobia at a vigil at NYU for the victims of the terrorist attack in New Zealand, in which 49 Muslims were killed. A now-deleted video of the confrontation was uploaded to Twitter,and in it, you can see a woman speaking to Clinton in a raised voice. During the conversation, she appears to link the former first daughter’s reaction to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s recent comments about AIPAC’s influence on Congress to the rhetoric that motivated the attack’s alleged perpetrator, Brenton Tarrant.
“This is the result of a massacre, stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,” she said. “And I want you to know that and I want you to feel that deep inside.”
At first, Clinton defended herself by stating that she had not intended to be Islamophobic, but that she just wanted to emphasize that “words matter.”
“I’m so sorry that you feel that way,” she says at one point during their exchange before someone off camera shouts, “What does that mean?”
The person who uploaded the video to Twitter claims to be the best friend of the woman who spoke to Clinton. According to the Daily Mail, her name is Leen Dweik and she’s a senior at NYU. The uploader, Rose Asaf, also states that a lot of students at the vigil felt uncomfortable because of Clinton’s presence and linked that discomfort to her comments on Ilhan Omar.
As The Forward notes, during the furor that erupted after Omar’s controversial accusation that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) makes donations to congresspeople, Clinton tweeted that elected officials should be careful about spreading anti-semitic views.
“We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-semitism,” she wrote on Twitter on February 12.
In a subsequent tweet, the woman who confronted Clinton said that other aspects of the vigil upset her like seeing more non-Muslims than Muslims speaking at the event.
“I was on the verge of tears all day today and actually cried on my [sic] into and during prayer but the charade of a vigil where more non-muslims than Muslims spoke and Chelsea Clinton was invited made me so viscerally angry and I will not apologize for that,” she wrote.
As of this writing, Clinton has not discussed the confrontation at the vigil on her Twitter account.
