Marco Rubio fires back defiant response after media calls to delete edited Ilhan Omar video

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) resisted calls to delete a tweet with an edited video of controversial comments from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) about violence from white men.

"These questions prove my point," said Rubio in a statement released Thursday.

"If a Republican grouped all men of any background or ethnicity together, in any negative context — especially terrorism — many in the media would immediately demand that other Republicans disavow their statement," he explained.

"But when Rep. Omar suggested white men — ‪not white supremacists or white nationalists, white men — pose a greater danger than jihadists, many in the ‪media rushed to her defense, and attacked me for pointing out this double standard," he added.

Rubio was referring to this tweet he posted of the Omar video:

Many in the media reported that the video edited out a sentence where she added the hypothetical clause, "if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe."

But others pointed out that she still made the arguable claim that white males are more of a threat to Americans than Islamists, and her statement went on to blame U.S. foreign policy for jihadist terror attacks.

"I think, like I said, the focus of our policies should be about keeping Americans safe, keeping us domestically safe, and and and where we actually find a solution is looking at our foreign policy," Omar said in the unedited video.

"Looking at how we engaging with these the members of these communities," she added, "and and the kind of rhetoric that is being spewed out of leaders within our our city halls, within our state capitals, and within our nation's capital."

Various critics on social media demanded that Rubio delete the tweet with the video. Yet, he persisted.

Instead, he tweeted out various reports of his tweet and called them out for their liberal bias.

"Interesting, my tweet asked if media would characterize her statement as racist," he tweeted. "It's described very differently in this story. What happened to the need for 'context'?"

"This is why the outrage-response cycle is so stupid," he concluded.