Rep. Ihan Omar (D-Minn.), one of the four outspoken, liberal Democratic Congresswomen known as, “The Squad,” arrived home in Minneapolis like a conquering hero. Her supporters greeted her at the airport with enthusiastic chants of “Welcome Home Ilhan” after a raucous week in Washington.
She had been trading rhetorical blows thru tweets and press conferences with the president of the United States. Back home in Minnesota, Omar, declared she will, “continue to be a nightmare to this President, because his policies are a nightmare to us.”
In the tweet that started it all, the president, reeling from repeated charges by The Squad that his border policies are inhumane, wrote, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.” The President, clearly chagrined, was hitting back at the four congresswomen who had the audacity to condemn his border policy while they voted against his $4 billion emergency humanitarian border-relief bill.
As the only foreign-born member of The Squad, much of the media focused on Omar and her response.
Omar was born in Somalia, which is probably one of the countries from which the President suggested we should limit immigration. And the president is right. Somalia is a crime-ridden, impoverished, war-scared, failed, Islamist-Socialist state.
When Omar’s family fled in the early 1990s, Somalia was engulfed in yet another of its eternal internecine intra-clan wars. Somalia is less a nation than it is a tribe – the Somalis – divided into several clans and sub-clans. And the clans, which have been killing each other for centuries, show no sign of stopping.
Omar tells the tale of what happened the night she and her family fled Mogadishu. It’s like a version of West Side Story on meth. Armed militiamen, who were schoolmates of Omar’s sister, surrounded the Omar household. The boys were there, as Omar describes it, to “assassinate” her family. Yet, her sister was able to talk with the boys through her window and convince them to spare their lives. Omar does not explain why the boys went from being friendly classmates to armed killers there to slaughter her family. Most likely it’s because her family belonged to a different clan or sub-clan.
In comparison, the detention facilities on the U.S./Mexican border, about which Omar so loudly complains, must look like the Taj Mahal.
Of course, Omar will not do as the president suggests. But she can help fix America. Omar can use her own life experience in Somalia to remind Americans of the failure of socialism to feed, clothe and shelter the people, the failure of Islam, the purported religion of peace and the state religion of Somalia, to prevent Somali Muslims from massacring each other, the failure of the vengeance-based clan system to bring about true justice, and the failure of the Somali people to purge themselves of their own systemic anti-Semitism. Omar can serve as a living lesson and warning to the American people.
But she won’t. Unlike past generations of immigrants who came to America to become Americans, Omar came to America to make America more like Somalia. She resides in a Somali enclave in Minnesota that is referred to as a jihadi recruiting ground. The large number of Somalis living in her congressional district helped her win election in 2016 and will ensure her future electoral victories. A proud Somali through and through, Omar’s public career shows that she’s the product and champion of the Islamist-Socialist social, political and economic system of her home country.
It seems to me the issue is not whether Omar should leave America. The issue is whether Omar should leave Somalia. It is often said, “you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.” No doubt, Omar will remain a country girl. And thus, the nightmare of her Somali-inspired policies will continue to be heard in the halls of the U.S. Congress.
