Can we believe Ilhan Omar’s autobiography
This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman by Ilhan Omar
Political autobiographies are written to conceal, not to reveal. They come in two eminently pulpable forms. One is the twilight apologia of the retired or defeated politician, the other the resumé-polishing pitch of the rising star. Which category Ilhan Omar’s autobiography falls into depends on whether you, like her, think she’s a cruelly traduced beacon of hope in a land of benighted bigotry; or whether, as one investigative journalist concluded, she has committed the ‘worst spree of felonies by a congressperson in history’.
‘I’m not here to undo or rewrite history,’ Omar tells us. But the truth slips away from her like a greased pig. This is a slick and devious account, selective in memory, vague in detail and merciless in its play for praise The persistent and credibly sourced claim that Omar committed immigration and education fraud with one Ahmed Said Elmi who, it is also claimed, may be her brother, is simply ignored. She doesn’t even name Elmi, and calls the man that she was married to for four years someone ‘whom I spent little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story if it weren’t for the fact that this event turned into the main headline later on’.
In fact, address records show that Omar was living with her first husband (‘Islamically married’) while still married to her second (civil marriage). In 2017, when she filed for divorce from her second husband, she claimed under penalty of perjury not to have been in contact with her first husband since 2011. Dozens of now-deleted social-media posts, photos and a 2016 interview suggest that she may have lied.
Nor does Omar address her conviction in 2019 for campaign finance violations, or disgraceful tweets from 2012 like ‘Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel’, or her conspiracy-mongering public claim in 2019 that pro-Israel organizations make ‘allegiance to a foreign country’ a precondition of serving in Congress. She doesn’t mention that she may currently be under investigation by the FBI, ICE, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, either.
Omar may well be the author of her own fortune, but the author of our misfortune here is Rachel Paley. This mercenary’s previous stabs at literary immortality include The Body Book for Boys and the American Girl biography A Girl Called Hillary: The True Story of Hillary Clinton. Paley has also ghosted the confessional memoirs of chubby model Ashley Graham, self-harming swimmer Amanda Beard and personal shopper and foreign-policy expert Betty Halbreich.
Paley’s mode here is not the confessional, but digressional. Omar seems to have a relentless grip on the self-actualizing narrative of her life, while also being unable to remember the most important details. As in the autobiography of David Copperfield, the opening chapters are the best. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somilia in 1982 in a relatively wealthy family. She was the youngest of seven children, none of whose names are mentioned. Her mother died when she was two. Her father was a teacher. Her grandfather was busy ‘helping to run the country’s network of lighthouses’. Or was he, as her Wikipedia entry says, the chief of Somalia’s National Marine Transport?
https://spectator.us/believe-ilhan-omar-autobiography/
https://spectator.us/believe-ilhan-omar-autobiography/