>>9376857 (You), Specator: Can we believe Ilhan's Biography?
2nd our 3, part of article What to hell us this creature doing in congress of the USA?
This being America and not Somalia, it is nobody’s business that, shortly before conducting a highly dubious second marriage, Omar chose to cover her hair in 2005 as a symbol of her ‘purity in the presence of the world’. It is, however, of public interest when the hair is on the head of the first hijabi in the House of Representatives, who tells us, ‘I wanted to wear the abaya with a niqab to Trump’s State of the Union, but my staff worried I would be arrested by the Secret Service.’ Apart from the absurdity of suggesting she would have been arrested, a ‘positive ambassador’ would have saluted the uniform, not the man.
Omar wanted to wear a niqab in bad faith. Her shuffling of costumes as political tokens uses religion as a mask for trolling. She denounces ‘identity politics’, but she is their quintessence. She talks of truth, but erases the traces of lies and bigotry. This is not what an American politician should look like.
Omar and Paley may have contrived a third genre of political memoir. Omar is not running for higher office or burnishing her record for posterity: she is trying to get ahead of the inevitable moment when her past catches up with her. The only people who need to buy this book are the see-no-evil journalists who will quote it to endorse Omar’s implausible claim that the allegations against her are ‘conspiracy theories and propaganda’. In the meantime, for another perspective on Ilhan Omar, see the credible and well-sourced researches of Preya Samsundar, Ben Weingarten, David Steinberg and Scott Johnson’s Powerline site, who have done the work that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has failed to do.
When Somalia collapsed into civil war, Omar’s family might have supported the Salvation Democratic Front, but we aren’t told who they are or what they were fighting for. Anyway, what happened there was ‘no different to what happened in Nazi Germany’. After the family compound was shot up by a militia, the family fled to a refugee camp in Kenya. It took four years, until 1992, for her father to obtain visas to the United States.
America was ‘disappointing’. Omar, like most first-time visitors, was shocked by New York City: ‘graffiti, trash and, to my greatest horror, homeless people’. ‘This isn’t our America,’ her father said. ‘We’ll get to our America.’ After a few years in Arlington, Virginia, her father moved to Minneapolis, to join his father and America’s largest concentration of Somali immigrants. ‘Our America’ was not much different to their Somalia: clannish and patriarchal, with her grandfather prominent in community politics. But Omar’s America, like that of almost all immigrant children, was the real thing, or as much of it as her father could tolerate.
‘I learned English from watching Baywatch,’ she writes. As a teenager, Omar accompanied her grandfather to political meetings, but she also dyed her hair and had a boyfriend, Ahmed Hirsi. Her father, apparently a man of ‘inherent liberalism’, agreed with Hirsi’s family that Ahmed and Omar should marry when she finished high school. ‘I wasn’t there, just as I wasn’t there for the religious ceremony to marry Ahmed and me, a ceremony traditionally attended only by the male members of the family.’ Two children followed.
Working it out for herself, Omar realized that education was the way up and out. Indeed, there is nothing more American than taking a two-year associate degree in evening classes at a college in the Mall of America, then returning to university to upgrade your qualifications, as Omar did at North Dakota State. By then, Omar had graduated from Baywatch to the higher gibberish. At North Dakota State, she joined a Democratic group called Unity in Diversity.
From there, Omar’s American journey fell rapidly into the familiar Democratic groove of machine politics, ethnic bloc-voting and affirmative action. In 2014, aged 22, she started work as a ‘senior policy aide’ to Andrew Johnson, head of Minneapolis City Council, even though she had ‘never been a paid staff member of any organization’. In 2016, she won a seat in the Minnesota House by mobilizing her fellow Somalis.
In 2018, she inherited the House seat for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District when it was vacated by Keith Ellison, whose history with the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan of course goes unmentioned here
https://spectator.us/believe-ilhan-omar-autobiography/