Why I Do Not Care for Ilhan Omar

Oh, let me count the ways – first, a purely visceral and visual reaction: she’s a snake in a trendy head-scarf. Reminds me of the internet meme of Momo, actually. And the fact that she is a particularly nasty bigot and vocal anti-Ordinary American, and Jew-hater, and might very well have both perpetuated and benefited from immigration fraud.
And … Somali.

I am certain there are some Somali immigrants/refugees who are adornments of wherever they have settled outside of Somalia and taken the trouble to adapt to their new communities. The fashion modal Iman. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali … Seriously, that just about does it for me as far as favorable impressions of the Somali immigrant community goes. I have been given to understand through various local specialty bloggers, that there is a large and indigestible collection of Somalis in Minnesota; indigestible as much of what passes for news regarding that community which appears now and again in media as well as blogs … does not reflect well on Somalis. Systemic welfare fraud. Somali taxi drivers refusing rides to passengers with service dogs and duty-free alcohol. Support and volunteers for the brutal régime of ISIS in Syria. The unprovoked shooting of an unarmed woman by a Somali police officer who never should have given a badge and a gun. There are reports that Ms Omar’s father was a higher-up in a Marxist régime which brutally ruled the place until overthrown, whereupon Somalia devolved into a more or less permanent state of cutthroat tribal war, famine and piracy … and don’t think that I have forgotten about how the US and the UN together got suckered into trying to administer famine relief in the face of a local warlord weaponizing the distribution of food. Taking pity on all those poor, poor, big-eyed starving children with swollen bellies finished up with the bodies of dead Americans being dragged through the slums of Mogadishu and displayed like trophies for the news media. No good deed goes unpunished, in that part of the world, it appears.

You’d think that refugees from all that would be disinclined to create that situation all over again, upon escaping from it, as well as perhaps displaying a modicum of gratitude for a safe refuge. That doesn’t seem to be the case, most notably with Ms Omar, who apparently expected America to be all roses, rainbows and unicorns like a 1950ies sitcom and was most bitterly disappointed when it wasn’t.

Somali refugees were settled there through the good offices of religious agencies over the last three decades, which once had much better results in assisting refugees. I was active in college in a local Lutheran-sponsored local resettlement effort focusing on Vietnamese refugees. This was a very personal, tightly-focused effort by a working-class community in doing our best for a body of people for which we felt an inchoate degree of sympathy, in that most of the refugees that we turned out all effort for were also working and middle-class – whom, moreover – worked very hard to establish themselves in a new country. Those sponsored families and individuals rewarded our homes and efforts; they all became Americans, melting seamlessly into speaking English, educating their children, sending them out into military service, to useful occupations, to whole-heartedly embracing all that America had to offer – while still keeping intact an affection for certain traditions. That is the way that immigrants in previous decades did it, no matter what their national origin – but if Ms Omar is the best the Somali-American community has, I don’t hold out much hope for that community ever adjusting. Discuss as you wish.

8 thoughts on “Why I Do Not Care for Ilhan Omar”

  1. She is the daughter of a warlord who was not eligible as an asylum seeker They immigrated under false names (Their names are Elmi, not Omar) and the father was an associate of Barre, a bloody dictator. She should not be here even before her immigration fraud of “marrying” her brother. Now, she has campaign fraud, in addition.

  2. Well, when the average IQ in Somalia is 68, we’re not importing the brightest people in the world:

    http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/average-iq-by-country/

    And remember, the average is 68; that means that half the Somali population ranks less then that.

    And I recall reading elsewhere the assertion that it takes a country with an average IQ of about 85 to maintain a modern technological nation.

    The Left makes a fundamental error in assuming that all peoples are interchangeable.

  3. Can anyone point to a single speech or article by her expressing clear and unambiguous love for America?

  4. She’s starting to figure out her previous schtick wasn’t working, and is now pilong in the ‘moar free stuff’ bandwagon.

  5. David L. – how amazingly efficient of them … I knew an Army broadcaster when I served at Yongsan-AFKN who was deployed to Mogadishu when we were briefly and disastrously there, at the time of the Blackhawk Down affray. (AFRTS had some mobile radio studios for deployment – sort of a radio station in a can. Probably still do, although I think that streaming radio and TV content has probably replaced them.) Hoo, boy – did he have not much good to say about the place. AFAICR, one of his comments was that when God decides to give the world an enema, the nozzle is going in Mogadishu.

    Christopher – I think she and her advisers are starting (belatedly) to re-think the strategy of becoming notorious. Too many people are paying attention to her, and not many of them can be so easily shut up as the local Minnesota media.

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