Ilhan's Country

[mountaineer]

Ilhan’s Country
Traveling through East Africa and Minnesota reveals a story more quintessentially American than either the congresswoman or her detractors want to admit
by Armin Rosen
July 20, 2022

On July 2, 2022, Ilhan Omar briefly appeared onstage with Suldaan Seeraar, a Somali pop star making his U.S. debut. It was the first time the sizable Minneapolis Somali American community had held an event at the Target Center, the arena that’s home to the Twin Cities’ NBA team. Like Omar’s political career, the concert marked the power and permanence of a relatively new community of Americans, one that barely existed just 30 years earlier. Presented before thousands of young Somalis, many of whom had come from Columbus, San Diego, and other centers of Somali American life, Omar, the world’s best-known person of Somali ethnicity and one of the only members of the U.S. House of Representatives who is a bona fide national figure, faced a torrent of booing. The jeering accelerated as she began to address the crowd. “We don’t have all night,” she chided with a wide and unembarrassed smile across her face, as if the congresswoman was reveling in the open scorn.

That Omar is unpopular among some Somalis should not be surprising by now. ...

From the beginning of her political career, her views on abortion, homosexuality, and a range of other topics were not those of a staunch Muslim traditionalist, and were even to the left of what a standard-issue Minnesotan typically believed. At the Target Center, she brought onstage her husband Tim Mynett, a political consultant who is not Somali and only converted to Islam around the time he ended his previous marriage and married Omar. Ahmed Hirsi, Omar’s previous spouse, was a well-known and once relatively popular figure in Twin Cities Somali affairs.

Perhaps, one source in the Minneapolis Somali community suggested to me, the booing expressed the growing edginess of a younger generation that was more open to taking a hard line on matters of religion and morality than even their parents had been. The Somali American community has produced plenty of young people vocally committed to progressive politics—the booers didn’t seem to represent a majority of the Target Center crowd, after all—but also many others who have gone sharply in the other direction, toward a religious fundamentalism that was itself a reaction to distinctly American realities. It could all be very bewildering, including to Somali Americans themselves. “Our children, they look like us,” said the man, a political strategist and activist in south Minneapolis, “but they are not Somali. They are American.”

Omar didn’t get to where she is by reconciling any of these contradictions but by making them work to her advantage.  ...

Read entire article at Tablet Mag

[goatprairie]

I read maybe half of the article. It's simply way too long for someone like Omar.
She is definitely on the list of people I wish had never made it to America.
She shows absolutely no sense of gratitude towards her new country after escaping from one of the most hellacious countries on the face of the Earth, Somalia, and going to the greatest country in the world.
Instead, elevated to a position far beyond her competence she maligns America every chance she gets.
She's the kind of person that might cause a person to advocate for completely stopping immigration just to prevent odious persons like her from ever setting foot in the U.S.A.

[Cyber Liberty]

I read maybe half of the article. It's simply way too long for someone like Omar.
She is definitely on the list of people I wish had never made it to America.
She shows absolutely no sense of gratitude towards her new country after escaping from one of the most hellacious countries on the face of the Earth, Somalia, and going to the greatest country in the world.
Instead, elevated to a position far beyond her competence she maligns America every chance she gets.
She's the kind of person that might cause a person to advocate for completely stopping immigration just to prevent odious persons like her from ever setting foot in the U.S.A.

I can't blame you for not reading it all.  I fast-forwarded to the ending, and it's a true nausea-inducing hagiography of a lousy person from start to finish.  I feel more stupid after having read it.