In what has become a bi-monthly tradition in 2019, Ilhan Omar, freshmen
Congresswoman from Minnesota, is once again in the national news. This time, Omar
downplayed the horrors of 9/11, while propping up the idea that the true victims of those
horrific attacks were American Muslims. Omar’s comments do not exist in a vacuum,
however. She has a long history of downplaying the atrocities of terrorism while
propping up the notion that America is to blame for the evil in the world. This ideology,
combined with her membership within three oppression groups, makes Ilhan Omar the
embodiment of the leftist ideal.
What has become increasingly apparent is that the modern left has split the world into
two groups, the oppressor and the oppressed. To determine which group an individual
belongs to, one need only examine race, orientation, gender or religion. If you are a
member of an oppressed group, you are given a certain level of credibility, as long as you
spout leftist ideology. Ilhan Omar is black, Muslim, and a woman, so she is part of three
“oppressed” groups. Omar fully believes that this is how the world operates, and it
perverts her entire view of current and historical events.
During a 2012 interview, Omar was discussing her experience in a college “terrorism
class”, as she described it. When the professor talked about Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, he
gave a visible body language sign of discomfort, cringing, raising his shoulders. Omar
called it “an intensity”. As she and the host of this interview were laughing at the
ridiculous notion that Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah are cringe-worthy, she wondered why
“you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with an intensity,
you don’t say ‘The Army’ with an intensity. But you say these names (referring to Al-
Qaeda and Hezbollah) because you want that word to carry weight.” America, in Omar’s
opinion, is the true oppressor of the conflict, and therefore warrants a level of intensity
when it’s name is uttered.
In November 2016, nine Somali men from Minnesota were being sentenced for planning
to join ISIS. Then State Representative-Elect Omar wrote the judge, asking for leniency.
In the letter, she wrote “A long-term prison sentence for one who chose violence to
combat direct marginalization is a statement that our justice system misunderstands the
guilty…The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people – it is the consequence of
systematic alienation”. In Omar’s worldview, the men who set out to join ISIS are
oppressed, only reacting to “direct marginalization” and “systemic alienation”. Not only
do these men not deserve a lengthy prison sentence, according to Omar, in a way their
cause is just.
In a Time magazine article from August 2017, in response to the Charlottesville attack,
Omar wrote about America, “We must confront that our nation was founded by the
genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, that we maintain global power
with the tenor of neocolonialism.” While there have been, indeed, many dark chapters in
American history, there have also been massive efforts country-wide to repent for those
sins. Omar dismisses how we fought a war to free slaves, sent in the National Guard to
desegregate schools, and are constantly trying to live up to our original creed. To Omar,
the last century never happened. She even disregards our attempts (with mixed results) to
spread freedom and democracy to countries like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq;
she would rather cudgel America with the accusation of “neocolonialism”, an obvious lie.
Recently, Ilhan Omar also tweeted her support for freeing Hoda Abdelmonem, who she
described as “a political prisoner in Egypt”. In reality, Abdelmonem is a member of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates for an Islamist takeover of Egypt. Egyptian
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has a warm relationship with President Trump, which
makes the Egyptian government automatically the oppressor, and the Muslim
Brotherhood and its members the oppressed.
This puts in context the latest controversy around Omar. In a statement to CAIR (The
Council on American-Islamic Relations), Omar said, “CAIR was founded after 9/11,
because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting
to lose access to our civil liberties.” Literally none of the sentence is true. CAIR was
founded in 1994, Muslims did not en masse lose civil rights, and 9/11 was not just “some
people did something”. It was a group of radical Islamist terrorists who attacked and
murdered 3,000 innocent Americans. However, as she has said over and over throughout
her career, America is the oppressor. That makes anyone, even radical Islamists, the
oppressed.
Omar is happy accepted amongst the left. Journalists refuse to question Omar. The
Democrats refuse to condemn her. She still sits on the prestigious House Foreign Affairs
Committee. When she is interviewed she is thrown softball questions. In her recent
appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert asked her what it was like to
“be used as a political cudgel” when she was accused of anti-Semitism. Not a question as
to why she uses inflammatory and anti-Semitic rhetoric on a regular basis, rather asking
her how she felt when she’s accused of anti-Semitism.
The cover of Newsweek this past week was a smiling Omar, with the headline “Ilhan
Omar, The Democrats and Israel”. A few weeks ago, a laughing Omar appeared on the
cover of Rolling Stone with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The pair appeared on
the cover of New York Magazine last October. In March 2018, she was on the cover of a
Time special issue entitled “Women Changing The World” along with Hillary Clinton,
Oprah Winfrey, and Ellen Degeneres. All of these magazines showed Omar in a
favorable light, as someone who is “changing the conversation” and “speaking truth to
power”.
Omar knows that she embodies all the oppressed identity groups within herself. In the
same interview with Colbert, she said that the Republicans attack her because she “just
happen to embody all of those identities”, implying, of course, that Republicans are
racists, sexists and Islamophobic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans
focus on her because she is receiving undue amounts of attention while spreading a toxic
worldview.
Truly, this worldview is cancerous to a society. Instead of uniting against the forces that
seek our destruction, we have members of our own government actively siding with
them. To assume that terrorists only cause terror because they feel oppressed is to
disregard their own motivations. The day that happens is the day that history repeats
itself, and the innocent will always be the ones to pay the price.
You can follow Moshe Hill on Twitter @TheMohill
