For all of the entertainment value afforded by the three amigos of the Freshmen Democratic class; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Talib, and Ilhan Omar; occasional nuggets of insight can be gleamed; particularly in the case of Ilhan Omar. Unlike AOC, whose gaffes are often hilariously dumb, Omar gaffes are of the Michael Kinsey variety; a politician unwittingly telling the truth.
Omar recently gave an interview in Vogue Arabia with this observation:
It’s a life lesson she has repeatedly turned to during her most challenging days – from being a refugee to being a black, Muslim, hijabi woman in the US. Her family fled the Somali civil war in 1991, staying in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years, before resettling in the US. Here, she was confronted with the differences between her and her new home. “It was the first time that all of the identities I carried and had pride in, became a source of tension,” she recalls. “When you’re a kid and you’re raised in an all-black, all- Muslim environment, nobody really talks to you about your identity. You just are. There is freedom in knowing that you are accepted as your full self. So the notion that there is a conflict with your identity in society was hard at the age of 12.”
There may be more than one way to read this, but it sounds as if she finds many qualities of a refugee camp favorable to living in the United States. In a refugee camp, there wasn’t an issue of identity because everyone was a black Somali Muslim. Here in the US on the other hand, you have infidels of all different shades, preventing you from being “accepted as your full self.”
So per Omar, if you can only be your “full self” within the confines of your own people, it almost sounds as if she is an alt-right nationalist (or tribalist). Well who’s kidding who? There is no almost about it. Omar is an ethno nationalist. I wouldn’t really have a problem with that if she were in Somalia, but it bothers me a great deal that she’s essentially masquerading as an American legislator when she seems more comfortable being on the side of America’s enemies, as she did in her Black Hawk Down tweet.
One has to wonder why we even bother having a military when we allow the enemy a vote in the US Congress.
Mike Street Station 