Saturday 13 July 2019

Can Ilhan Omar Overcome Her Prejudice? - The Wall Street Journal.



A tale of two Somali refugees to America.
1.  Professor Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee, was taken in and protected in the United States when she was forced out of Holland by death threats which the supine and pusillanimous Dutch government refused to protect her against. She is now a scholar at Stanford university. She regularly expresses gratitude for a country that has protected her and given her access to the highest offices in the academy.
2.  Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Also a Somali refugee to the United States at age 12 and now elected to the House of Representatives in the US Congress. A Congress which, by the way, passed a special a law to allow her to wear the hijab. Until that time even Jewish skullcaps had not been allowed. Is Ms Omar the least, just st the least bit grateful? Why, no, she is not. She constantly rails against the United States: it's racist,  bigoted, misogynist and xenophobic. The 4th of July for her was not a celebration of the establishment of the country which had given her succour and opportunity. No, it was time for another tweet calling out racial inequity. She has a particular animus for Jews, and especially American Jews, who, she says, are "all about the Benjamins, baby!"
Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently criticised Omar and praised Hirsi Ali. Two high achieving Somali born women. For that Omar called him a "racist fool". Carlson pointed out he was criticising views, not race, hence contrasting with another Somali woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Omar ignored this, of course, because it's easier to smear with the word "racist".
Omar has become a well known anti-Semite in her short time in Congress. Ayaan Hirsi Ali tries to explain that in an excellent article below.
Short version: she was brought up to hate Jews.
/Snip:
In any event, I am liv­ing proof that one can be born a So­mali, raised as an anti-Semite, in­doc­tri­nated as an anti-Zion­ist—and still over­come all this to ap­pre­ci­ate the unique cul­ture of Ju­daism and the ex­traordinary achieve­ment of the state of Is­rael. If I can make that leap, so per­haps can Ms. Omar. Yet that is not re­ally the is­sue at stake. For she and I are only two in­di­vid­u­als. The real ques­tion is what, if any­thing, can be done to check the ad­vance of the mass move­ment that is Mus­lim anti-Semi­tism. Ab­sent a world-wide Mus­lim ref­ormation, fol­lowed by an Is­lamic enlightenmemt, I am not sure I know.