Here's Just Some Of The Insane Lies Being Spread About Ilhan Omar

Ilhan Omar’s mere presence as the first Somali-American and one of the first Muslim Congresswomen - along with Rashida Tlaib -  does tend to ruffle a few feathers among the more bigoted politicians and news pundits, much like those who insisted that former President Barack Obama wasn’t American and was actually a Muslim who was born in Kenya.

Just as former President Barack Obama had ridiculous and debunked conspiracy theories surrounding him - so does Ilhan Omar.

Omar’s journey to Congress was extremely reminiscent of that “American Dream” you hear so much about. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia and had to flee from the Somali Civil War which had seen the country plunge into a system of total anarchy. Omar and her family fled to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, near the Somali border and remained there for four years before immigrating to New York in 1992 and her family secured asylum in 1995.

Omar’s father and grandfather taught her about Democracy at an early age and when Omar was 14 she attended political caucus meetings with her grandfather and served as his interpreter. Omar then became a community nutrition educator at the University of Minnesota in 2006. Afterwards she continued her foray into politics, becoming Campaign Manager for Kari Dziedzic’s reelection campaign for the Minnesota State Senate in 2012 and was also Campaign Manager for Andrew Johnson’s campaign for Minneapolis City Council.

Ilhan Omar is the personification of the “American Dream” - immigrating to America, fitting in, all while enduring endless childhood bullying and working her way up from nothing to something. That something being the first Somali-American to be elected into the United States Congress.

Omar arrested 23 times and a father linked to Somali terrorism?

The first conspiracy theory being thrown around right-wing circles online is the claim that Omar has been arrested 23 times while living in America. According to Politifact, one of those FACT checking website thingys, this is demonstrably false. A false image made its way around right-wing Facebook groups which had a the caption “From jail cell, to Congress” and claimed that she was arrested 23 times and her father is apparently a Somali terrorist.

Now, there are two problems with this: her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, trained teachers while in Somalia and worked as a cab driver and at a post office while in America - hardly a terrorist mastermind. As for the 23 arrests claim, Omar was arrested once, for trespassing at a Minneapolis hotel in 2013, when she snuck back into the hotel when the Somali President was present after police had cleared the hotel, which isn’t important anyway after the charges were dropped for Omar shortly afterwards. Oh, and the “23 arrests” is actually 23 parking tickets, given to her for parking violations, once for parking overtime in a timed meter zone, twice for expired plates and once for speeding. Clearly a hardened criminal if ever I’ve seen one.

Trump claims Ilhan supports terrorist group Al-Qaeda

Secondly, Omar was giving a speech at a March 2019 banquet, addressing attendees from the Council of American-Islamic Relations, and her comments led to intellectually dishonest people on the right such as current President Donald Trump included twisting her words to suggest that she was soft on terror group Al-Qaeda and those who committed the 9/11 attacks.

Omar stated that she viewed the 9/11 attacks as “some people did something” - and this sent right-wing sites ablaze with posts cherry picking this one statement and taking it wildly out of context.

Omar has long spoken about why she, as a Muslim woman, is always asked to condemn fundamentalist Islamic terrorism when white people as a whole are never asked to denounce white supremacist terrorism, which is statistically a much larger problem in America.

Why should Omar have to denounce past terror attacks? Are we supposed to assume that she is somehow supportive of them because she’s brown and wears a hijab? Because that’s what it seems like on the surface when you ask Muslim people to condemn terror attacks, something which is only asked of Muslims and not white people after attacks like we saw earlier in August in El Paso, Texas - where a young shooter targeted and killed Hispanic “invaders”.

False claims about Obama, Omar and Somali refugees in Minnesota

Viral social media images that are floating around right-wing circles claim that former President Barack Obama purposefully settled 43,000 Somalian refugees, rising to 80,000 by the time Obama had left office in 2016. The insinuation here is that all of this was planned in order to elect Ilhan Omar into office, which is laughably wrong. 

First of all, Ilhan Omar was elected as a Minnesota Representative with a gigantic 78% of the vote. Omar received 267,000 votes to the republican challengers 74,000 - which shows that even if the claims of relocating up to 80,000 Somali refugees to Omar’s district in Minnesota were true, it wouldn’t have even mattered in the end anyway, Omar would have still won her election and been elected to Congress.

Furthermore, this statistic is simply wrong. Politifact took data from the interactive website Refugee Processing Center, which uses data from all the way back in 2002, and found that only 6,320 Somali refugees were resettled in Minnesota between 2009 and 2017, the years in which Barack Obama was serving as President. The actual number of resettled refugees equate to around one-seventh of what the anti-Omar social media images claim.

Perhaps the most ridiculous inaccuracy of these images is the fact that there aren't even 80,000 Somalis living in Minnesota, let alone 80,000 recent Somali refugees, according to the U.S Census Bureau. The Bureau's five-year estimate found between 42,400 to 55,200 Somalis living in Minnesota in roughly 13,000 to 16,500 households - nowhere near the amount the anti-Omar images have claimed.

Minneapolis set up a "Sharia Hotline" for those who criticise Islam

This falsehood is more indirect in its efforts to attack Ilhan Omar, using her Muslim faith to couple her with the false notion that Minneapolis is being "taken over" by the evil Muslims, a common racist trope you encounter on the Right.

The claim is this: "The city of Minneapolis has set up a Sharia hotline for residents to report citizens who criticise Islam, in order to prosecute them for 'hate crimes'". This was placed as text above a woman's head, who was wearing a hijab, also including the text "Wake up America!"

Minneapolis did in fact open a new hotline in order for citizens to report hate crimes, in June 2017. A hate crime, according to the city, "is any crime against a person or property motivated by prejudice against someone's race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity. This includes prejudice-motivated property damage (including graffiti), stalking and assault."


Although the hotline was created at a time in which assaults against Muslims in the United States were on the rise, the new city service was not tailored to address crimes against Muslims and it makes no mention of Sharia (Islamic Law). Instead, it's aimed at reporting crimes based on the criteria previously mentioned.

Reporting people who "criticise Islam" is not listed among the criteria. Politifact rated this claim as "Pants on fire!"

Ilhan Omar endures this racist abuse on a daily basis simply because she exists, which is why we as progressives must wholeheartedly stand with her.