Domi Good: Washington Post examines how America is the country that ‘has too often disappointed’ Ilhan Omar

We don’t recall Rep. Ilhan Omar saying anything openly anti-Semitic this week that would send mainstream journalists rushing to write puff pieces about her, and we haven’t heard her vocally supporting the Maduro regime in Venezuela in a while, so what’s the occasion? The Washington Post obviously thought it was time for yet another piece on Omar’s background and her controversial tenure in Congress.

Yes, we know. She was born in Somalia and fled to a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the United States. And the U.S. has been a big disappointment to her — not enough that she’d consider returning to Somalia, at least not before “fixing” America.

Here’s her story, again:

At issue wasn’t a piece of legislation or an election. It was something bigger — a battle over the American story — who was entitled to tell it and how it would be told.

In Omar’s version, America wasn’t the bighearted country that saved her from a brutal war and a bleak refugee camp. It wasn’t a meritocracy that helped her attend college or vaulted her into Congress. Instead, it was the country that had failed to live up to its founding ideals, a place that had disappointed her and so many immigrants, refugees and minorities like her.

“I grew up in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be the country that guaranteed justice to all,” she told the high school students. “So, I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept.”

And so, on this morning she decided to share a story of American racism, cruelty and injustice.

Of course she did. It was the story of a “sweet, old . . . African American lady” who was caught stealing and fined $80. Yet she sides with Iran and Russia in supporting the Maduro regime, which took a U.S. journalist into military custody for the crime of filming citizens scavenging food out of a garbage truck.

Yes, she’s “complicated.” And “she has a different experience in the use of words,” don’t forget, which makes her seemingly anti-Semitic and anti-American statements even more complicated to parse.

Domi Good

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Monday 8 July 2019

Washington Post examines how America is the country that ‘has too often disappointed’ Ilhan Omar

Ilhan Omar is unlike anyone who has served in Congress. This is her complicated American story.

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