People and groups that are in receipt of money from the taxpayer have a duty to spend that money effectively and wisely. Those who run organisations that are funded by the public should also be aware that they should be careful about which individuals and groups that they associate with. Any organisation, in particular an entity which receives large amounts of public money, that praises a person, needs to be absolutely sure that this praise will not rebound on the organisation and damage their reputation.
The praise that the British Islamic grievance mongers of Tell Mama heaped onto recently elected US congresswoman Ilhan Omar, is one of those examples of praise that I hope will come back to bite this troublesome organisation deeply on the arse. Did this organisation, which in early 2018 was given £1.9 million in order to fight ‘Islamophobia’, bother to do any checking on Ms Omar or her background before dishing out this praise?
Image from Tell Mama’s Facebook page – screengrabbed 24th January 2019
Tell Mama appears to have not done any checking on her whatsoever. This failure to think before acting is very bad, bearing in mind there were iffy things coming out and being alleged about Ms Omar long before she became a Congresswoman. There was plenty of warning signs that Tell Mama could have seen concerning Ilhan Omar that should have made them more cautious about praising her for being one of the first Islamic members of the US Congress.
THE EVIDENCE FOR ILHAN OMAR BEING DODGY
For the first example of Ilhan Omar’s questionable record: There’s the anti-Israel tweet that verged on being a Jewish conspiracy one.
Ilhan Omar’s Tweet about Israel
As Tell Mama have close relations with certain Rabbonim such as Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and have managed to get the support of the Jewish security organisation the Community Security Trust, I can imagine that this is, or should be quite embarrassing for Tell Mama. It should be noted that this Tweet came a long while before Ilhan Omar became a Congresswoman and was something that wasn’t exactly hidden or hard to find. I wonder how the Jews and Jewish groups that Tell Mama has courted and flattered over the last few years will feel about Tell Mama dishing out praise for someone who is an Israel hater and who may also hold anti-Semitic views?
Then there are the accusations, partisan ones I admit, of Ilhan Omar sticking her snout into the trough and claiming dubious travel expenses from her campaign committee. Ms Omar denied charging unnecessary travel expenses to her campaign. Ilhan Omar also denied spending campaign money on her divorce, but the lawyer who dealt with Ms Omar’s divorce said that Omar had paid her for ‘crisis management services’ and not divorce services. However, at the very least it looks like an act of bad probity to use the same lawyer in the divorce issue as for the campaign issue. It opens up Ms Omar to accusations of spending campaign funds unwisely.
In expectation of Tell Mama whining that these particular complaints about Ilhan Omar’s fiscal management of her campaign are coming from ‘Islamophobes’ I have to say here that they are not. They are coming from a well established local newspaper, the Star Tribune, that has been in existence for 150 years.
The Star Tribune said:
Rep. Steve Drazkowski has been mounting a series of allegations against Omar in recent months. His latest complaint stemmed from travel expenses, including airfare to Estonia and expenses for Omar to speak at a rally for a Boston City Council candidate, that he said he found in the year-end report for Omar’s legislative campaign committee.
Omar’s campaign did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Drazkowski, of Mazeppa, also shared correspondence from the chair of the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board confirming that regulators found probable cause to investigate his earlier complaint that Omar illegally used campaign money for personal legal expenses.
“The more we dig, the more problems we find,” said Drazkowski.
Drazkowski first alleged the misuse of campaign funds in July. Also that month, Omar said she would return $2,500 in speaking fees from two Minnesota community colleges after Drazkowski called out the payments as violating House rules against accepting an honorarium for a service from anyone with a direct interest in House business. Omar is on a House committee that makes funding and policy decisions for Minnesota’s public colleges and universities.
This story from the Star Tribune is not the only example of alleged dodginess from Ilhan Omar. There is also a writer from the City Journal, the quarterly magazine published by the well established conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute. That magazine has also dug into Omar’s background and uncovered a whole host of questionable personal behaviour. The writer from the Manhattan Institute, Scott W Johnson, writing in September 2016, stated that there are questions to be asked about her marriage, including questions about whether this marriage was consanguineous and therefore illegal under United States law.
Mr Johnson said:
As many candidates do, Omar has made her personal background an integral part of her campaign. But neither the candidate nor the reporters who covered her have shown much interest in exploring one aspect of her personal story that recently came to public attention: the fact that she is not legally married to the man she advertises as the husband and the father of her three children. In fact, she is legally married to another man—who may be her brother. A posting on the SomaliSpot discussion board alleged that Omar had married the man touted as her husband in 2002 before marrying her brother for fraudulent purposes in 2009. The post, which seems to have been written by someone from Minneapolis’s Somali community, was quickly deleted. By the time it came to my attention, the post was only available via a Google cache (now also deleted). If the story is true, however, it suggests that Omar had engaged in some kind of dishonest activity in connection with her marriage to her brother (which by itself would be illegal).
I originally checked out the SomaliSpot story online through the Minnesota Official Marriage System. Inputting Omar’s name, I found that the two marriages cited in the discussion board post checked out as indicated. The site reflected Omar’s 2002 marriage to her advertised husband, Ahmed Aden (later Ahmed Hirsi), and her 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (identified in the SomaliSpot post as Omar’s brother). A few days after the primary, I submitted written questions to representatives of the Omar campaign, citing the SomaliSpot post, and asking whether Omar’s second marriage had been entered into with her brother for dishonest purposes. That same afternoon, I received a message from Omar’s press contact indicating that the campaign would get back to me later that day. I didn’t hear back from campaign officials directly, but I did receive a response from Minneapolis criminal defense attorney Jean Brandl. It provided no answer to my question, and implied that the question itself evidenced bigotry against Omar and her candidacy for public office.
I would strongly advise readers of this blog to read the very detailed full article from Mr Johnson over at City Journal. It is a classic example of good investigative journalism and deserves to be read in full and not just in excerpt. Click the link below for Mr Johnson’s article
https://www.city-journal.org/html/curious-case-ilhan-omar-14724.html
Further evidence of Ilhan Omar’s questionable views seemed to come again from the Minnesota Star Tribune. In 2017 this newspaper published a story claiming that Omar was one of only four members of the 128 member Minnesota local State Congress to vote against provisions to restrict Female Genital Mutilation. However later information published by the fact checkers of the conservative leaning Daily Caller News Foundation revealed that she had voted for the increased penalties but felt that parents should be charged under existing felony laws regarding FGM rather than new laws that she believed were driven by a desire to make media headlines. She was also concerned that the bill, which passed the Minnesotta Congress but did not receive a vote in the Minnesota Senate, did not specify levels of penalties.
The Star Tribune said
(The) bill makes it a felony for parents to subject their daughters to the procedure and calls for loss of custody and prison terms from five to 20 years, depending on the extent of the injuries. It also increases penalties for those who perform the procedure, which has been illegal since pioneering Minnesota legislation in the 1990s.
The bill won support from all but four of the 128 House members who voted, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, the country’s first Somali-American legislator.
Although I have now discovered that the Star Tribune’s original article was misleading, it still gives me some concern that she did speak against aspects of this bill proposing increased penalties for FGM
We move on now to allegations that organisations linked to Islamic extremism have been involved in fundraising for Ilhan Omar’s campaign for election to the US House of Representatives. These allegations come from The Clarion Project, a non-profit American organisation dedicated to countering Islamic extremism. This organisation has helped to publicise the threat of Islamic radicalism and has worked with American Islamic reformers such as Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
The Clarion Project are alleging that a Muslim Brotherhood linked group, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have been fundraising for Ilhan Omar’s US Congress campaign. The Clarion Project said:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) California Political Action Committee (PAC) revved its fundraising machine for Ilhan Omar, who is running for Congress in Minnesota.
CAIR held three fundraising events in California for the candidate. CAIR is a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity that was designated as a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates. FBI wiretaps in 1993 revealed CAIR was established to deceptively push the Islamist agenda in America.
Omar is vying for controversial Congressman Keith Ellison’s seat in the House of Representatives as he moves toward his aspiration to become the state’s attorney general.
Omar was elected to Minnesota’s House of Representatives in 2016, becoming the first Somali-American elected to office. During her time in government, she advanced anti-Israel hatred, including voting against a Minnesota House bill to stop financially punishing Israel. Commenting on her vote at the time, Omar said, “I would have loved to vote for a bill that expands our ideals of fighting against discrimination…I don’t want to be part of a vote that limits the ability of people to fight towards justice and peace.”
It seems that CAIR are probably attracted to Omar because of her anti-Israel leanings and her willingness to stand up and protect Islamic practices and the cultural aspects of Islam, that have no place in civilized countries such as the USA. The involvement of CAIR in Omar’s campaign should have rung alarm bells among those observing her campaign. Politicians or prospective politicians who are backed by groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood should be treated with extreme caution.
Finally we have to look at Ilhan Omar’s intervention in a 2016 court case where she appealed to the court to act with ‘compassion’ towards 9 men from Minnesota charged with attempting to join the Islamic terror group ISIS. According to the TV station Fox 9 Omar called for a ‘restorative’ approach to this case.
Fox 9 said:
The 9 Minnesota men charged with planning to join ISIS are scheduled to be sentenced next week. Ahead of those court dates, 13 letters were sent to Judge Michael Davis in the case of defendant Abdirahman Yasin Daud, including a letter from state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who on Election Night became with first elected Somali-American lawmaker in the nation.
Rep. Omar asked Judge Davis for “compassion” and a “restorative approach to justice,” concluding that “this ruling can set a precedent and has the potential to be a landmark case in addressing extremism.” Read a complete copy of Rep. Omar’s letter at the bottom of this story.
Daud was one of two young men from the Twin Cities arrested in San Diego in April 2015 in an alleged plot to buy fake passports for travel to Syria. Federal prosecutors requested 30 years in prison for Daud, with a lifetime of supervised release.
CONCLUSION
All the information that I have found in order to throw light on Ilhan Omar’s attitudes, actions and political views come from solid sources. They are from long established TV stations and newspapers and from respected think tanks. They are not the rantings of basement dwelling ‘Islamophobes’ which groups like Tell Mama like to think most criticism of Islam and some Muslims comes from.
I find it utterly astonishing that Tell Mama went out and heaped so much public praise on Ilham Omar after her election to Congress, when there was ample information available going back several years before they praised Omar, that showed her to be more than a little dodgy. We have here Ilhan Omar making calls for leniency for ISIS recruits, not being vigorous enough about cracking down on FGM, along with allegations of money coming from Muslim Brotherhood linked entities and claims that her personal life and her campaign funding was convoluted to say the least.
All of the information that Tell Mama could have used in order to avoid embarrassing themselves by dishing out praise on Ilhan Omar was publicly available and very easy to find. All of this information was discoverable with just a few minutes search time online and all of it predated Tell Mama’s decision to gush praise on Ilhan Omar following her election to the US House of Representatives.
An organisation or an individual with less funding and which is less well connected than Tell Mama, may have been able to conjure up some excuse for the error of promoting and praising someone who is as plainly dodgy as Ilhan Omar. However, Tell Mama, with its £1.9M of British taxpayers money and its extensive network of contacts and supporters in the British Establishment, do not have such an excuse. I find myself asking this question: If I can find out this stuff why didn’t Tell Mama? I am quite capable of curating things like social media feeds and evaluating sources of information so as to avoid doing stupid stuff, such as accidentally promoting neo-Nazis or tin foil hatters or communal extremists.
It appears to me as if it is a shocking dereliction of duty and care that an organisation like Tell Mama have shown themselves unable to look into Ilhan Omar’s background before heaping praise on this troubling character. This case is yet another example of why Tell Mama are not suitable people to be in receipt of so much public money and so much public support. I would strongly urge those readers who are British subjects to contact their Member of Parliament and complain about this incident of unwarranted praise and about the Tell Mama organisation that has dished out this praise. I find it disgusting that an organisation that gets so much public money – money that many of us believe could be better spent – is praising a woman who is so obviously iffy. We should not be seeing taxpayer funded organisations heaping praise on a person who is allegedly being funded by a Muslim Brotherhood linked entity, who has a questionable familial backstory and is rabidly anti Israel.
