In the Cole Porter song, “Miss Otis Regrets” she’s unable to lunch today because she murdered her unfaithful lover and is about to be lynched. She’s sorry she has to stand up her date. By contrast, Ms. Omar regrets nothing because she married her brother and still has the fact-checkers standing by her. She’s not apologizing to anyone for anything.
Rather, she’s gloating. In her memoir (written with Rebecca Paley), Omar writes of me and others who have been on her case: “It didn’t work. Despite all their efforts, I kept rising. Ironically, I don’t know if I would have the widespread support I do today if I hadn’t been messed with as much as I have.” Who’s messin’ who? When I introduced myself to her in at the DFL congressional candidates’ debate at Beth El Synagogue in 2018, she exclaimed: “Oh, you’re the one who made me famous.”
I’ve been on her case now nearly ten years. I documented the story in its early stages for City Journal in the September 2016 column “The curious case of Ilhan Omar.” Today I return to the scene of the crime with a first-person account in the Washington Free Beacon column “Yes, Ilhan Omar married her brother.”
I begin with the events that have given the story new currency (links omitted):
President Donald Trump is an occasional practitioner of an unsparing form of political logic. Having taken an interest in the massive public-programs fraud committed by an almost exclusively Somali cast of perpetrators in Minnesota, he has followed up with unfriendly comments on Minnesota fifth district Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.). “She comes in, does nothing but bitch, she’s always complaining,” the president told a crowd in Mount Pocono, Penn., on Tuesday. “We oughta get her the hell out. She married her brother in order to get in, right? She married her brother. Can you imagine if Donald Trump married his sister?”
Omar is Somali fraud Exhibit A, and her district was the center of gravity in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud case that I wrote about in the Washington Free Beacon in March. Despite what you may think, Omar has made a valuable contribution to our history. She goes to show that there is such a thing as a new kind of political scandal. Mark Twain famously observed: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” And he hadn’t even met Omar.
I’m talking about Omar’s marriage to her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. Trump may have garbled the specifics, but he got the upshot of the story right. Omar’s family brought Elmi over from London in 2009 to try to extract him from a gay lifestyle, and that is the context in which the congresswoman tied the knot with him.
Today the New York Post reports “Ilhan Omar’s flamboyant ‘dirty dandy’ second husband surfaces in S. Africa as Trump accuses duo of being siblings.” That’s what I’m saying. Don’t miss the photos that accompany the Post story.
Referring to Preya Samsundar (see my City Journal column), David Steinberg, Dominic Green, and Ben Weingarten, I conclude:
While none of us has nailed down definitively why Omar did what she did, we can say it was done for some fraudulent purpose in supreme confidence that the law of the land could be treated as a joke. If the truth ever emerges in some undeniable form, Omar will perform yet another variation on her pose as the perpetual victim. She will claim she did what she did for a beloved brother and father. She won’t say and there’s nothing you can do about it now, but she’ll be thinking it.
The Free Beacon column is illustrated with a few graphics that illuminate the story and full of links to the work of my colleagues who have joined me in pursuit. Please read the whole thing here. Fact-checkers of the world, check off!
