On trial with Feeding Our Future fraud ringleader Aimee Bock earlier this year, Salim Said sought to introduce the video (below) featuring Ilhan Omar in his defense. The video shows Omar talking up Said’s Safari restaurant in Somali and bringing meals outside to waiting cars. Lead prosecutor Joe Thompson objected to Omar’s part in the video as an attempt to graft her prestige as a member of Congress onto Said’s defense. Judge Brasel’s ruling had the effect of keeping the video out of evidence, but let us pause over it.
A friend thanked me for posting the video. He was incredulous that the defense was going go play the video of a sitting member of Congress shilling for what has been revealed to be a monumental fraud scheme. I wish I had emphasized that point in my own comments on the video last week.
I took it as a given. Overexposure has made me immune to Ilhan Omar’s continuing offenses against honesty and the American legal order, although I tried to think them through last week in the New York Post column “Vast fraud of Somali migrants, starting with Ilhan Omar…”
My friend’s message prompted me to think back to the 2016 terrorism trial featuring a cast of young Somali immigrants. Of the ten charged in the case, six pleaded guilty, one was presumed dead in Syria, and three were convicted at trial. I attended the trial to cover it daily on Power Line and in four articles for the Weekly Standard, including one on Judge Michael Davis’s sentencing of the defendants that fall (“‘Minnesota men’ go to prison,” behind the Washington Examiner paywall).
This is not ancient history. Last week Abdisatar Ahmed Hassan — yet another “Minneapolis man,” as the Star Tribune put it — pleaded guilty to material support of terrorism in connection with his efforts to join ISIS in Somalia. The Department of Justice issued a press release announcing the plea and stating the facts of the case.
The defendants in the 2016 terrorism trial appeared to be relatively well-adjusted immigrants. They diligently pursued their education (and related public benefits supporting it). They took advantage of employment opportunities. They were also ardent Muslims who spent way too much time hanging out in the local mosques.
The government’s star witness was a defendant turned informer who had a job unloading baggage at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport at the time of his arrest. When he agreed to turn informant, the first question he asked was: “Can I get my job at the airport back?”
He wore a wire in the later stages of the defendants’ scheme to join ISIS in Syria. Listening to the recordings, we could hear that these guys burned to wage jihad and chop heads. They were inspired by ISIS beheading videos that they watched during their lunch breaks at work. They were thrilled by the prospect. When they had finished their planned work with ISIS in the Middle East, they longed to return and continue the mission in the United States.
At the time of Judge Davis’s sentencings in 2016, Omar had just been elected to serve in the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was a lowly state representative-elect, but she was already on her way to making a name for herself with the public persona we have all come to know.
Omar took the opportunity of the sentencing hearings to advise Judge Davis on the correct approach. This is what she had to say:
Honorable Judge Davis,
As you undoubtedly deliberate with great caution the sentencing of nine recently convicted Somali-American men, I bring to your attention the ramifications of sentencing young men who made a consequential mistake to decades in federal prison. Incarcerating 20-year-old men for 30 or 40 years is essentially a life sentence. Society will have no expectations of the to be 50 or 60-year-old released prisoners; it will view them with distrust and revulsion. Such punitive measures not only lack efficacy, they inevitably create an environment in which extremism can flourish, aligning with the presupposition of terrorist recruitment: “Americans do not accept you and continue to trivialize your value. Instead of being a nobody, be a martyr.”
The best deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion. We must alter our attitude and approach; if we truly want to affect change, we should refocus our efforts on inclusion and rehabilitation. A long-term prison sentence for one who chose violence to combat direct marginalization is a statement that our justice system misunderstands the guilty. A restorative approach to justice assesses the lure of criminality and addresses it.
The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people — it is the consequences of systematic alienation; people seek violent solutions when the process established for enacting change is inaccessible to them. Fueled by disaffection turned to malice, if the guilty were willing to kill and be killed fighting perceived injustice, imagine the consequence of them hearing, “I believe you can be rehabilitated. I want you to become part of my community, and together we will thrive.” We use this form of distributive justice for patients with chemical dependencies; treatment and societal reintegration. The most effective penance is making these men ambassadors of reform.
The restorative approach provides a long-term solution – though the self-declared Islamic State may soon suffer defeat, their radical approach to change-making will continue as it has throughout history – by criminalizing the undergirding construct rather than its predisposed victims. Therein, this ruling can set a precedent and has the potential to be a landmark case in addressing extremism.
Thank you for your careful attention,
Ilhan Omar
State Representative-Elect – MN 60B
Let us pause over this: “The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people — it is the consequences of systematic alienation; people seek violent solutions when the process established for enacting change is inaccessible to them.”
Omar to the contrary notwithstanding, anyone who heard the evidence in the case understood that the defendants’ “desire to commit violence” emanated directly from Islamic religious beliefs. In a move with which we have become overly familiar, Omar nevertheless laid the fault for defendants’ wrongdoing at our doorstep.
