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Rep. Ilhan Omar’s apparent lies about her family and finances are bad enough, but nothing is as outrageous as the way she slanders Israel with the “genocide” libel when her own father in all likelihood took part in Somali dictator Siad Barre’s real genocide.
Omar in her memoir calls her father Nur Omar Mohamed an “educator,” yet it looks like the only educating he did was teaching Barre’s enemies lessons in brutality as a colonel in the Somali Army in the 1980s.
The Barre regime committed horrific atrocities against the Isaaq clan, killing at least 200,000 and displacing another 900,000 in a massive ethnic cleansing.
The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and virtually every other authority agrees that the campaign against the Isaaq was genocidal in intent and in practice: Government forces strafed fleeing civilians, planted land mines at wells and systematically raped girls and women.
There can be little doubt that Omar’s dad was involved in the genocide. As historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told The Post, “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.”
Nur Said and his family escaped Somalia as “refugees” following the collapse of Barre’s dictatorship, gaining asylum in the United States in 1995 — improperly, it seems, as war criminals are not entitled to refugee protections.
Omar has long been blatantly antisemitic, with comments like “Israel has hypnotized the world” and saying Jews bought control of US policy because “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”
But with her own family’s bloody history, it takes real chutzpah to join in the “genocide” slurs, e.g. by insisting Jewish students at Columbia University are “pro-genocide” and routinely condemning Israel’s supposed “genocidal” campaign against Palestinians.
Omar’s scandals include messy finances and a possibly fraudulent marriage as well as serious questions about the legitimacy of her citizenship, but this hypocrisy takes the cake
America doesn’t believe in blood guilt, and we can’t blame Omar for her father’s history.
But there’s something truly despicable about her rush to (falsely) accuse Israel of a crime against humanity when her own family looks to be knee-deep in a genuine genocide.