“Hate-Filled, American-Bashing Socialist”

_{Not “Lock her up! Lock her up” but “Send her back! Send her back!”}

For those who look at the above photograph can cannot see the potential of an American patriot, a woman who truly cherishes her American citizenship above all, it’s time to do a “who am I really” second look. Her name is Ilhan Abdullahi Omar. She is a practicing Muslim. She is also a duly elected member of the United States House of representatives, a Democrat who has served on behalf of Minnesota's 5th congressional district since 2019. She is yet one more concrete example of a racist President, making up vituperative “facts” without substance along the way, and those who support his racist views. The Grand Master of fake news. Donald Trump’s foaming hatred of this dark-skinned member of Congress is part of the tsunami of proof to the rest of the world of Trump’s fundamental belief that white supremacy is the proper American way. 

The list of Trump insiders speaking out or writing tell-all books is long and getting longer. The latest insider quote, from Trump’s former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci blasted the President (calling his behavior “ridiculous”) following his July 3rd Mt Rushmore speech, saying: “Just go read transcripts of the speeches he gave over the weekend. It’s literally as if Charles Lindbergh had a baby with Joe McCarthy and that baby was Donald Trump and grew up to become the president of the United States.” The world is watching. 

This is how our ally, the United Kingdom, looking at Congresswoman Omar, sees the President of the - United States of America (BBC.com, July 6th): “President Donald Trump is making Somali-American congresswoman Ilhan Omar one of the bogeywomen of his campaign for re-election to the White House in November - and by proxy her country of birth, Somalia. 

“In his most recent attack, at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he tore into the 37-year-old alleging that she wanted to bring the ‘anarchy’ of Somalia to the US… ‘She would like to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came - Somalia. No government, no safety, no police, no nothing, just anarchy. And now, she's telling us how to run our country. No, thank-you.’ 

“Ms Omar, who arrived in the US as a child refugee in 1995, is a congressional representative for Minnesota, which includes the city of Minneapolis where African-American George Floyd was killed by police in May, reigniting Black Lives Matter protests.” A large Somali-American constituency resides in her district. 

We live in hateful times with a President who generates political power by accelerating any divide and conquer strategy he can foment, particularly anything that can motivate traditional white traditionalists, especially those embracing white supremacist views. We live in a nation, built by immigrants (the indigenous residents of this land were all “people of color”) and predicated on religious freedom. We transitioned through an ugly path of tearing indigenous peoples from their land and resorting to bringing Africans as forced labor, routinely to be tortured and murdered, sexually humiliated and subject to hopeless and unspeakable cruelty – we call it “slavery” – peoples dragged from their homes in another continent and shipped like cattle across a vast ocean under most horrific conditions. 

As our textbooks have sanitized that era, many still believe in honoring traitors who defied the law, battled in the Civil War (and lost!) to continue enslavement, embracing their statues, symbols of the Confederacy, claiming a right to preserve our “historical heritage.” Germans definitely are not proud of their 20th century enslavement and brutal extermination of Jews and others; Nazi flags, statutes and symbols are banned. So it hard to understand why so many “Americans” do not sympathize with those in our nation who have wanted to remove similar statues and symbols of slavery and their oppression from government buildings. As Trump champions retention of those racist works, knowing how divisive that issue truly is, the white power backlash feels empowered by his vitriol. 

On July 5th, and in apparent retaliation for those who have, lawfully or in defiant passion, have toppled statutes of slave owners and Confederate leaders, “A statue of abolitionist [and escaped slave] Frederick Douglass was ripped from its base in Rochester, N.Y., on the anniversary of one of his most famous speeches, delivered in the city in 1852… To a slave, Douglass said, Independence Day is ‘a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.’” Los Angeles Times, July 6th. White power has spoken. 

Which simply makes Trump’s focus on Ilhan Omar that much more critical. In his sparsely-attended Tulsa rally, “The president described Ms Omar as a ‘hate-filled, American-bashing socialist,’ warning she would have a role in shaping the country if Mr Biden were to win… This is despite the fact that the pair are on opposite ends of the Democratic Party - Ms Omar had been a prominent supporter of Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic ticket..” BBC It’s not as if Ms Omar has been free of controversy, stirring both Democratic and Republican ire challenging American Jewish support for Israel. 

But Somalia, still facing occasional attacks from the locally-hated Al-Shabab Islamic terrorists, is hardly the nation that the President might remember from films about the country. But then, where would he discover what it is like today, since he does not, self-admittedly, read to keep up with current events? Not even his daily intelligence briefing. 

Somalia it is not the anarchic nightmare of a country that President Trump describes. Somalia has changed. Mr Trump has not… “The impressive new National Theatre was unveiled just last week - there are fancy hotels, cafes and beach-side restaurants in Mogadishu and the city even has a literary festival, the annual Mogadishu Book Fair. 

“Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland, is one of the most peaceful cities in the Horn of Africa, with libraries, the Hargeisa Cultural Centre while the Hargeisa Book Fair, which has been taking place for more than a decade, draws in thousands every year…. And even though it has not been recognized internationally, Somaliland has held successive free and fair elections, making it the strongest democracy in the Horn of Africa…. 

“Since 9/11 there have been fraught conversations over the place of Muslims in America. Mr Trump often uses anti-Muslim rhetoric in his portrayal of good versus bad migrants, playing into these fears…. For the president, Ms Omar does not fit into his idea of a ‘good migrant’. The proud Hijab-wearing politician fought for her right to wear headwear in the House of Representatives, overturning a 181-year ban.” BBC 

This is the rest of the world looks at the America they once knew, the former leader of the free world and exemplar of equality and democracy, now the poster nation for hateful stereotypes, racism and a President who depends on white power support to garner his political backbone. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and the litany of castigation I get from overseas, including a lot of ex-pats, embarrasses me and for which I have no defense… except a hopeful, “we’re really not like him.”