In the category of mailbag poison, this entry is almost not worth the time if we were to measure by wordage. However, it’s not the wordage, but the amount of illicit poison to the Union which is important, so let’s take a quick look.
You would think the national media would at least make a token effort to investigate this. Oh, I forgot, she is a Democrat and they get a way with everything.
The “she,” in this instance, is Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who is a Representative to the Minnesota State House for District 20B in her first term, and who is a candidate to succeed Congressional Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) in the upcoming mid-term elections. It’s important to know that Omar is a refugee from Somalia, the child of a Somalian father and Yemeni mother. Evidently she moved here when young, as she attended (graduated?) Edison High School, and then went on to North Dakota State.
And the subject of the report at the link? Her alleged marriage to her own brother.
Is it true? MinnPost is a Minnesota-based investigative journalism site, so they took a look back in 2016, when she had won the primary race for the Minnesota House seat, into this alleged bit of incestuous relations, and what did they find?
Last week, Ilhan Omar made national headlines after her historic win over longtime Rep. Phyllis Kahn and fellow Somali-American Mohamud Noor in the DFL primary race for House District 60B. In the heavily Democratic district, the primary victory put the 33-year-old mother of three in position to become the first Somali-American elected to a state legislature anywhere in the United States.
A little more than week later, however, she found herself on the hot seat after conservative blog Power Line questioned whether Omar was married to two men: Ahmed Nur Said Elmi and Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children.
The Star Tribune then followed up, looking into Omar’s marital records, which revealed that Omar has been legally married to Elmi since 2009, and that she has never been legally married to Hirsi. Yet the paper also found that there was no evidence to support another of the charges raised in Power Line’s original report, that Elmi is Omar’s brother.
Note that the local StarTribune is referenced as also checking into these rumors. MinnPost also offers an FAQ for those who want more detail about her relationships, children, and marriage license situation as of that date.
Of course, it’s important to be aware of your sources, and while I know of MinnPost, I don’t use them, so I’m not sure as to the quality of their reporting. The StarTribune is better known for investigative reporting, but like many large city newspapers, they’ve suffered hits of late.
But there are other routes to judging the veracity of a report – when it’s been removed by the publisher. In this case, though, it’s not MinnPost doing the removing, but the news site that published the muckraking report in the first place – Fox 9. Another local newspaper, City Pages, has the report:
It was [Fox 9 reporter Tom] Lyden who pounced on a blog post that accused the 33-year-old Somali-American of bigamy and possible immigration fraud.
Since then he’s been attempting to pick away at the scab of what he’s reported as a “controversy.” The latest controversy to grow out of the Ilhan Omar coverage is one of Lyden’s own making.
“Feds looking into Ilhan Omar’s marriages,” read the headline on a story appearing on KMSP-TV’s [aka Fox 9] web site Monday. …
According to Lyden’s story, Andrew Luger, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, had “asked the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to look into Ilhan Omar’s marriages.”
But Lyden’s digging went from scoop to oops by the end of business Monday. Fox 9 has scrubbed the story from its site after serious doubts were raised about the report’s veracity. Those doubts came from Andy Luger himself.
On Monday, Luger emailed Omar’s attorney to put in writing what he’d apparently said earlier by phone. “[T]here is no truth to this report,” Luger wrote, “and my office is not investigating, nor have we requested an investigation into Ms. Omar.”
Yes, it’s a classic xenophobic smear job. In a sense, Omar finds herself treading the same honorable road as did the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and many other ethnic groups that now make up the background noise of our State and Nation, but were once viewed with suspicion and outright hostility by the locals, whose main virtue was they got here first. The newcomers are accused of whatever happens to be handy for inspiring nausea and revulsion in the locals: witchcraft, eating their children, sleeping with their brothers, sleeping with the locals’ wives, they’ve all been used and all have worked with our ancestors.
But in today’s world, as fast as a lie can go around the world, the turtle of truth can at least get his scaly head out there to shout out the facts.
It’s also worth noting the lengths to which those who would distribute lies, who wish to manipulate the naive for their own ends, will go. First, the contemptible content of the mail, suggesting the media is ignoring controversies involving Democratic darlings, while victimizing the Republicans.
THIS IS HOW YOU SOW DIVISIVENESS. As my research shows, the local traditional and new media did investigate and found nothing substantive. But it’s important to the author of this poisonous little missive to keep his readers in the echo chamber of conservative media, so he seeks to cast anything he doesn’t approve of as being biased towards the non-conservative. It’s a classic divide-and-conquer strategy characteristic of those who would divide and destroy the greatest nation on Earth.
Second, if you follow that link, you’ll find yourself at a site called TrueDaily. Beyond a name that would suggest to the naive that it only deals in truth, a quick look at the menu shows that it’s married itself to the Trump tradition of destroying anything that may impair the Trumps from making money: a link to Fake News. I’m sure anything that might impair what TrueDaily’s editors see as the conservative narrative ends up labeled as Fake News. It’s an easy way to corral the naive reader onto the path the editors desire them to take, rather than subject themselves to possibly damaging comparisons by the discerning and independent reader.
A conservative reader may be raising their finger now, asking why MinnPost, or the StarTribune, has a grip on the truth not available to TrueDaily. Out of context, this is a fair question; but discarding context robs the careful, independent reader of important information.
MinnPost conducted an investigation, noting there was no evidence of an illicit sexual relationship, but also noting her personal relationships are a bit of a mess, with two divorces and one or more civil marriage licenses apparently not completed. They noted the StarTribune, who may have more resources, also found nothing. Their complete information advances their cause.
A careful reader may also note that this story, despite the lack of a date in the mail, comes from MinnPost in 2016. If it had any sort of truth to it, the author should have turned his evidence over to the relevant governmental authorities for prosecution, and by now Omar would have been discredited and no longer in the public eye, not heir-apparent to Ellison’s political seat. TrueDaily’s date on their “news”? 2018. Yeah, two years later.
But the capstone, as I’ve already noted, is Fox 9 removing the story. This has the following consequences:
- It verifies MinnPost’s reporting;
- Ditto StarTribune’s;
- It confirms TrueDaily not as a dispenser of truth, but as a classic Fake News site, best ignored by the reader who thirsts for truth over ideology;
- And, most importantly, it removes the mud thrown at state Rep Omar.
The lesson here? If you swallowed this story credulously whole, perhaps you should inquire as to whether your prejudices make you vulnerable to the manipulation routinely employed by fake news sites, such as TrueDaily.
