The state that has imported the most Somali Muslims over the past 25 years has reached a historic milestone that may be a harbinger of things to come.
In Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the Minnesota House of Representatives, Ilhan Omar, a hijab-wearing Somali woman, defeated 44-year incumbent Phyllis Kahn and will likely become the first female Muslim legislator in U.S. history in November. The district is made up mostly of college students and immigrants, offering zero chance for her Republican challenger in November.
Omar escaped perpetual war in Somalia as a child and lived with her family for four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before being resettled by the United Nations and U.S. State Department in Minnesota. Now 33, she works as a community organizer, serving as director of policy initiatives at Women Organizing Women, “where she empowers East African women to take civic leadership roles in their community,” according to her website.
Among the six accomplishments Omar lists on her website is lobbying for passage of a city council resolution honoring Muslims in Minneapolis:
“Passing a Minneapolis city ordinance (the first of its kind) to allow businesses to extend their hours 35 days a year to honor, respect and accommodate Muslims celebrating Ramadan.”
In an interview with Knight Errant, Omar says she learned about politics mostly from her grandfather’s example and by “meeting with people from marginalized, predominantly immigrant communities.”
A Muslim and a feminist?
Omar is the current president of the state Democratic Party’s Feminist Caucus, which would seem to fly in the face of the beliefs of a practicing Muslim. Islam teaches the submission of women under men, and wearing the hijab is but one symbol of that submission. Women are counted as “half” of a man under Shariah law for purposes of inheritance.
Dr. Mark Christian, a former imam who grew up in Egypt the son of a Muslim Brotherhood operative, said the Brotherhood uses Muslim women in positions of authority in Western countries where Muslims are still a small minority.
“Every country is different. The Muslim Brotherhood, only in the U.S.A. and West, love to have women in a high level position to show how equally they treat women,” Christian writes in his booklet “Women and Islam,” but this is “a strategic tactic used to convince the world their women are not oppressed.”
But it’s a very different story in Muslim-dominated societies in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman, UAE, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Afghanistan, where women are typically not allowed to go out in public without being escorted by a father, brother, husband or some other male relative. They must be covered and are taught to “lower their gaze” in the presence of a Muslim man. To prosecute a man for rape requires multiple male witnesses, and if they can’t be produced the woman is guilty of adultery.
A Muslim woman also does not have the same inheritance rights as her brothers under Shariah.
Quran (4:11) states with regard to inheritance: “The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females” (see also verse 4:176).
Quran (2:228) states, “and the men are a degree above them [women]”
But feminism is not the only issue in Omar’s agenda that would seem antithetical to the principles of Islam. She also considers herself pro-abortion and LGBT rights while vowing to fight for “environmental justice” and “social justice.”
Omar gave two victory speeches Tuesday night, one in English and the other in Somali. She has lived for nearly two decades in the Cedar Riverside community, a section of Minneapolis often referred to as “Little Mogadishu.” It has the highest concentration of Somali refugees of any area in the country. They have been shipped there by the U.S. State Department’s refugee resettlement program and its taxpayer-funded contractors since at least 1994 and the arrivals continue to this day. Somalis are sent to America at a rate of 700 a month under the program, which distributes them into more than 200 cities and towns for permanent resettlement.
Praise from Democrats
Former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who endorsed Omar, told the Star-Tribune. “From a refugee camp to the State Capitol with intelligence and insight. This is a wonderful story to tell as Americans, and a great source of pride for the state of Minnesota’s open arms.”
Kahn also praised her opponent and congratulated her for the historic victory.
“Ilhan obviously ran a very good campaign and mobilized a lot of people that we didn’t see before in previous elections,” Kahn said after the results were in Tuesday night.
Khan, a Jewish-American woman, said her own election in 1972 had been historic and “this is a new historic event … our district is the home of historic events.”
Some Republicans say ‘We told you so’
But some Minnesota Republicans were not so giddy, especially those who have warned for years that the build-up of Somali enclaves would eventually lead to their political empowerment, which represents a whole new phase of what they believe is a campaign of cultural jihad.
Cultural jihad, also called civilization jihad in Muslim Brotherhood documents, uses America’s liberal immigration laws to infiltrate and take over through peaceful means, a strategy that’s spelled out in the “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” This seized document was entered by the FBI as evidence against the Holy Land Foundation during the largest terror-financing trial ever held on U.S. soil in 2007.
“The Democratic Party rejects the idea of civilization jihad as advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood,” said former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. “Who’s laughing now?”
Omar won her victory over two other candidates in a three-way race. Besides incumbent Kahn, another Somali, Mohamud Noor, also ran for the seat. Like Omar, Noor is also Somali-American and an activist in Democratic politics.
In November, Omar will face Republican Abdimalik Askar, a school teacher who political observers in Minnesota say has no chance of winning.
Jan Markell, founder of Olive Tree Ministries, a Christian radio broadcaster in Minnesota and co-author of “Trapped in Hitler’s Hell” with Holocaust survivor Anita Dittman, said she will be watching the political career of Omar closely but she doesn’t have high hopes based on the performance of Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress who is also from Minnesota.
She said many Minnesota Christians will be praying that Omar is “a productive part of our political process and not an advocate of Shariah law.”
Ellison swore his oath to uphold the Constitution on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran, sparking comments from his supporters at the time that “even Jefferson recognized the importance of Islam.” What they didn’t say was that Jefferson read the Quran so he could understand the mindset of the enemy Barbary pirates, who were plundering American merchant vessels off the coast of Africa. When Jefferson took office as president he sent the U.S. Navy and Marines to stop the pirates.
Read about President Jefferson’s defeat of the Barbary pirates and what he had to say about Islam.
Debra Anderson, the Minnesota chapter coordinator for ACT For America, a watchdog group that opposes Shariah law, said Omar’s election is just the first shoe to fall in what will inevitably be many conquests of Islam in her state as a result of the growing Somali enclaves not only in Minneapolis but in St. Cloud, Willmar, Austin, Owatonna and other cities.
“She believes America is oppressive, classic Islamic worldview,” Anderson said of Omar’s platform as laid out on her website. “Throughout, she uses progressive speak, policies that, if enacted, will ultimately promote the incremental accommodation to Islam.
“She is following the example of Mohammad: Settle. Seek power through politics. Once power is achieved, impose Islamic law.”
“Their extensive co-opting of American ideas and words overwhelm me. I don’t know where to even begin to counter their lies.”
Masters of deception
Former Homeland Security officer Phil Haney agrees that American Muslims operating under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood are masters of deception.
Haney, co-author of the bestselling whistleblower book “See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad,” said Omar is able to get elected in a liberal state like Minnesota by pandering to liberal causes.
“If the predominant political climate of America was conservative, they would support every conservative cause with just as much fervor as they are now supporting liberal causes,” Haney said of politically active Muslims. “These guys are master chameleons, and even though their colors are red, white and blue, they’re still chameleons.”
At the very least, Muslim legislators who swear on the Quran to uphold the U.S. Constitution, can be counted on to be solidly anti-Israel, said Markell.
Hatred of the Jewish people is embedded in the Islamic texts.
The hadith narrated by Abdullah bin ‘Umar says: “I heard Allah’s Apostle saying, ‘The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!'” [Volume 4, Book 56, Number 791]
Muhammad himself is recorded in the Quran to have beheaded more than 700 Jewish men and boys at the Battle of the Trench outside Medina in 627 A.D.
“A likely logical conclusion is that most Muslim legislators will never act on behalf of Israel,” Markell said. “I think this is a safe assumption and a tragic reminder that elections have consequences.”
Traditional non-Islamic Minnesota Democrats don’t realize their days are numbered, Bachmann said.
“Democrats don’t realize that Shariah-sympathetic politicians see the supplanting of the U.S. Constitution by Shariah, in addition to other U.S. laws, as their ultimate goal,” Bachmann said. “This isn’t far-fetched.”
Bachmann introduced legislation in 2014 to get the Muslim Brotherhood banned as a terrorist organization while she was in Congress but Republican leaders buried the bill. It’s been re-introduced this year, but Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have again buried the bill.
Wherever concentrations of Muslims have arrived, they continually agitate for Shariah-compliant accommodations, and that’s just a fact, Bachmann said.
It happened in 2011 on the federal level when 57 Muslim organizations banded together and demanded of now-CIA Director John Brennan that the White House purge all references to Islam’s connection to terrorism from FBI training materials, libraries and teaching curriculum, she said.
“They also demanded certain instructors be removed so teaching what motivates Islamic terrorists would no longer be taught to law enforcement,” she added. “Brennan was only too happy to comply, and it was done.”
In that instance the offense was criticizing Islam, which is called blasphemy under Islamic law. So teaching America’s law enforcement what motivates terrorists is now prohibited.
“Here in Minnesota Muslims demanded and received foot baths in higher-education bathrooms. They have prayer rooms in public facilities, halal-compliant food in public facilities, they defied zoning laws to build a mosque in an area zoned industrial.
“Today, there are at least 129 mosques in Minnesota, with more in the pipeline. There are at least 22 Muslim Student Associations on public college campuses, and approximately a dozen MSAs on public high school campuses.”
The federal district court in Dallas found during the Holy Land Foundation trial that MSA chapters were fronts for the extremist Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.
Minnesota ‘far down the road’ of cultural jihad
All of this means Minnesota is “far down the road of civilization jihad,” Bachmann said.
Another long-term Democrat politician was defeated Tuesday in Minneapolis by another refugee, Fue Lee of Thailand, though Lee is not Muslim.
“The Democratic Party may think they are brilliantly adding coalitions under their inclusive umbrella,” Bachmann said. “But they fail to realize their power will be quashed sooner than they can say ‘Shariah.'”
Markell said most of the Somali refugees remain isolated within their own communities and do not assimilate. And in the Twin Cities and surrounding area, “Somali gangs are more and more prevalent in our area and actively harass people and even threaten them.”
A gang of Somali men harassed and threatened to rape a young woman in Minneapolis’s Linden Hills neighborhood in July, as reported by WND.
“Minnesota’s generous welfare system welcomes many and we just want to see the various immigrants from Muslim lands show real appreciation for the new life we offer them,” Markell said. “It’s far better than the $200 a year some Somalis earn in their homeland.”