A question that has been hotly debated since Donald Trump tweeted his now-infamous “go back” tweet is whether refugees to the U.S. — and especially Somali-born Ilhan Omar — owe a debt of gratitude to the country that took her and her family in.
Omar’s childhood was traumatic, beginning with her mother’s death when she was two. By the end of the 1980s, Somalia was torn apart by rapacious civil war. Omar, now seven or eight, recalls be awakened one night and told that militiamen were preparing to attack the family home in Mogadishu and that they must leave, according The Guardian. As the family fled, Omar says she remembers walking through streets strewn with debris and corpses.
The family took refuge in a refugee camp just across the border, in Kenya, where conditions were similar to the ones Omar now fancifully claims exist at the U.S. border with Mexico. “I would have loved to have heard a story like mine,” she told The Guardian. “I could have used it as an inspiration to get by. The lesson is to be hopeful, to dream and to aspire for more.”
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When she was ten, that dream came true. Her family had made it to the U.S. and three years later was granted asylum.
So how grateful has Omar been to the land of plenty that welcomed her and her family? She professes to love America, more even than native-born Americans. What she doesn’t like is the people, whom she thinks are ignorant. She also has little use for the ideals on which the country was founded, which she claims include genocide.
In fact, when you get down to cases, this woman seems to detest America. She said in May that the answer to combating Islamic terrorism was compassion. In another interview, she went further, maintaining that the real terrorist threat is — you guessed it — white people. She went so far as to suggest that if the authorities are going to profile anyone, maybe it should be white Americans.
Irrefutable evidence that @IlhanMN is a dangerous racist & bigot. RT #QAnon #Q #qanon pic.twitter.com/EeSPPxMqqJ
— QAnon’s Pastry Chef (@QAnonPastryChef) July 24, 2019
That’s gratitude for you.
