Ilhan Omar trashes US city as more violent than the Somali refugee camps she fled to as a youth

Left-wing Rep. Ilhan Omar admitted that since fleeing the “armed conflict” in her native Somalia, she’s witnessed more of a similar type of violence living in the Democrat-run city of Minneapolis than she did temporarily living in an East African refugee camp.

“At the age of eight, I watched the kids I used to walk to school with … carrying assault rifles to kill each other and me. So I know what that kind of violence looks like. But I was fortunate enough to flee that and seek refuge in a refugee camp for four years, where I did not witness that type of violence,” she said.

“I came to the United States. For the first two years, I didn’t see any violence. My first year in Minnesota, I both saw a person shot at Peavey Park, dead on the floor, three weeks after my father and I arrived in Minneapolis. Six months later, I watched the Minneapolis police put 38 bullets into the body of a mentally disabled Somali immigrant who didn’t speak English.”

Omar added, “So six years I had the privilege of not seeing any violence, until I moved to Minnesota.”

Listen:

The congresswoman made the remarks while speaking on a gun violence panel at a Minneapolis high school this Thursday, according to the Star Tribune.

“Omar’s district includes all of Minneapolis, which continues to be plagued by gun violence and a pace of homicides this year that threatens to match or exceed last year’s number. There have been 45 homicides in the city in the first half of this year. There were 97 in 2021,” the Tribune notes.

Not mentioned by Omar were the circumstances behind the police shooting she’d cited. The shooting was of Abu Kassim Jeilani, a machete-wielding madman who’d threatened local police.

The shooting occurred after Jeilani, a Somali immigrant, was apparently seen walking the streets with his machete. Not only did he subsequently strike a police cruiser with the machete, but as the police surrounded him, he then “raised the machete” and yelled “Allahu akbar,” as reported by the Associated Press.

This isn’t to say Omar was wrong about violent crime in Minneapolis. It’s just that the police aren’t the problem — criminals are.

And indeed, violent crime in Milwaukee soared specifically after the emergence in 2020 of the “Defund the Police” movement following the death of criminal suspect George Floyd while in police custody.

“Halfway through 2020, on top of a deadly pandemic and rising tensions between police and the public, Milwaukee has been tormented by a homicide rate not seen in this city since the crack epidemic of the 1990s. As of the July Fourth holiday, 86 people have been killed in homicides in Milwaukee in 2020, which is double the number of victims at the same time in 2019, according to police,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported at the time.

“Should that number again double to 172 victims over the next six months, Milwaukee will face a homicide reckoning it hasn’t seen in recent memory. It would top the 165 lives lost in 1991, during the height of the troubled 1990s in which more than 100 people were killed every year and more than 120 were killed in nine out of 10 years.”

The congresswoman was a staunch supporter of the movement:

Then once crime began to skyrocket, Omar turned around and blamed the same police she’d sought to defund for all the violence.

“[T]he police have chosen to not fulfill their oath of office and to provide the public safety they are owed to the citizens they serve,” she said.

In addition to being a hotbed of violent crime, Minneapolis also has a record for being a hotbed of Islamic terrorism.

“More men and boys from a Somali American community in Minneapolis have joined – or attempted to join – a foreign terrorist organization over the last 12 years than any other jurisdiction in the country,” Fox News reported in early 2019, citing data from the FBI.

The data specifically showed that over the previous 12 years, a total of 45 Muslims had departed from the Minnesota city to go join a radical Islamic troop, be it ISIS or al-Shabab. And of this 45, roughly a dozen Somalis had left as recently as 2018 and some even reportedly in 2019.

“Both numbers are far higher than those of alleged terrorist wannabes who left or attempted to leave the country from other areas in the country where Muslim refugees have been resettled,” Fox noted.

As previously reported, Omar immigrated to the United States as an asylum seeker in the 1990s.

Vivek Saxena

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