The new (and continued) controversy with Ilhan Omar forces a new conversation on Somali refugees. After the latest round of rapid-fire tweets pushing historically vile myths about the Jewish people, it might be time for America to take closer look at its refugee communities. That begins with looking at Ilhan Omar and the Somali community she comes from.

Ten years after Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu, the 1991 Somali civil war forced her family to head for a refugee camp in Kenya where they spent four years. Along with her family, Omar arrived to the United States with refugee status in 1995. Omar was already a teenager.

Despite having predominantly lived in the United States, Omar still carries the broken value systems of some third-world countries.

If Minnesota’s Somali community elected Ilhan Omar as their representative, we need to to ask: What are the values of the largest Somali community in the Somali diaspora? Did they ever leave Somalia or did they bring Somalia with them?

As of 2015, 150,000 Somalis lived in the U.S., with Minnesota hosting the largest population because of the resources provided through a refugee-friendly infrastructure in the liberal state. Yet, we know that:

The Somali community is ripe with the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM);

An explosive story of daycare fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community was discovered when “the carry-on bags of multiple airline passengers traveling from Minneapolis to Somalia contained millions of dollars in cash, on a regular basis;”

This high-immigration population has made the Somali demographic vulnerable to Islamist radicalization. As the The Washington Times reported, “The State Department has helped to relocated tens of thousands of refugees … but the effort is having the unintended consequence of creating … a rich pool of potential recruiting targets for Islamist terror groups;” and

The young girls and women in the community are prone to dressing as orthodox Muslims, with hijabs and long gowns, indicating an unlikeliness of adaption or (more importantly) integration with an outside community.

Are we failing our refugee communities by allowing them to remain in the same states of minds, unchallenged and unacculturated as if they never left war torn regions or refugee camps.

Building a new life and discovering hope for the future isn’t simply about primal needs of food, shelter and security. It needs to be about something more; it needs to be about challenging the broken mindsets and broken patterns of behavior that in many cases gave birth to the ‘third world.’

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