The allegiances of Ilhan Omar

There has been of late a lot of wringing of hands about freshman Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar's accusations that American Jews have dual loyalty. Her tweets were seen as odiously anti-Semitic even by such knee-jerk ultra-liberals as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times; they pushed the Democrats into some soul-searching, they caused Republican legislative ire — and they made me wonder: where do Ilhan Omar's own allegiances lie?

After all, she herself is not exactly a descendant of the Mayflower pilgrims, steeped exclusively in American history and culture. She is a first-generation American, a Muslim immigrant who had come to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia. So is she herself as wholeheartedly American as her accusations that American Jews put America second imply? Is she indeed the true-blue American patriot uncovering and sniffing out the hidden treason, as her tweets would make us believe? Well, I think that today I found an answer. Representative Ilhan Omar said this of pro-Israel protesters at her CAIR speech: "I don't think any of them realize that people like myself and many of the people in this room could care less about what they have to say." Huh? Representative Omar thinks it is OK to ignore the people she supposedly represents? How democratic is such a disdainful attitude toward the governed? How American is it? It sure sounds pretty autocratic to me — clearly, her notions of governance have nothing whatsoever to do with the idea of a representative government, with the notion that she is but a voice of the people who elected her, to whom she had better listen. Clearly, Representative Ilhan Omar's underpinning instincts are undemocratic, if not outright despotic, in nature. So where are Ilhan Omar's loyalties? I think it is legitimate to question them, as she clearly has no gut allegiance to the American, representative system of government. It looks as if she is more at home with her native Somalia. So does Representative Omar have dual loyalty? I will not accuse her of that — because "dual loyalty" implies at least some measure of loyalty to American, democratic values. Yet her contempt for the people she presumably represents that he has none. Her speech at the Council for American-Islamic Relations surely illustrated her loyalty to Islamic America, but as to the loyalty to the United States of America, not so much. Or rather, not at all. Image: Leopaltik1242 via Wikimedia Commons.