A Tale of Two Different Somali Women

A Tale of Two Different Somali Women

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia, is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, author, scholar and former politician. She received international attention as a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor violence, child marriage and female genital mutilation. She has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. She is a Fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Her activism and writings about Muslim abuses of civil rights, and particularly, women have resulted in a contract on her head, or Fatwa, by Muslim authorities.

As a child, Hirsi Ali had to move with her family to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, due to political turmoil in her own country and her father’s political background.  Ali was educated in Kenya at the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School where she was exposed to Islamic scholarship and religious life.  She was also exposed to Western culture and values in Kenya and began to lament what she saw as the rise of radicalized Islamic traditions imported from Saudi Arabia into East Africa. 

Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands in 1992. Once there, she requested political asylum and obtained a residence permit. Between 1995 and 2001, Hirsi Ali worked as an independent Somali-Dutch interpreter and translator, frequently working with Somali women in asylum centers, hostels for abused women, and at the Dutch immigration and naturalization department.  As a result of her education and experiences, Hirsi Ali speaks six languages: English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, and Dutch. After gaining her degree and work at another Dutch think tank, Hirsi Ali In 2003, aged 33 won a seat in the Dutch parliamentary election.

During her tenure in Parliament, Hirsi Ali continued her criticisms of Islam and many of her statements provoked controversy. She said that by Western standards, Muhammad as represented in the Qu'ran would be considered a pedophile.  In a 2007 interview in the London Evening Standard, Hirsi Ali characterised Islam as "the new fascism": Just like Nazism started with Hitler's vision, the Islamic vision is a caliphate – a society ruled by Sharia law – in which women who have sex before marriage are stoned to death, homosexuals are beaten, and apostates like me are killed. Sharia law is as inimical to liberal democracy as Nazism ... Violence is inherent in Islam – it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.

In 2007, Hirsi Ali received her United States Permanent Resident Card (green card).  She became an American citizen in 2013.  She continues to write and speak for civil rights and against repressive Muslim regimes.  She is under heavy security in her public appearances, since there still is a contract out for her.

Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (born October 4, 1981) is a Somali-American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Minnesota's 5th congressional district since 2019. The district includes all of Minneapolis and some of its suburbs.

Born in 1981, in Mogadishu, Omar spent her early years in Baidoa, Somalia. She was the youngest of seven siblings, including Sahra Noor. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, an ethnic Somali, worked as a teacher trainer. Her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, a Benadiri (a community of partial Yemeni descent), died when Omar was two years old.  She was thereafter raised by her father and grandfather. Her grandfather, Abukar, was the director of Somalia's National Marine Transport, with her uncles and aunts also working as civil servants and educators.   Escaping war in Somalia, she and her family fled the country and spent four years in a Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa County, Kenya near the Somali border.

Omar entered the United States in 1992. After first arriving in New York, her family settled in Arlington, Virginia. Her family sought asylum in the U.S. in 1995 and moved to Minneapolis. Omar's father worked initially as a taxi driver, later as a postal office worker.  He and Omar's grandfather emphasized during her upbringing the importance of democracy, and she accompanied her grandfather to caucus meetings at age 14, serving as his interpreter. Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old.

Omar attended Edison High School, and volunteered there as a student organizer.[19] She graduated from North Dakota State University with bachelor's degrees in political science and international studies in 2011. Omar was a Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

While she was in the Minnesota legislature, Omar was critical of the Israeli government and opposed a law intended to restrict the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. She compared the movement to people who "engage[d] in boycotts" of apartheid in South Africa. During her House campaign she said she did not support the BDS movement, describing it as counterproductive to peace. After the election her position changed, as her campaign office told Muslim Girl that she supports the BDS movement despite "reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution".  Omar has voiced support for a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.  She criticized Israel's settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.  In 2018 Omar came under criticism for statements she made about Israel before she was in the Minnesota legislature. In a 2012 tweet she wrote, "Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel."  The comment, particularly the notion that Israel had "hypnotized the world," was criticized as drawing on anti-Semitic tropes. The New York Times columnist Bari Weiss wrote that Omar's statement tied into a millennia-old "conspiracy theory of the Jew as the hypnotic conspirator". When asked in an interview how she would respond to American Jews who found the remark offensive, Omar replied, "I don't know how my comments would be offensive to Jewish Americans. My comments precisely are addressing what was happening during the Gaza War and I'm clearly speaking about the way the Israeli regime was conducting itself in that war."  After reading Weiss's commentary, Omar apologized for not "disavowing the anti-Semitic trope I unknowingly used".

On April 11, 2019, the front page of The New York Post carried an image of the World Trade Center burning following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a quotation from a speech Omar gave the previous month.  The headline read, "Rep. Ilhan Omar: 9/11 was 'Some people did something'", and a caption underneath added, "Here's your something ... 2,977 people dead by terrorism."

The Post was quoting a speech Omar had given at a recent Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) meeting.  On April 12, President Donald Trump retweeted an altered video which selectively edited Omar's remarks to remove context, showing her saying "Some people did something".  In context, Omar was expressing displeasure that Muslims were being treated as second-class American citizens: "CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us [Muslims in the U.S.] were starting to lose access to our civil liberties". In fact CAIR was founded in 1994, although it increased its advocacy activities after 9/11.  Some Democratic representatives condemned Trump's retweet, predicting that it would incite violence and hatred. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Trump to “take down his disrespectful and dangerous video” and asked the U.S. Capitol Police to increase its protection of Omar.  Others who criticized Omar for her comments included Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, who said, "You have to wonder if she is an American first", and Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted, "This woman is a disgrace."

Ray Gruszecki

April 16, 2019