Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Baseless, Degrading, Unverified, and Quite Possibly True
A reporter asked President Trump, “if the administration was looking into possible immigration fraud committed by Ilhan Omar for possibly marrying her brother.”
Trump replied, “Well, there’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it, I hear she was married to her brother. You’re asking me a question about it. I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s somebody who will be looking at that.”
This rumor has been around for a while and one would think it is something that would be easy to disprove if false. You could show pictures of your brother and husband, marriage records showing different names, etc., but we have not seen much effort by the press to clarify this. Reaction to the fact that Trump even acknowledged this reporter’s question look like this:
Saying it is “baseless” is nice, but did anyone actually do any investigation on this? It looks like some people did and it is not some simple political attack. I do not know all the facts, but the guys at Powerline have been looking into this for some time now. This article shows lots of reasons to be suspicious. Too much for me to summarize but check out the whole article on Powerline. Whatever the truth is, this does not appear to be a baseless conspiracy theory . . . or does it?
Yeah well barring a change in the constitution she can’t be president.”Natural born” thing. Of course we’ll never know for real if Obama qualified. Funny thing. All his past records seem to be sealed and unavailable to this day. The ultimate Mystery Man.
Unless your name is “Trump”.
I am reasonably persuaded that Obama was born in the United States and, in any case, his Mum was absolutely American. I don’t think (as I once did) that the question itself was ridiculous, given “the author was born someplace exotic!” business on his original book jacket. But it was not impossible to answer the question, and the question was, in fact, answered. Perhaps not in enough detail to satisfy the genuine skeptic, but close enough for me.
And if these reporters were targeting some random Somali woman with these accusations—you know, the way one might be inclined to do had she taken to praying outside an abortion clinic or something— I’d agree that it smacked of bullying.
But she is a United States Congresswoman, one who makes a “thing” of her biography. It is perfectly reasonable to investigate that biography and, when there is evidence that something fishy has gone on, to continue to investigate it.
You, Zafar, or any of her other admirers can counter the charges on her behalf—“people call each other brother and sister all the time!” etc., but as far as I know, Ms. Omar has not done this herself.
Again: would you be as swift to leap to her defense had she been a Polish-American Republican Christian?
I hope so GD, but on Ricochet nobody would have been attacking her. IMHO.
(If Omar speaks Somali she probably does do that quite a lot, actually. We do it in Hindi, they do it in Arabic. It’s not uncommon. )
What I mean is that she hasn’t given an interview in which she explained the brother sister thing and all the other fascinating features of Somali culture like lying on your taxes and hating Jews.
no one in the present conversation is attacking ms Omar. For that matter an investigation is not an attack. Your phrasing rather proves Kozaks point.
Obama teased out that citizenship thing for years. As a benefit, he was able to tar his opponents as ‘birthers’ regardless of their beliefs.
It is just possible that Omar is doing something similar, that American politicians need a potential scandal to use as a laser pointer to help control the news cycle.
Edit: Redundant as Zafar made these very points himself.
Thanks for the reminder. We can think whatever the heck we want . . .
Worked for Ralph Northam
If they would submit to DNA testing it could be disproved pretty quickly.
Wait…what?
You mean that if a black immigrant woman has committed felonies, and conservatives object to her having committed felonies, they’re losing the culture? So we should let the crimes of immigrant black women slide because of the optics, or what?
The culture I am hoping to restore is the one where the rule of law applies to everyone.
Last time a Democrat tried to use DNA to disprove a scandal it proved to be 1023/1024ths ineffective.
Yeah, this is standard operating procedure for the MSM as per Iowahawk;
This really may be how Conservatives see what this is about.
But clearly, a lot of people in America see it differently also.
I am not American, but I am progressive, and my first take (which is completely subjective, like everybody else’s) is:
Politically it is an Age of Disruption; it probably needs to be.
On one side of the spectrum that has produced Donald Trump; many of the responses to him have been predictable – and (equally predictable) viscerally antagonising for the people who saw and felt the need for this disruption and who supported him. These manoeuvres have consolidated his support, and continue to do so, although they may not expand it.
On the other side of the spectrum the AOD has produced a number of actors – most media visible among them “The Squad”. And responses to that seem also predictable, and also similarly antagonising to the social wave that put them (and people like them) in Congress.
Progressives will not win the culture by being *CoC*hats about Donald Trump. Even if they raise legitimate questions, they score self-goals by raising them in an atmosphere of hysteria and lynchmobbery, or illogical/incomplete arguments based on rumour and innuendo (I’m thinking Hookerpeegate, with the caveat that I’m a total fan of that story – as entertainment).
Admirable.
That’s what ‘they’ claim they more or less want too, isn’t it? If you ask them?
Well, no.
Being mired in several progressive “communities,” I can say that they never, ever talk about wanting the rule of law to apply to everyone, nor is that implied in their conversation or (Lord knows) their behavior. I offer, as an example, notes taken by a progressive Unitarian Universalist (but I repeat myself) on a recent meeting at the General Assembly:
Right relations committee chastised Roberts Rule of Order for promoting white supremacy and not being inclusive of diversity.
This years Distinguished Service Award was not given out because the nominees were not diverse enough to represent the communities we want to have.
Agree.
Is this about equality?
what would they say if asked about the rule of law?
Go read the Powerline articles. They have been providing copious documentation regarding her filing tax returns (Federal forms under the penalty of perjury) as if married to one man, while actually being married to a different man.
Oh, and people who say things like “there should be clear rules that apply to everyone” are instantly accused of White Supremacy. Or White Fragility.
This, by the way, is the document usually referred to when describing what “White Supremacy culture” is. If it weren’t for the title at the top of the page, wouldn’t it strike you as a list of management skills and strategies?
Yeah, it looks like a guide to really bad management. Or at least stunted management, because one dimensional.
I don’t get what it has to do with whiteness, but….??
It’s the married to her brother thing which seems like a crazy claim, on par with Birtherism, and of course the one which gets the attention but also which thereby colours the whole issue and the people who raise it.
You can make what you will of (I repeat):
Progressives will not win the culture by being *CoC*hats about Donald Trump. Even if they raise legitimate questions, they score self-goals by raising them in an atmosphere of hysteria and lynchmobbery, or illogical/incomplete arguments based on rumour and innuendo (I’m thinking Hookerpeegate, with the caveat that I’m a total fan of that story – as entertainment).
Right. Like Trump’s are?
Exactly! And yet this is what we are directed to when we ask what the heck “white supremacy culture” is.
Let me frame it not according to peculiarities of Somali cultural expression, but according to plain old human nature.
A girl escapes, with her family, from a truly terrifying, violently dysfunctional country. She spends some time in a refugee camp which, though presumably better than her country of origin, is still pretty unpleasant. The hope—surely discussed at length around whatever the camp offers for a dinner table—is for emigration to America or Western Europe.
The girl’s family contrives to have three of its members emigrate/escape by pretending to be part of a different family. The girl would not only have known about the subterfuge, but would have to participate in it—for example, by answering to the new surname. The trick works. The girl arrives in the United States. Meanwhile, the rest of her biological family has landed in England. They keep in touch.
At some point, the possibility that the girl’s brother could come to the U.S. arises.
It would be relatively easy and more remunerative for him to do so as the spouse of an American citizen. It would be impossible as the mere, British acquaintance of one. Remember, he’s not supposed to be a relative.
The girl—now woman—has a partner to whom she is “married” but luckily not legally.
The woman’s family has already lied so as to exploit the “family” loophole in American immigration law. They got away with it. Apparently, lots of immigrants in similar circumstances had done the same.
So why wouldn’t they do it again? Is there some culturally-specific more that would allow the first lie but not the second?
Lets recall, also, that the young woman and her brother were raised in—presumably—pretty desperate circumstances in which survival has been the problem and priority. In such circumstances, a certain moral relativism naturally takes hold, even when everyone involved begins as a reasonably good, rational person. That sense of relativism and rules-are-meant-to-be-broken doesn’t go away just because one has spent a few years in safety.
Moreover, even otherwise decent, law-abiding, non-traumatized American citizens will cut corners or make small “adjustments” to their biographies in order to avail themselves of opportunities, or avoid paying penalties imposed by what seem to them irrational rules.
They’ll claim to be Cherokee to get a coveted teaching job. Or say that a studio apartment in Jacksonville is their primary residence just so as to pay Florida’s income tax rather than Maine’s, or keep a pied a terre in Sacramento so their kid can apply to the UCal system as a Californian.
I’ve seen single mothers go to elaborate lengths to hide the live-in father of their children so as not to forsake welfare benefits, and I’ve even read of mothers who train their kids to “act retarded” so Mom can get that extra “disability” bump in the monthly check. (Why would anyone do such a strange thing? Why indeed…)
And I’ve spoken elsewhere about the day a woman working for the Social Security office instructed my disabled loved one in the art of circumventing income and asset restrictions —which basically meant “acting retarded” at least on paper.
No one is arguing that Ilhan was involved in an actual, incestuous relationship with her brother. They are saying that there is evidence not of moral turpitude but of legal fraud. Given that she is, at the moment, an elected law-maker, it seems reasonable to expect that this would be investigated for her as it would and should be for anyone else.
GD – it is one possible sequence of events but it is (1) not proved and (2) there is also no proof that this guy was her brother.
It was also possible for Obama to be born in Kenya and then be smuggled into the US by his mother, but similarly (imho) farfetched and also not proved.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that I noticed in the Powerline article is the background discussion of fraud in the efforts of Somali asylum-seekers in the 1990s, including Omar. I understand that she was a child at the time, and I understand (intellectually) the difficult situation faced by refugees, but I found this quite appalling. This makes me very concerned about fraud in our immigration system generally.
Omar’s possible subsequent fraud, as an adult, entering into what appears to be a sham marriage with a many who might be her biological brother, increases my concern about widespread fraud in our immigration system.
I wonder about the percentage of immigrants who commit fraud in order to get into the country. It makes me disinclined to permit any immigration.
I’m not going to take a complete anti-immigration stance, because I really like Mark Steyn, Niall Ferguson, and Charles C.W. Cooke.
In a pilot program, approximately 30% of rapid DNA tests of immigrant adults who were suspected of arriving at the southern border with children who weren’t theirs revealed the adults were not related to the children, an official involved in the system’s temporary rollout who asked to be anonymous in order to speak freely told the Washington Examiner Friday.
Ya think ?
I think originally there was some confusion because her brother’s name was similar to the name of the man she married and then left to live with another man – the one she claimed was her husband on her tax forms.
There are so many issues that a skeptic can judge simply by noticing whether there is or there is not any effort at all to pursue certain investigations. This is not the only case I am thinking of – there are many other, much more major ones and never do any of those involved manage to do anything but slander the conspiracy theorists who bring the issues up.
When slander is the only response, be afraid. In some cases be very very afraid.
By the way, here’s a really wacky subterfuge by an American woman running for office: https://www.breitbart.com/health/2019/07/20/florida-democrat-admits-she-lied-about-treating-pulse-shooting-victims/.
People are cray-cray, Zafar. And, again, there doesn’t need to be proof. There just has to be a reasonable suspicion. If this had been investigated by either the authorities or a newspaper and found to be nonsense, Ilhan would say so. If there was another, better, more innocent explanation for the pattern described in the Powerline article, Ilhan would offer it. In fact, she’d be rubbing our noses in it.
Why should she have to answer the questions? Because she’s a public servant.