Ilhan Omar is the endorsed DFL candidate running in next Tuesday’s contested DFL primary to succeed the former Nation of Islam hustler Keith Ellison in Congress. In the primary Omar faces former Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher and state senator Patricia Torres Ray. Today the Star Tribune endorses Kelliher and ranks Torres second of the three. Omar comes in third.
Attentive readers will note that this is how I saw the race in my take yesterday on the Fifth District candidates’ forum at Temple Beth El in St. Louis Park. Mark this down as a rare case of harmonic convergence between the Star Tribune and me. I don’t think the Star Tribune’s endorsement will help Kelliher any more than my favorable assessment of her, but at least it won’t hurt her.
The Star Tribune sits in the Fifth District and has several reporters devoted to covering state politics, but hasn’t found the time or space to cover the race or the candidates in anything like appropriate depth. The Star Tribune’s coverage has been pitifully weak.
Today PJ Media’s David Steinberg provides a case study in what the Star Tribune could and should have been doing over the past two months if not the past two years. Steinberg takes a deep dive into Omar’s recent divorce from husband number 2. Omar finally got around to divorcing husband number 2 this year in order to clean up the loose ends of the story I wrote about two years ago.
Steinberg’s findings seem to support my hypothesis that husband number 2 was Omar’s brother and that Omar had married him for some fraudulent purpose. Omar wouldn’t respond to Steinberg’s inquiries for this story any more than she would to mine or to Preya Samsundar’s two years ago and the Star Tribune is leaving her in peace. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
At Alpha News John Gilmore reports that “Omar apparently spent the penultimate weekend before the DFL primary for CD 5 not in the district of the Minnesotans she claims to want to represent in Congress, but with her co-religionists and terrorist affiliated CAIR in a three city fundraising tour of Southern California.” Maybe the Star Tribune will get around to this story after the primary, as it did in the case of Keith Ellison in 2006 (see the conclusion of my Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman”).
In the video below, Omar responds to moderator Mary Lahammer’s question on anti-Semitism at Monday night’s Fifth District candidates’ forum. What would Omar do about it? I take it that she wants to join the Jewish community in “alliedship” in fighting against “Islamophobia.” The video also includes Omar’s answer to the question (1) whether she supports a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and (2) whether she supports the anti-Israel divestment movement.
Omar is a difficult person to hear out. She speaks in vapid leftist cliches. When she speaks in this case, the old Bob Dylan song “Too Much of Nothing” comes to mind. When the question is whether to abolish ICE, adopt fully socialized medicine, or make college “free” for all, Omar speaks with far greater clarity.
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