Stand by your sham: The name game

A few days after I started writing about Ilhan Omar on Power Line in August 2016 — after she had won the primary for the DFL state legislative endorsement — I was contacted by a source who agreed to discuss his knowledge of Omar’s family with me. At our meeting he told me that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — Omar’s legal husband, so to speak, as of that date — was Omar’s brother and that she had married him for fraudulent purposes. He wrote out the real names of Omar and the members of her immediate family as follows, specifying their locations as of that summer:

Nur Said Elmi (father) — Minneapolis
Sahra Nur Said Elmi (sister) — Minneapolis
Leila Nur Said Elmi (sister) — London
Ilhan Nur Said Elmi (Ilhan Omar) — Minneapolis
Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (brother) — London

At the 2016 meeting with my original source, by the way, I was given a screenshot of a 2015 Facebook post in which Mohamed Nur Said Elmi discussed Omar’s appearance in London and touted her prospective political career. On August 22, 2016, I accessed Mohamed Nur Said Elmi’s Facebook account and viewed a post celebrating Omar’s primary victory. When I returned to the Facebook page later that evening, the post had disappeared. Mohamed Nur Said Elmi appears to be another member of the family for whom we must account.

My source told me that Omar and another member or two of the Elmi family had entered the United States as fraudulent members of the Omar family. That would go some way to explain why Omar lacks any acknowledged relative with the name Omar.

Omar’s father goes by the name Nur Omar Mohamed. Sahra Noor (as she is known) was something of a public figure in Minneapolis. So far as I know, she is Omar’s only acknowledged sibling. Now she has returned to Kenya, where she seems to have been reunited with Ahmed, even though Ahmed and Ilhan are now divorced. Somehow the love abides.

Omar is said to be one of seven siblings. The Star Tribune says so, for example, in its big page-one story of June 23. Who are they? It is amazing that as of this date we have never heard from the mainstream media outlets purporting to cover Omar.

Despite its deficiencies, the Star Tribune story is a major contribution to the Omar story we have pursued now for three years. Star Tribune reporters Patrick Coolican and Stephen Montemayor seriously sought to confirm Omar’s public statements. They were nevertheless unable to find a single fact supporting Omar’s denial that Ahemd Nur Said Elmi — the man whom Omar legally married, so to speak, in 2009 — is her brother.

We have before us one Ilhan Omar. To ask a rude question, however, where are the rest of the Omars? The real Omars have gone to ground. No member of the mainstream media has noted the anomaly hiding in plain sight, among others.

Three years after I first met with my original source, David Steinberg drew on social media, documentary evidence, and other research to report the Omar story in detail for us in “Tying up loose threads in the curious case.” I link to David’s 2018 Pajamas Media columns with his preceding research on Omar in the introduction to his Power Line post. Following his own route, David arrives at the same facts and conclusions that were separately drawn to my attention in 2016.

Yesterday New York Post reporter Jon Levine noted on Twitter that Omar had just deleted a 2013 tweet wishing her father — Nur Said — a happy father’s day. Levine wondered why (tweet below).

Levine subsequently obtained a characteristically unilluminating statement from Omar’s office (see David Steinberg’s tweet below). Twitchy collected the amused reactions to the nickname edition of Omar’s name game. David Steinberg had the definitive reaction to the nickname edition of Omar’s name game.

On Twitter Jon Levine also credits the Star Tribune for its “incredible work” on the Omar story. The Star Tribune nevertheless came to the story three years late. Over those three years the Star Tribune overlooked substantial evidence hiding in plain sight while Preya Samsundar and David Steinberg did the “incredible work” that the Star Tribune acknowledged in a backhanded way in its June 23 story.

I interviewed Preya regarding her work on the Omar story for Alpha News for my September 2016 City Journal column “The curious case of Ilhan Omar.” Preya advised that she had routinely discovered the deletion of social media accounts related to Omar. “This is a systematic purge of online presence,” Preya told me. As David Steinberg aptly notes in the tweet below, Omar’s current statement fits into this context.

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