Ilhan Omar: The tabloid story, cont’d

Daily Mail reporter Martin Gould has been in town this week doing the work that the Star Tribune and the rest of the local press declines to do. I had lunch with him in Minneapolis on Wednesday to compare notes. He updates the tabloid elements of the Omar saga in “Ilhan Omar’s husband discovered she was cheating with her chief fundraiser when he walked in on the lovers lounging in pajamas – and now the congresswoman is paying ex $250,000 for his silence.”

Like the news of Omar’s 2009 marriage to her brother Ahmed Elmi, the news in Gould’s story today is out there for the asking in Minneapolis’s Somali community. It’s not hard to find. Yet the local press prefers to avert its eyes.

By contrast, the Daily Mail is the most widely read English-language news site in the world and it unabashedly feeds the interest in Omar and the “faith tradition” she invokes whenever it suits her personal purposes (as in the 2016 statement she concocted to account for her unusual family arrangements).

Yesterday evening Omar held the first in a series of Happy Hours with Ilhan at the local Du Nord Craft Spirits distillery. I can add that today Omar was campaigning in a local mosque. Gould’s story considers the contradictions.

The Daily Mail continues to assert that Omar divorced Ahmed Hirsi in her “faith tradition” before she married Ahmed Elmi in in 2009. This assertion has no basis other than the fabulations in Omar’s 2016 statement and I highly doubt its veracity.

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