Omar Ilhan Quotes

I grew up knowing that hard things only get harder when you don’t have real conversations about them.

The big lesson was that it’s possible to treat people as your equal even as you manage them.

Do I care enough? If so, then I don't care about what other people think about my presence in a room or conversation

I have no religious expectation of her or of anybody else for that matter. I’m a Muslim and live as such, but I’m also a humanist. Just as I believe in God, so also do I believe that we are all connected no matter our faith, belief in science, race, or country of origin. We all have an ability to enrich one another not in spite of our differences but because of them.

As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in - which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words. You belong here.

You can’t take away the past; you can only add to the narrative. There is a narrative about Muslims that already exists. I’m not here to undo or rewrite history. That is propaganda or an impossibility. What I, and others, can do is expand on the notion of what it means to be Muslim, continue the story line that survives alongside us.

Even in a realm as historically dogmatic as religion, I don’t believe one size fits all. Faith is a pathway to life, but not just any life. Your life. My life. And none of us lives the same life. To wrestle with belief is to apply it within the context of your own circumstances.

It's all about the Benjamins baby.

To know there was someone whom I could always count on but who also let me be whatever I wanted to be gave me more security than anything else could.

And yet I also rail against having every action I take reduced to a social construct stemming from my religion, stripping me of the complexities of multidimensional thought. I am a human, not a figurehead. I have always chafed at owning other people’s notions about my identities, be it what it means to be a mother or a member of Congress.

Although we witnessed the worst of human nature in Utange, we also witnessed the best of it. The greatest lesson I came away with from my time in the refugee camp is that your today doesn’t get to determine your tomorrow. Everything in life is fluid. Pride, strength, and responsibility—all of those notions are the domain of people in comfort and safety. When you’re facing death, you’re not guided by your importance or your past, and you certainly don’t worry about whether your pride is intact. Again and again, I witnessed that if you can push through whatever is happening today, tomorrow might be worse, but it could also be better. The only option for the human spirit is to keep going.

I fully got it. The hijab wasn’t about a piece of cloth or the battle against objectification. Instead it was really a symbol of the purity of my presence in the world. It makes sense to me that I need to cover pieces of myself to preserve who I am and feel whole. I’m centered by the hijab, because it connects me to a whole set of internally held beliefs.

When freshman Democrat congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib endorsed Bernie Sanders, they were chastised in both traditional and social media for throwing their support behind “an old white guy” rather than a woman. How is it that so many white feminists still cannot grasp the many factors that shape the politics of women from such diverse backgrounds?

Ilhan Omar’s 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States. It is a fertile base for both direct and online recruitment. FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.

My regimented food preparation was just one aspect of the environment I created in Fargo—where I was in control of everything as I saw fit. When I left Minneapolis, I was fleeing a family and culture that prescribed so many aspects of my life that I didn’t know where they ended and I began. Away from the confines of their judgments, I wanted to explore the full range of my reactions—to new people, new books, new music, new ideas. In North Dakota I found a space where for the first time in my life I was able to push all of the expectations away from my brain and focus only on what interested me.

The reasons for weaponizing division are not mysterious. Racial fear prevents Americans from building community with one another and community is the lifeblood of a functioning democratic society. Throughout our history, racist language has been used to turn American against American in order to benefit the wealthy elite. Every time Mr. Trump attacks refugees is a time that could be spent discussing the president's unwillingness to raise the federal minimum wage for up to 33 million Americans. Every racist attack on four members of Congress is a moment he doesn't have to address why his choice for labor secretary has spent his career defending Wall Street banks and Walmart at the expense of workers. When he is launching attacks on the free press, he isn't talking about why his Environmental Protection Agency just refused to ban a pesticide linked to brain damage in children. (7/25/2019 in the New York Times)

We are motivated by radical love of country. We fight for universal healthcare because of love. We fight for a livable planet because of love. We fight for equitable housing because of love. (7/31/2020 on Twitter)

Stop saying "we can't afford" Homes for All, Green New Deal or Medicare for All. If we didn't spend trillions on endless wars and tax breaks for millionaires, we could afford to house our homeless, care for our seniors, and save our planet. We suffer from greed, not scarcity. (7/29/2020 on Twitter)

In the US, even more obscenely vast gains during the pandemic have prompted calls for a windfall tax on super-rich tech titans to help pay for the economic recovery from the pandemic. Senator Bernie Sanders and Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, both Democrats, have introduced legislation dubbed the “Make Billionaires Pay Act” for a one-off 60% tax on the wealth gains of billionaires between 18 March [2020] and the end of the year to help working Americans cover healthcare costs. Under Sanders’ proposal, [Jeff] Bezos would pay a one-time wealth tax of $42.8bn, and [Elon] Musk would pay $27.5bn.66

Just a few months ago, the comedian Tom Arnold tweeted: “Imagine being Rand Paul’s neighbor and having to deal with @RandPaul lying cowardly circular whiny bullcrap about lawn clippings. No wonder he ripped his toupee off.” Within seconds, Representative Ilhan Omar had retweeted it, obviously gleeful that the attack had taken place. Nice, right? And they say Donald Trump is the one who’s vulgar, but they won’t say anything about Omar allegedly marrying her brother to enter the country illegally. Or, having an affair with a married paid staffer, or as someone hilariously commented on my Instagram feed, “She puts the infidel in infidelity.” Whether it’s true or not, she’s not exactly the moral authority the media makes her out to be.

Then there are the future leaders of the Socialist, I mean, Democrat, Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, or “the Squad,” as they’re commonly known, stand somewhere left of Chairman Mao. Their radical beliefs have real-world consequences.

Using South African apartheid–era rhetoric to defend the Israeli occupation remains alive to this day. During the 2019 Israeli election campaign, opposition leader Benny Gantz criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for banning US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel and the Palestinian territories. Instead, Gantz said, both women should have been allowed to see “with their own eyes” that “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel … and the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.” This was reminiscent of South African apart-heid leader John Vorster statement to the New York Times in 1977 that “the standard of living of the South African Black is two to five times higher than that of any Black country in Africa.”14 One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apart-heid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.

Ilhan Omar’s 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States. It is a fertile base for both direct and online recruitment.

The girl who had purportedly escaped a violent assault on her family home in civil-war-stricken Somalia, and departed the dangerous, ramshackle, jungle-like conditions of a Kenyan camp for America, was amazingly ungrateful.

In April 2019, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar received death threats after Trump tweeted a video falsely implying she approved of the 9/11 attacks.

Among them were Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Muslim women ever elected to the House. Rashida’s and Ilhan’s victories were more than symbolic for me, as I counted both women as dear friends. Not only had I witnessed their trials and watched them triumph, but the fact that Ilhan wore a hijab while Rashida did not was, for me, a beautiful expression of the independence and diversity of Muslim women. African American women, Latina women, and Native American women also won big on election night, most of them running on progressive platforms calling for health care for all, tuition-free college education, environmental protections, gun law reforms, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and refugees.

As we continue to perfect our union, citizens, neighbors, coworkers, and family must keep expanding our circles of self-interest to learn and relearn the fundamental truth that we are all connected. The more invested we are in one another, the better all of us ultimately will be.

The more we listen to and learn from those with different backgrounds and present circumstances from our own, the more we can find connections to our own lived experience.

I had suddenly discovered a great weakness I never knew I had in me. That weakness was allowing myself to mindlessly conform to family and social expectations without stopping to fully understand who I am and what my purpose is. I was the person I never imagined myself to be, the type of woman I railed against.

Even when his paternal worries kick in, which I know they do, he doesn’t belittle me with protectionist admonishments. “That’s my daughter, and I’m proud of her,” he says. “She is a full being. She gets to have autonomy over her decisions and how she wants to live.

I struggled with who I was—both to myself and to those closest to me. I tried so hard to be the good daughter, the good mom, the good wife, the good friend. But I began to wonder whom I had been trying to satisfy all those years. What was I living for? It wasn’t me. I had always felt like there were five hundred eyes watching me, and every single pair was looking to see if I met their expectations of who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to do. When I got married, the number of eyes only grew, since now my family had gotten bigger.

I always thought it odd when people created obstacles for themselves that got in the way of addressing an issue or being in a certain space. My guiding principle was “Do I care enough?” If so, then I didn’t care what anyone else thought about my presence in a room or conversation.

Your success and the success of others you inspire can heal your wounds. Of all the wounds I have suffered, this is the one that is most healed. Because everyday I see the system I fought against get dismantled by the people who use to feel so small but know now they too can be big.

It was a fascinating contradiction to both stand out and completely fade into the background at the same time. But being the first is all about contradictions.