Meghan Chao

Never forget: Ilhan Omar’s family didn’t flee Somalia as the oppressed. They fled because her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a senior colonel in the Somali National Army of the genocidal communist dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, the regime that systematically slaughtered up to 200,000 people, mostly Isaaq civilians, in one of the worst genocides in modern African history. Her father wasn’t some low-level nobody or a teacher who just happened to be around. He was an esteemed senior officer who commanded a regiment, trained in the Soviet Union, and stayed in the military hierarchy of that brutal Marxist-Leninist dictatorship for years. When the regime finally collapsed under the weight of its own mass murder, famine, and civil war in 1991, the family ran, not as victims of the dictatorship, but as people tied to the apparatus that had just spent years bombing cities, executing civilians, and turning northern Somalia into a killing field. Now this same family is in the US, where Omar stands up and lectures Americans about justice, accountability, morality, and “genocide.” The hypocrisy is sickening. A daughter of a colonel from the regime that carried out the Isaaq genocide has the gall to moralize to the country that took her in after her father’s side lost power. Her father came to the U.S. as a “refugee,” just like Yusuf Abdi Ali, who was accused of war crimes and later found liable for torture in a U.S. civil court. Yet, as far as publicly available information shows, her father never faced comparable scrutiny or accountability. Consider this: Ali was deported from the US only two years ago, after a survivor pursued justice through the courts. It took a survivor’s determination to bring his abuses before a judge and jury. That’s the record.