As we noted last week, the state of Minnesota has given us a new Muslim Congresswoman – namely, 37-year-old Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis and surrounding urban areas, and who, after her election, publicly announced that, contrary to the impression she had left during the campaign, she is a firm supporter of the anti-Israeli BDS movement.
Elected to the U.S. House the same day was another female Muslim – Rashida Tlaib, age 42, who represents parts of Detroit and Dearborn Heights as well as several smaller municipalities. Tlaib, formerly a member of the Michigan House of Representatives, was the first Muslim woman ever elected to any U.S. state legislature. And she and Omar are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. (Omar wears a hijab; Tlaib doesn’t.) Suitably enough, they represent all or part of two of the most heavily Islamized cities in the United States – Minneapolis and Dearborn Heights.
Like Omar, Tlaib was celebrated by the international media throughout the campaign for being all these wonderful things: young, attractive, female, Muslim. What’s not to love? As with Omar, moreover, those same media have reflexively bought Tlaib’s self-characterization as a “progressive,” which of course even adds to her lovability in the eyes of the media. As evidence of her progressivism, they point to her membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.
Yet Tlaib is also a devout Muslim – in 2014 and again on November 17 of this year, she spoke at banquets held by the Los Angeles branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – and of course there is nothing at all progressive about CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood front group, or about orthodox Islam generally. until recently, moreover, Tlaib professed support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question; in an August interview, however, she stated that she was in favor of a one-state solution and a Palestinian right of return. Like Omar, she has also recently come out as a supporter of the BDS movement. At her victory party on Election Night, she danced while waving a flag. Not an American flag. A Palestinian flag.
The eagerness of Democrat voters in the upper Midwest to put people like Omar and Tlaib in office is disconcerting. But of course they’d already sent Keith Ellison, the current holder of Omar’s House seat, to Washington, despite his background in the Nation of Islam and his chumminess with Louis Farrakhan. And left-wingers all over America have embraced Linda Sarsour, a supposed feminist and leftist who has made clear her support for sharia law and for jihad. At this point, it seems safe to predict two things. One, the number of Muslims on Capitol Hill will continue to rise, despite their failure to distance themselves from some of the more uncomfortable aspects of their faith. Two, apropos of Omar’s and Tlaib’s switcheroos on Islam, it seems a fair bet that these are only the first of many about-faces that these two women will carry off as their careers advance.