Last week, controversial US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar made a highly publicized visit to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), where she promised to ‘mainstream’ Pakistan’s concerns with India. Ilhan Omar, who champions herself as the face of the ‘anti-Islamophobia’ movement across the world, received a red-carpet welcome in the terror state of Pakistan.
The Somalia-born radical Islamist politician also visited Islamabad to meet the recently deposed Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan. She even praised former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan for his position on ‘Islamophobia’. In response, Khan also appreciated Omar’s ‘courageous and principled position on the issues of Islamophobia’. Apparently, Imran Khan had personally invited Ilhan Omar to visit Pakistan.
Later, she also met Pakistan’s President Sultan Mahmood Chaudhry and new Pakistan Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, where she reportedly discussed the alleged violation of human rights in Jammu and Kashmir.
However, the visit by the controversial Muslim lawmaker from Minnesota to illegally occupied areas of Kashmir did not go well with the Indian government. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Omar’s visit to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and had said that she should practice ‘narrow-minded politics’ at home.
In response, the United States government distanced itself from Ilhan Omar and asserted that Omar’s visit to Pakistan occupied Kashmir was unofficial and personal.
The visit by Ilham Omar to Pakistan, especially the PoK, has given away the suspicion that the US lawmaker is colluding with the deep state of Pakistan to further anti-India propaganda. Ilhan Omar’s meeting with Pakistani politicians to discuss Kashmir and the issues of Islamophobia comes amidst Pakistan’s several attempts to internationalize the issue of Kashmir.
Besides, Ilhan Omar’s visit is also seen as an attempt by the Democrat politician to consolidate her position as the leader of the ‘anti-Islamophobia’ movement, for which she is soliciting the support of Imran Khan, who was one of the first to peddle this rhetoric to further his domestic politics.
Who is Ilhan Omar?
Ilhan Omar, who was elected to the House of Representatives from Minnesota on a Democrat ticket, has achieved celebrity status in the Muslim world. Outside the global Muslim brotherhood or the Ummah, Omar is seen as someone running errands for the powerful Islamist lobbies, whose only aim is to push radical Islam in modern societies.
In fact, the origins of Omar, who hails from Somalia, have also been controversial. Omar arrived in the US at the age of 12 in 1995 as a refugee fleeing Somalia’s civil war. She became a citizen five years later, at the age of 17. In November 2016, she won the election to become the first Somali-American in the US Congress.
There are allegations that Omar married her biological brother to bypass the US immigration process. Former President Donald Trump had asked the Justice Department to investigate Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her brother and her subsequent migration to the US illegally.
Ilhan Omar’s history of bias against Hindus, a known anti-India propagandist
A representative of Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, has several times in the past parroted the same lies peddled by the radical Islamists. For years now, Omar has indulged in propagating anti-India narratives, especially targeting the Narendra Modi government, and has sought Biden Administration’s official help to further her propaganda war.
With support from other ‘left-liberal’ circles, both in India and the west, Ilhan Omar has been at the forefront of raking up the issue of Kashmir in the US House of representatives with a pro-Pakistan stand demanding US agencies to intervene in the matter. Omar has also peddled lies about the alleged attacks on minorities, issues of human rights, and freedom of speech in India, claiming that Muslims in the country are facing atrocities at the hands of Hindus.
Last year, in a US House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on South Asia Human Rights, Ilhan Omar had also attacked Indian journalist Aarti Tikoo Singh, who had testified before the US Congres on the Kashmiri Hindu genocide in the valley in the 1990s.
Ilhan Omar’s connections with radical organizations
Allegedly, Omar is a pawn of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s rulers. She also has ties with radical Islamic organizations such as Islamic Relief and Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), the sister organization of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Western branch of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a terror group that is banned in India. HHRD also has ties with Islamic terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan.
Ilhan Omar: A hardline Islamist, an anti-semite
Ilhan Omar is a known antisemite and has expressed steadfast support for the terrorist group Hamas. When the Israel-Palestine crisis broke out in 2021, Ilhan Omar sided with Jihadists to whitewash their crimes against Israel.
In 2019, Omar had courted controversy when she had defended the 9/11 terrorists by referring to them as “some people doing something”. She is also a proponent of the ‘one-nation’ solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which effectively means refusing to let Israel exist as a country.
Ilhan Omar was also under heavy criticism for her decision to refuse to recognize the genocide of Armenian Christians by Muslim Turks. By rejecting claims of genocide against Armenian Christians, she had claimed that the resolution lacked ‘academic consensus’.