Michelle Mostella

llhan 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 s|aughtered up to 200,000 people, mostly Isaaq civilians, in one of the worst genocides in modern African history. Her father 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 m*rder, 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 ki||ing field. Now... this same family is in the US, where Omar stands up and lectures Americans about justice, accountability, morality, and “genocide.” This 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. 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. Consider that... Also, compare this CNN investigative piece to the propaganda, lies, out of context, theatrical drama show they spew today. Big difference. This democrat larty is not your grandmother's democrat party... nor is this mainstream media your mother's media.