ilhan omar

Sara Tyson

Ilhan Omar and the Politics of ‘Radical Love’

The Minnesota Congresswoman wants to redefine U.S. foreign policy as we know it.

by

Foreign policy is not an abstraction for Ilhan Omar. It is her life.

While Republican members of Congress propose to wall off the United States and many Democrats are shy about engaging with global issues, the Democratic Representative from Minnesota maintains a passionate sense of connection with the rest of the world. 

She is an immigrant, and a refugee. She is a Somali American woman who proudly identifies as an intersectional feminist. Her criticisms of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians have drawn a great deal of attention, including bipartisan rebukes. Yet little note has been made of the fact that this Muslim Congresswoman has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of human rights abuses in a number of predominantly Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Even less noticed has been her focus on poverty and injustice in Central America, and her ardent advocacy on behalf of women’s rights and LGBTQ rights in places like Brunei.

One year into her first term, Omar has adopted a global brief that has drawn vile attacks from the President of the United States and admonishment from Congressional Republicans, as well as a number of Democrats. She has faced immense pressure to fit into the neat categories where political and media elites consign new members of Congress, yet Omar refuses to conform. She is well aware that she is new to Capitol Hill, but Omar is not prepared to wait her turn. 

Rather, she is stepping up to express a deep, sometimes aching, often controversial concern for human rights, human development, climate justice, diplomacy, and peacemaking projects that might usher in an age of peace and shared prosperity. Her vision is of a “radical love” that extends beyond borders, and she maintains an even more radical faith in the willingness of Americans to think globally.

“I know we have it in us, right? We have always been aspirational,” the Congresswoman tells me during one of several conversations we had in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., this year. She espouses an eyes-wide-open internationalism that recognizes the threat posed by militarism and imperialism, and calls on the United States to embrace a whole new approach to foreign relations. 

“It’s a very American thing, to always want to excel,” Omar says. “We take pride in so many ways about our American being that I think sometimes it sort of fogs our view of the actual life that we’re leading here and what the world’s view is of us. I don’t really have that fog, and so I’m able to clearly express myself.”

Omar’s fierce determination to address “the human struggles” and “human aspirations in regard to our foreign policy,” as she puts it, has made her a disruptive force in foreign policy debates since she took office in January 2017. She has been cheered on by peace groups like CODEPINK and human rights campaigners such as Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), who says Omar’s “courageous voice redefines the political space for justice.” 

Even those who do not always agree with Omar recognize the Congresswoman as a uniquely engaged commentator on imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the danger of viewing global debates only within a domestic framework—issues that rarely get addressed in Congress. Her colleague in “The Squad” of new House members, New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, describes her as “one of the most effective voices right now at cutting through the authoritarian foreign policy tendencies of this administration.” 

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Omar recently endorsed for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, hailed the Minnesotan as “a leader with strength and courage.” Sanders has decried Republican attacks on Omar’s attempts to open up foreign policy discourse regarding Israel-Palestine and other hot spots as “a way of stifling that debate.” 

Support for Omar has also come from those who want that debate. When Omar was accused of anti-Semitism earlier this year for a controversial tweet she made criticizing lobbying on behalf of Israel, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street, came to her defense: “What I see is Republicans who, for partisan purposes, are trying to drive a wedge in the Democratic Party.” 

But these controversies obscure a larger role that Omar is carving out for herself. She is deeply engaged with her urban district, which elected her with almost 80 percent of the vote in 2018, and she has taken the lead on a host of domestic issues. This year, for instance, she has introduced major legislation with Sanders to address inequality by eliminating all student debt and to address hunger by providing three free meals per day for all U.S. schoolchildren. 

Omar is an active and engaged local representative. She loves holding town hall meetings, as I saw for myself when I attended her “Community Conversation on Environmental Justice” at the First Universalist Church in Minneapolis in May. The place was packed. Omar worked every corner of the room, greeting constituents by name, listening to them, taking notes about grassroots concerns regarding services in Minneapolis. 

Yet, Omar argues, “You can’t really speak to domestic policy without first having a conversation about our foreign policy.” So she has looked for every opportunity to insert herself into foreign policy debates. In this respect, she recalls the example set by former California Congressman Ron Dellums, who was elected in 1970 as a militant foe of the Vietnam War, and promptly jumped into a host of international debates. Dellums sought a seat on the House Armed Services Committee because he wanted to promote alternatives to war and militarism. He was initially rejected by conservative Democrats, labeled “an out-and-out radical” by Vice President Spiro Agnew, and added to the Nixon White House “Enemies List.” Dellums persisted, however, finishing his Congressional career two decades later as the committee’s chair.

Omar, for her part, went after a seat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and got it after meeting with the Congressman who would go on to become its chair: Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat who has been a consistent supporter of Israel. 

“I remember setting up a meeting, after I’d won my primary, with Representative Engel, and he said, ‘Why are you here?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re the possible chair of one of the committees I’m interested in,’ ” recalls Omar. “He asked what other committees I wanted to sit on, and I said ‘Foreign Affairs.’ ” That sharp focus appealed to Engel, who recalled that his own top three committee choices as a new Congressman were “ ‘Foreign Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Affairs,’ ” Omar said. 

Omar joined the prestigious committee and, while she and Engel have disagreed on major issues—such as her support of the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which was organized to “pressure Israel to comply with international law” in its relations with the Palestinians—he has rejected Republican demands that she be removed from the panel. 

Indeed, after President Donald Trump urged Israel to deny permission for Omar and a House member of Palestinian descent, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, to visit the country in August, Engel raised one of the loudest objections.

“You can’t really speak to domestic policy without first having a conversation about our foreign policy.”

 “It won’t surprise anybody that I have disagreements with Representatives Omar and Tlaib when it comes to Israel,” Engel wrote. “I probably wouldn’t have planned the same trip they did. But as I said to [Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron] Dermer yesterday, it’s a mistake for the Israeli government to bar entry of members of Congress into Israel. If Israel’s government hopes to win the support of American lawmakers across the political spectrum, then this visit could have been an opportunity to share views and make a case for why American support for Israel is so important. Instead, refusing entry to members of Congress looks like Israel closing itself off to criticism and dialogue.”

Omar now sits on the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, as well as the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. She has two legislative assistants who work on foreign policy, including Ryan Morgan, a well-regarded former Witness for Peace worker with extensive experience in Latin America. And she plans, during the next few months, to roll out a comprehensive proposal to radically alter the U.S. approach. 

“When I think about foreign policy,” she says, “we need something equivalent to the Green New Deal.”

During one of our conversations about her focus on international affairs, Omar told me: “When you do see members of Congress raising an issue, it often comes with an ask from some constituent, right? But for me, I am that constituent. I myself am that constituent who says, ‘Can you please speak about this?’ So I use my position of influence and the platform that I have to really give visibility to issues that are completely invisible on a world stage.”

Omar believes she can make the connections, shine the light, raise the consciousness of Americans. She is prepared to think big and dream the boldest dreams because she sees that as the way to make a future that is better than the past.

“For me, it isn’t just the mere conversations, it’s the kind of connected world that I see, and how—through policy—we can advance that connection or dismantle that connection,” she explains. “The advancement of that connection gets us closer to the kind of utopian world that I want—have always wanted—to live in, and want for everybody to live in.” 

Omar is not naïve. She knows politics. In the past decade, she has managed campaigns for others, forged policies and platforms, defeated an incumbent legislator in Minnesota, and won a highly competitive primary for an open U.S. House seat. She knows most politicians avoid terms like “radical love” and words like “utopia.” She is ready to explain what she means, but not to temper her ambitions. 

“It’s not the kind of utopia that is unrealistic,” she says, “but a world that has respect for one another’s differences, a world that has people recognizing each other’s humanity, a world that recognizes that my child’s pain is another child’s pain.”

There is nothing theoretical about the empathy Omar proposes. “One of the benefits of being [part of] a diaspora is that you have family in nearly every corner of the globe,” she says. “There isn’t really a country that I don’t have an extended relative in, or a state I don’t have an extended relative in. I mean, I could merely show up, I think, in Iceland and have people to put me up for a few nights because we are related somehow.”

The extended diaspora that Omar refers to is the exodus from Somalia on the horn of Africa. In the 1990s, the civil war there grew so violent, and so chaotic, that policymakers began to label the country a “failed state.” Roughly one million Somalis fled, settling in dozens of countries around the world. Omar was one of them. 

Born thirty-seven years ago in Mogadishu, the youngest of seven children in a family of civil servants and educators, Omar left Somalia when she was eight years old, at the height of the civil war. After living four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, Omar and her family came to the United States and eventually settled in the Twin Cities, home to one of the largest Somali diaspora communities formed over the past three decades. 

At a time when her own Democratic Party is very good at explaining what it is against, but not always so good at explaining what it is for, Omar has made it her mission to reframe the debate.

Omar’s is a classic American story of immigration and engagement. She learned English quickly and by the age of fourteen was attending Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party precinct caucuses as her grandfather’s translator. Those were the days when the late Senator Paul Wellstone made outreach to the Somali community central to his re-election bids, and Omar was soon drawn to progressive politics. 

For years, she worked behind the scenes as a campaigner, organizer, and activist before bursting onto the state scene with her election to the legislature in 2016 and then, in 2018, her successful campaign for the U.S. House seat that had been occupied for more than a decade by Congressman Keith Ellison, one of the first Muslims to serve in Congress. Along with Michigan’s Tlaib, Omar became one of the first two Muslim women elected to the House. 

Omar changed Congress even before her swearing in, by securing an alteration in House rules that allowed the new member to wear a head covering—her hijab—on the floor. But what she really wants is to change the debate about foreign policy by inviting the American people to the table. 

“There are all kinds of human rights reports that come out on a daily basis,” Omar tells me. “There are U.N. resolutions on a daily basis. None of those things really reach the American consciousness.” But what if they did reach the American consciousness? What if the debate was opened up?

Omar’s belief that Americans would, if informed, do right by people in other countries puts her in stark contrast to Trump and the “America First” fabulists who imagine that an isolated United States can stand apart. But it is not just Trump that she’s challenging. It is the narrow discourse, and the even narrower range of possibilities, that have been entertained in an era of transformative globalization.

At a time when her own Democratic Party is very good at explaining what it is against, but not always so good at explaining what it is for, Omar has made it her mission to reframe the debate. As a new member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she is using her considerable social media muscle (with several million Twitter and Facebook followers) and even more considerable energy (she’s held sixteen roundtables and town hall meetings on all sorts of issues since taking office and is a regular at policy forums) to focus attention on hunger strikes in Palestine, human rights abuses in Honduras, and “brutal regimes” in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

Omar asks Americans to “stand with the Sudanese people who are peacefully protesting for their democratic rights.” She has led her colleagues in expressing alarm at moves by the Indian government to “shut off all communications to, from, and within Kashmir” and to arrest hundreds of Kashmiri political leaders. The tensions in the region, she warns, “threaten the already fragile relationship between India and Pakistan, and an escalation of conflict between [the] two nuclear powers could have catastrophic effects.”

When prominent neoconservatives have appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Omar has grilled them relentlessly. Elliott Abrams, Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, felt the heat when he came to peddle his wares. 

“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” she noted. “I fail to understand why members of this committee, or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.” When Abrams proposed to respond, Omar silenced him, telling the envoy, “That wasn’t a question.”

In a political environment where attention is most frequently focused on petty politics and where domestic debates invariably get the most attention, Omar has chosen to engage in the daunting work of defining and promoting a progressive internationalism. She does not always get it right, as she has acknowledged. 

In February, journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their criticisms of Israel. It’s stunning how much time U.S. political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.” Omar replied, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” 

That drew an understandable outcry that led her to declare: “Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be willing to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity. This is why I unequivocally apologize.” 

Even those who have defended Omar have, at times, complained that the rigorousness of her approach isolates her politically and makes coalition-building complicated. In October, for instance, she voted “Present” on a House resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of a century ago, drawing sharp rebukes from many on the left. 

“My issue was not with the substance of this resolution. *Of course* we should acknowledge the Genocide,” Omar tweeted in response. “My issue was with the timing and context. I think we should demand accountability for human rights abuses consistently, not simply when it suits our political goals.”

Yet, Omar’s failure to support the resolution got plenty of pushback from thoughtful commentators, including Joe Eggers, the research and outreach coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, who argued that “recognition of genocide is an essential step in raising awareness of other episodes of mass violence.”

Omar is comfortable with discussions that challenge her assumptions. She respects the give-and-take. But what frustrates her is the inclination of commentators to stereotype her without engaging in the deeper discussions she is determined to have. 

“A lot of reporters have their article already written in their head. By the time you talk to them or they see a statement, it doesn’t really matter,” she says. “So the headline that they have written is that I have hate driving my policies.” 

While it is hard work to wrestle with complicated questions about how best to confront human rights abuses or whether the sanctions that U.S. policymakers are so inclined to impose on other countries do more harm than good, Omar insists that the nuances of foreign policy cannot be neglected. 

Take the sanctions issue, for instance. Yes, she acknowledges, it is often “good politics” to slap sanctions on a country with which the United States government disagrees. But, she adds, doing so is not invariably good policy. 

“The use of sanctions clearly can lead to crippling a nation,” she warns, “You can’t sanction people to death. And that is what we have been doing. We have better tools in our toolbox and we have to figure out how to use them.”

Despite her frequent forays into contentious debates, Omar is exceptionally easygoing and good-humored. She jokes about her fishing skills and her love of country music. Yet she has thought a great deal about her experience as a refugee who was forced to flee her home and as an immigrant who encountered racism and xenophobia after her arrival in the United States.

Ilhan Omar learned long ago to dismiss the haters and focus on the work that must be done, and she is confident in her ability to succeed where other House members have failed in reframing debates about Israel and Palestine, authoritarianism, and militarism. 

“I think as someone who is an immigrant, who has had a front seat viewing our foreign policy from a foreigner’s point of view,” she tells me. “I’m able to see it from both sides. I’m able to say, ‘This makes sense’ and ‘This doesn’t fully make sense.’ How do we tweak these things? How do we make sure that we are really living up to our highest aspirations?”

Sidebar - In Her Own Words: Ilhan Omar on the Issues

Military Spending: “We can fight to have our Green New Deal. We can certainly get Medicare for All. We can cancel out student debt. We can certainly pass our Housing for All bill. We can get a universal school meals program up and running. But in order to do all of those things, we have to stop policing the world, right? We have to not have over 800 military bases around the world. We have to not spend 57 cents on the dollar on defense.”

Faith-based terrorism: “Around the world, there are terrorists attacking people of faith in places of prayer. In a time of war, the only place you would seek shelter used to be in a place of worship because that was the place nobody would be so soulless enough to enter to take a life. Now you have people in the name of faith taking lives in a place of worship. That sort of stripping of morality and humanity should shake all of us to our core.”

Economic sanctions: “You can’t sanction people to death. And that is what we have been doing. We have better tools in our toolbox and we have to figure out how to use them.”

The plight of immigrants: “There is the possibility of death when you come across that desert border, but there is the guarantee of death when you stay. So that’s the choice people make, and that’s a choice my family made when they dragged me across a border at eight years old. My death would have been guaranteed if we stayed. As the poet Warsan Shire says, ‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.’ ”

Backing Bernie Sanders: “As a refugee who escaped war and persecution as a child, I am honored to stand with the son of a Jewish refugee who survived genocide. The acknowledgment of pain and suffering is personal for both of us. The fight for human rights is undeniable and when we recognize injustices of the past and present—whether it is genocide against Jewish people, Armenians, or Rwandans, or Bosnians, or Native Americans, or more—that recognition isn’t about punishing our political foes, but leading within a moral obligation.”

Her own public image: “I think there is really a clear, orchestrated effort to talk about me as the foreign member of Congress, and I am that. But there’s a reason I got elected and it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a refugee, an immigrant Muslim or woman, or black woman. It’s because I am someone who has a particular lens about how we approach policy domestically and internationally. I’m someone who is agitated about things, the way things work here.”