FLASHBACK: Ilhan Omar Asked Judge To Show “Compassion” to ISIS Recruits
Richard Moorhead
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In 2016, Minnesota U.S House Representative Illhan Omar asked a judge overseeing the terrorism trials of 9 men charged with attempting to join the Islamic State to show “compassion” in sentencing them.
Omar was a Minnesota state representative-elect at the time, and deemed it necessary to write a letter to Judge Michael Davis, requesting that he show leniency to one defendant, Abdirahman Yasin Daud, in sentencing. Daud had been arrested as one of nine Somali men from the Twin Cities area who plotted to obtain passports as a mean to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State terrorist organization.
Prosecutors had requested a sentence of thirty years for Daud, and similarly lengthy prison terms for the other defendants who didn’t cooperate with the counter-terrorist investigation as government informants.
Omar saw this prison sentence as too punitive for the aspiring terrorist, and called for a more lenient sentence to imposed upon Daud and the other aspiring jihadis after conviction.
In Omar’s letter to Judge Davis, she asserted that “the best deterrent to fanaticism is compassion,” and that the government should “refocus [its] efforts on inclusion and rehabilitation.”
She went on to assert that the gravitation of the Somali youth towards the violent and terroristic vision of the Islamic state had come as a consequence of circumstances that left them no choice. “The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people — it is the consequences of systematic alienation; people seek violent solutions when the process established for enacting change is inaccessible to them.”
Omar’s apologism for nine wannabe ISIS jihadis is striking in its boldness and shamelessness- treating young men who actively sought to join up with one of the world’s most dangerous and bloodthirsty terrorist cults as if they were mere babies with a reduced measure of responsibility for their own actions.
Omar’s generous extension of good faith with the nine wannabe mujahideen didn’t seem to manifest itself in a recent episode involving a very different group of young men. Omar recently rushed to judgement to condemn the actions of the boys of Covington Catholic, who were falsely accused of harassing a Native American man in what has now been revealed to be a media-sponsored hate hoax.
Omar accused the boys of “taunting five black men-“ completely ignoring the fact that the five black men in question were members of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, a fringe supremacist cult. The men in question had in fact been the ones taunting the young high school boys, shouting profanities and sexual slurs at them in addition to racial abuse.
If only the patriotic young men of Covington Catholic were as worthy of good faith as nine men who sought to join ISIS, in the mind of the member of Congress from Minnesota.
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