Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Representative Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia. As a child, she escaped the horrific conditions in her homeland with her family and eventually settled in the United States. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000 and won her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016.
Instead of showing gratitude to the United States for giving her the privilege of U.S. citizenship and vast opportunities in her adopted land, she claimed that the U.S. is turning into “one of the worst countries.” Referring to the Trump administration’s military parade, which celebrated the U.S. Army’s 250-year anniversary on June 14, 2025, Rep. Omar said, “I mean, I grew up in a dictatorship, and I don’t even remember ever witnessing anything like that.”
While Ilhan Omar was growing up in Somalia, her own father served as a senior officer in the dictatorship’s military, which killed tens of thousands of people living in the northern part of Somalia known as Somaliland. Whether or not little Ilhan personally witnessed the military’s genocidal campaign to stamp out the Somaliland people’s aspirations to restore their independence, it happened and is a matter of historical record. Still to this day, she refuses to acknowledge the genocide, much less any role that her father may have played in it as a senior officer.
Quite the opposite.
Although Rep. Omar is a naturalized citizen of the United States, she has referred to the current president of Somalia, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, as “our president.” (Emphasis added) “I call him uncle and he calls me his girl,” she said, adding, “Somalia is our home. It is our heart. We always think about Somalia.”
Rep. Omar uses her congressional platform to shill for the Mogadishu regime’s corrupt, authoritarian government of today, including its demand that the people of Somaliland continue to submit to its arbitrary rule.
“Somalia is one,” Rep. Omar said during an early 2024 address that she delivered to her Somali American constituents in Minnesota. “We are brothers and sisters, and our land will not be balkanized.”
Ilhan Omar, who has falsely accused Americans supporting Israel of dual loyalties, is guilty of dual loyalties herself.
As much as Rep. Omar loves the Mogadishu regime ruled by her “uncle” President Sheikh Mohamud, Omar hates Israel. She is quick to espouse the Palestinians’ cause and commit blood libel against Israel, falsely accusing the Jewish state of genocide, apartheid, and stealing the Palestinians’ land.
Rep. Omar has embraced the fake Palestinian victimhood narrative of the so-called Nakba (or catastrophe), which is what Palestinian propagandists and their supporters call the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. “Consider that 78 percent of their [Palestinians’] land was taken from them,” Rep. Omar falsely claimed on the floor of the House of Representatives.
President Sheikh Mohamud, like “his girl” Ilhan Omar, vigorously embraces the Palestinians’ cause for a state of their own while just as vigorously opposing Somaliland independence. He insists, like Omar, that “Somalia is one.”
By way of background, the former British Somaliland protectorate first gained its independence on June 26, 1960 and received international recognition as the “State of Somaliland.” Four days later, after the Italian-controlled Somalia territory, known as the Trust Territory of Somaliland, gained its independence, the State of Somaliland voluntarily joined a federation with the Trust Territory of Somaliland to form the Somali Republic. They agreed to Mogadishu as its capital.
But the State of Somaliland only agreed to this arrangement upon the condition that its people would be guaranteed certain rights. It did not take long for the rulers in Mogadishu, who increasingly treated what had been the independent State of Somaliland as a vassal territory, to blatantly trample on those rights. Resistance to the dictatorial regime by the Somaliland people in the north was met with ruthless attacks that devolved into genocide.
Dissolving a voluntary federation between previously independent states that one side has grossly abused is not secession. It represents the Somaliland people’s exercise of their right of self-determination to restore their independence after the suffering and humiliation that the regime in Mogadishu inflicted upon them. So, they declared their independence as the Republic of Somaliland in 1991, and developed democratic political institutions along with a stable economy.
Although the Republic of Somaliland meets the major criteria for international recognition as an independent state, for various geo-political reasons it did not receive such recognition from any country – until now.
On December 26, 2025, Israel became the first country to formally recognize the Republic of Somaliland as “an independent and sovereign state.” Israel – the country that Rep. Omar has falsely accused of committing genocide – is doing its part to give the people of Somaliland what they are due, decades after the real genocide committed by Somali military forces. The same military in which Omar’s father served as a senior officer.
Somalia requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to line up support against Israel’s action. Its President Sheikh Mohamud called Israel’s sovereign decision to recognize the Republic of Somaliland as an independent state an act of “aggression that will never be tolerated.” He added that “Somalia & its people are one: inseparable by division from afar.”
Naturally, the Palestinian leadership expressed staunch support for its stalwart friends in Mogadishu. Its so-called Foreign Ministry said that Israel’s recognition of an independent Somaliland state fits “Israel’s broader efforts to destabilize regional and international peace.” This is yet one more example of the Palestinians’ anti-Israel propaganda. They think they are ready for an independent state of their own but reject out of hand the right of the Somaliland people to restore their independence.
The Palestinians are far from ready for their own independent state, no matter what rationales and schemes the so-called “international community” contrives. The Palestinians have embraced terrorism and corruption while spurning multiple chances for a state of their own, going back to the UN’s original two-state solution set out in its partition plan nearly eight decades ago. They have failed to build durable governance and economic institutions that can stand on their own. They have wasted the opportunity to build a prototype state in Gaza after Israel unilaterally withdrew all its military forces and citizens in 2005. Instead, Hamas turned Gaza into a sanctuary from which to launch rocket attacks and execute other acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians, culminating in the horrific massacres, rapes, and abductions committed by Palestinian terrorists inside Israel on October 7, 2023.
In September 2025, Somali President Sheikh Mohamud’s office issued a statement boasting that Somalia “was one of the first nations to formally recognize Palestine as a state in 1988.”
Another way of looking at Israel’s recognition of the Republic of Somaliland as an independent state is that it proves the truth of the saying that “what goes around comes around.” Now Israel can say that it has become the first nation to formally recognize the Republic of Somaliland as an independent state in 2025. We will see whether any countries follow Israel’s lead in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Currently, many of the same countries that have rewarded the Palestinians’ embrace of terrorism by indulging their puerile desire for an internationally recognized state of their own have rushed to condemn Israel’s recognition of an independent Somaliland state.
To quote Moliere: “Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”
