The Attacks On Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib Don't Surprise Young Muslim People

By Khushbu Shah


several days immediately after President Donald Trump used Twitter to attack Representative Ilhan Omar on April 12, the Minnesota Democrat noticed herself on the procuring end of even more death threats than in recent months. Days later, on April 20, Huda Fahmy met Omar at the Changemaker Summit hosted by Mu Delta Alpha, the initial Muslim sorority, in Texas. It turned out, the Congresswoman was much less fazed by the violent threats than was the woman meeting her.


“It was so powerful to be able to see her,”  Fahmy told MTV News. “There were death threats and she was like, ‘So what? … Don’t worry, this doesn’t bother me.’ She was so chill, and was like, ‘God, put me here for a reason.’”


Though she has only been in office for four months, Rep. Omar and her friend Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib have arguably been subjected to more scrutiny than some politicians receive during their entire careers. Much of that scrutiny and censure attempts to weaponize their identities, given that each woman has a background that makes her singular in Congress. Rep. Omar is a Black Somali-American, and came To America as a refugee whenever she was 12; Tlaib is of Palestinian descent — and with each other, they are the opening Muslim ladies to serve as members of the Home of Representatives.


In the last few weeks, Rep. Omar has been made to defend herself against President Donald Trump’s call for her to resign, forced to repeatedly apologize for her controversial comments about Israel, defend out-of context comments about Islamophobia In America right after 9/11 that landed her on a unapologetically racist and xenophobic New York Post cover, and assert her status as a American in ways that few white politicians ever have.


Once Tlaib called for Trump’s impeachment — with an expletive — hours immediately after her inauguration on January 4, reactions included references to her identity in ways that seemed especially pointed. The Christian Broadcasting Network called her a “foul-mouthed Islamic Congresswoman,” and described how she showed up to Congress in an established “Palestinian dress,” although what she wore has no relation to the story.


Rasha Mubarak of Orlando, Florida, thinks Representatives Omar and Tlaib are among the few politicians in office now who have been consistent in their beliefs. She calls them “bold, unapologetic, unconditional [and] unwavering,” and believes that because they put people over politics — that alone scares folks on both sides of the aisle.


“This nation can't stage name a Muslim woman, especially a Black Muslim woman, who stands firm in what she believes and doesn't fold to what more customary white people tell her is the correct way to do things,” Tesay Yusuf, who lives in Austin, tells MTV News. As a black Muslimah herself, she relates to Rep. Omar’s presence in Congress in particular. While Yusuf loved growing up in a diverse community in northern Virginia, she admits it did get exhausting in college “to be the only or one of very few Black Muslims in that space.”


For Kifah Shah, who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, several of the reactions towards the two ladies remind her of growing up as a Muslim girl in a majority non-Muslim community. It’s also emblematic of a larger scope of intolerance and ignorance towards Islam as a whole: “With mostly white people, [life] immediately after 9/11 were a mixed bag of curiosity and coded some days blatant) racism: from being asked whether or not I’ll have an arranged marriage to being told my uncle was [Osama Bin Laden] to having teachers dehumanize Muslim lives by saying an entire city in Iraq wasn’t worth the life of one U.S. Soldier,” she remembers, adding that seeing trolls target both Omar and Tlaib by questioning their patriotism doesn’t surprise her.


“The right has asserted pernicious ideas about whether or not Muslims in the U.S. Subscribe to the idea of ‘America,’ because if they don’t, or if they question any aspect of it, then they must subscribe to some other ‘state,’” Shah notes. “This conspiratorial, baseless, and harmful lens has for a long while tried to push Muslims into dichotomies of good versus bad.”


Izzy Mustafa, a Muslim man living in Brooklyn, tells MTV News he thinks the constant vitriol towards the representatives is because they are ladies of color: “Their loyalties are being questioned because they are overjoyed Muslim females who come from East African and Arab backgrounds,” he notes.


“The fact that these strong Muslim black and brown girls are going against that notion and saying, nah, we're actually going to save y'all from yourselves, is why these racist white nationalists are freaking out. The war-mongering and fear they have stoked for so long has come back to bite them.”


While some Democratic members of Congress have come under fire for not condemning the treatment against their peers more rapidly, private citizens are taking the discourse as a possibility to create their voices heard. Whenever Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw determined to tweet a criticism of Rep. Omar’s out-of context comments surrounding Islamophobia post-9/11, D.C.-Based activist Wardah Khalid penned a op-ed in her hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle. In it, she called his attack on Omar hypocritical: “Crenshaw of all people should understand all this,” she wrote, referencing his call for an apology immediately after a Saturday Night Live skit poked fun at him.


Khalid had so much hope on the night of Omar and Tlaib’s inaugurations because she wasn’t sure she would ever visualize girls who looked like her in the highest law-making body In the
U.S.. However outdoor the Muslim community, she speedily realized reaction to Omar and Tlaib was split down partisan lines, and perpetuated by xenophobic lies about what it means to be Muslim.


“These ladies are actually for the people and not for the elite class, plain and simple,” Mustafa, who is transgender, adds. “They define a wide span of working class people, immigrants, marginalized communities, people who are attempting to survive in this system that tries to throw the issues that face to the side.”


He also points out that Reps. Omar and Tlaib have, for now, made it a point to be intersectional in their work. “They don't solely speak on issues about Islamophobia or Palestine; what's key is that they work on all the issues that we as a country are attempting to change,” he says, citing in particular Omar’s work to protect transgender rights, and Tlaib’s push to make sure that people in her district have access to tidy water.


Yusuf agrees. “The usual profile of a congressperson has been an older, cisgender, heterosexual, white man with cash for as long as our nation has been around,” she starts. “For [two] Muslim females — one Palestinian and the other a Somali refugee — to enter a space that this nation has excluded females, people of color, queer people, immigrants and anyone else from is exceptionally significant.” It is no surprise that the system isn't set up for them to succeed in that space, she adds. “There can be no question why their identities are at the forefront of every discussion about their actions and words.”


It’s about shaking up the status quo, Mustafa says, and these new Congresswomen are scaring those who have sustained power because of it.