“This Omar from Minnesota”. Trump’s Aggressive Tweets

Just when you thought President Trump couldn’t get any more absurd, out comes a series of tweets telling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” 

Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somali and immigrated with her family to the US when she was ten years old. Ocasio-Cortez was born in The Bronx and is of Puerto Rican ancestry. 

This one is going to stick to Trump like flypaper. It has already outraged progressives and Democrats, but then that’s why Trump said it like he says so many things—to create controversy and piss people off. This is fantastic for the artificial political divide manufactured by the financial ruling elite in its largely successful effort to keep Americans away from real issues like a crushing national debt and wars designed to last forever. Democrats will be ranting about this all the way through the election next year.

Not realizing when to quit—does he ever?—Trump then attacked Rep. Omar directly. 

The Donald is obviously elaborating on talking points made the other day by his buddy Tucker Carlson. 

In fact, Omar is pretty much your garden variety progressive Democrat and her stand on immigration is largely that of many if not most America-born progressives. 

The ruling elite that control Fox News and the rest of the government megaphone media have another problem with Omar—she’s an outspoken critic of the “special (and vastly expensive and deadly) relationship” between the US government and Israel. 

In regard to Somalia, there might be a reason Omar “hates” the United States. 

Jeffrey Gettleman fills in what the Swanson frozen-food baby left out:

Somalia won independence in 1960 [previously colonies of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland], but it quickly became a Cold War pawn, prized for its strategic location in the Horn of Africa, where Africa and Asia nearly touch. First it was the Soviets who pumped in weapons, then the United States. A poor, mostly illiterate, mainly nomadic country became a towering ammunition dump primed to explode. The central government was hardly able to hold the place together. Even in the 1980s, Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, the capricious dictator who ruled from 1969 to 1991, was derisively referred to as “the mayor of Mogadishu” because so much of the country had already spun out of his control.

Many Americans remember the Hollywood film “Black Hawk Down,” but have at best a dim understanding of the story behind it. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush completely misread the tribal composition of the country and tried to abduct Mohammed Farah Aidid, a warlord creating problems for the distribution of international food aid. Bush sent in the calvary and they had their asses handed to them on a platter—two helicopters shot down and 16 US soldiers killed, their bodies dragged through the streets by triumphant Somalis. 

After 9/11, Somalia played a peripheral role in the national security state manufacture of the war on terror. Minus any evidence whatsoever, the US said Somalia would “blossom into a jihad factory like Afghanistan,” and despite the tribal warfare-torn country was too chaotic even for al-Qaeda, “the administration of George W. Bush devised a strategy to stamp out the Islamists on the cheap. CIA agents deputized the warlords, the same thugs who had been preying upon Somalia’s population for years, to fight the Islamists.” 

The outcome was predictable: hated warlords flush with US cash resulted in many Somalis supporting radical Islamists, thus making the fantasy of an al-Qaeda foothold a reality. “Somalia may indeed have sheltered a few unsavory characters, but the country was far from the terrorist hotbed many worry it has now become,” writes Gettleman. 

President Obama ramped up drone strikes in Somalia, purportedly against al-Shabab. In addition, the US introduced AFRICOM combat operations in the country as part of its effort to expand dominance in sub-Saharan Africa. “Under the false pretext of fighting terrorism, US imperialism is striving to secure its hegemony over Africa, launching ever more wars of aggression in an effort to exclude the European colonial powers from their former spheres of influence,” notes Thomas Gaist. 

Months after taking office, the campaign trail non-interventionist Donald Trump conducted a number of airstrikes in Somalia. 

The presence of US troops stationed in the famine-wracked country went from 50 under Obama to 500 under Trump. “Before President Trump, the US military has always maintained a small presence in the region. Now it seems with the geographical spread larger and a new enemy in the region defined; the endless wars will most certainly continue further enriching the US-military industrial complex,” Zero Hedge remarked. 

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None of this, of course, finds its way into Carlson’s commentary on the “hatred” of Rep. Omar and the opposition to American foreign policy on the part of folks who live in countries Trump has described as “shit-holes,” many made that way by the legacy of colonialism and US foreign policy. 

Carlson is simply putting a new spin on the US as the exceptional and indispensable nation—exceptional in mass murder and inflicting endless misery—and this makes him little different than the neocons he occasionally criticizes while promoting his own “conservative” version of the same. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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