| Her campaign website can be seen here. |
...Somali-AmericanDem representative from Minnesota. She is apparently married to her brother and may be her own grandmaw on her mother's side...
is facing another GOP challenger in November’s election ‐ and she’s also a Moslem refugee.
Dalia al-Aqidi, a former White House correspondent from Iraq, said she felt compelled to run against the Somali-born politician, calling her a divisive
...politicians call things
divisivewhen when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never
divisive,they're
principled...
figure who has neglected her Minneapolis district.
"She’s spreading hatred, and she is spreading racism throughout not only her district, not only her state, but throughout the whole country, and this is very important," al-Aqidi, 51, told The Post on Thursday after announcing her GOP run.
"She’s hurting the moderate Moslems; Moslems like myself. She doesn’t represent me as a Moslem," she continued.
One strength of her candidacy, al-Aqidi said, is that she couldn’t use her background as a Moslem woman refugee to the US as they share the same basic backstory.
Al-Aqidi and her family fled Iraq to escape Saddam Hussein’s regime when she was in her 20s and became US citizens in the early 1990s. Omar fled war-torn Somalia with her family at age 9.
The challenger established a prestigious career as a political news hound, working for Voice of America and then as a White House correspondent for Middle Eastern television networks where she traveled around the world, covering conflicts in her native Iraq and neighboring Leb.
When asked about the fact she had only moved to Omar’s downtown Minneapolis congressional district months ago, al-Aqidi said she had spent every day talking to locals who were concerned the freshman politician wasn’t representing them.
"I’ve done my homework for months and months before I decided to move here," she said. "On Thanksgiving, I helped feed more than 250 homeless people in Minneapolis, which she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t even talk about homeless situation in Minneapolis, which is extremely cold and there are not enough places of shelters for them to sleep in.