You know I’ve been out of the loop since mid-October or so, so I didn’t know about all this business about CAIR going after Somalis Abdi Bihi and Omar Jamal in Minneapolis until I saw this post by Marisol at Jihad Watch yesterday that begins:
CAIR’s Minnesota chapter led a personal attack on the credibility of Omar Jamal and Abdi Bihi in connection with their planned presence at a conference whose literature described al-Shabaab as an “Islamic extremist terrorism organization,” to which CAIR took exception.
There are at least two noteworthy aspects to this story: First, the threats are a reprise of the old chestnut “Say Islam is a Religion of Peace, or we’ll kill you.” The second is that CAIR is caught in its own game, for as hard as it has worked to cast all criticism as incitement to a violent “backlash,” at least where Islamic teachings and advocacy groups are concerned. How about their intense criticism of Omar Jamal and Abdi Bihi? If CAIR Minnesota is to hold itself to the standards it imposes on others, it would have to apologize, shut up, pay up, and disband.
Then again, claiming victim status tends to require a certain ideological pedigree, and the right connections. “FBI Investigating Facebook Death Threats on Somali Advocate,” by Tom Lyden for Fox 9 News, December 2 (thanks to The Religion of Peace)….
Seems that Jamal now claims he is getting death threats on his facebook page. As we have noted here at RRW (innumerable times since 2007 when I noted he defended a Somali rapist caught in the act and on camera), Jamal is a publicity hound and possibly more than that. I call him the Somali Jesse Jackson (Frontpage Magazine writers called him the Al Sharpton of the Somali community) and he is at the center of anything to do with Somalis including driving media attention away from the Somali who died with cyanide (enough to kill hundreds) in his hotel room in advance of the 2008 Democratic Convention, here. At that time we learned that Jamal was here illegally and had been convicted of immigration fraud in 2003 in Tennessee. He was never deported.
Readers: Search RRW for ‘Omar Jamal’ and you will see what I mean.
Abdi Bihi, on the other hand, seems to be the real deal and should be encouraged. Here is one of many posts on Bihi at RRW. At one point I suspected that Jamal had only pretended to be on Bihi’s side to get more information to pass along—to someone. Facebook threats from Al-Shabaab would be a very handy way to solidify one’s cover, or simply to get media attention.