For most of the past decade, the misinformation complex — a decentralized, ideologically aligned network of fact-checking sites, media outlets, NGOs, government agencies and social media companies — ruled our information ecosystem. Today, the archives of this ancien régime are being opened. What they show is how, with shockingly little effort, the misinformation complex could shut down investigations into even the most clear-cut claims that threatened the Democratic party’s great narratives.
This was precisely the case with one of the most prominent progressive politicians in the US today, Ilhan Omar. In 2018, Omar rode a wave of identity politics into high office as representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. The media was not just jubilant but triumphant. Along with the nascent Squad, this Trump-taunting black female politician and former refugee became an instant icon of the new color-bound progressive politics.
But there was a catch: Omar herself would not be shoved into this cardboard cutout of a squeaky clean, infinitely tolerant diversity figure. In her very first weeks in office, she made a series of comments about Israel that fell well within the discourse of antisemitic speech as the Democratic Party itself had long since defined it. Then, far more damagingly, allegations that Omar had married her own brother to secure his visa to the US exploded in the conservative media.
There was, however, another claim that was overshadowed by allegations of (to coin a term) fratrimony. This was that Omar’s father had been a “terrorist” or had served the Somali government in a capacity that could have made his entry into the United States illegal. While it didn’t have the tabloid qualities of brother-marriage, if corroborated the story could have been just as damaging.
To be clear, the following does not show, or attempt to show, that Ilhan Omar bears responsibility for decisions made by her father when she was a child. But what it does show is how the fact-checking industry was able to quash a burgeoning political crisis with just two articles and one threadbare source, and, in doing so, protect Democratic party interests in ways that not even the best, and most expensive, political crisis management agency could even dream of.
On July 25, 2019, Snopes published its assessment of the claim, “Is Rep. Omar’s Father a ‘Somalian War Criminal’ Living ‘Illegally’ in U.S.?” Under a big red triangle featuring an “X” and the text “Mostly False,” the site broke down its finding under three headings. Under the heading “What’s True,” Snopes stated, “Ilhan Omar’s father is living [sic] the U.S. legally. The family was cleared to enter the country in 1995 and successfully secured asylum status.” Under “What’s False,” Snopes found, “Omar’s father is not in the U.S. illegally.” And marked “What’s undetermined” the site ruled, “Omar’s father was responsible for, or even credibly accused of, any wrongdoing in Somalia.”
In the first sentence of its fact-check, Snopes reported the various “firsts” Omar had achieved: one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, first to “don a religious headscarf,” first Somali-American and naturalized citizen from Africa in Congress. The site then noted that these many “milestones,” however, had been accompanied by “conspiracy theories and racial or religious-themed hoaxes targeting Omar.”
Snopes reported that the claim that Omar’s father was a Somali war criminal who had come to the US illegally originated from a rightwing blog called Gateway Pundit, which Snopes called a “junk news site.” Gateway Pundit had reported less than a week prior, on July 16, 2019, that Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was “connected to the former dictator in Somalia, Said Barre.” The site compared Omar with another Somali in a similar situation, former Somali National Army colonel, Yusuf Abdi Ali, who was found to have committed human rights abuses by a U.S. civil jury in May 2019 and was eventually deported in 2024 for similar crimes during the same time period.
Gateway Pundit wrote that Omar’s father “and other Somalians [sic] like Yusuf Abdi Ali, who killed thousands for Barre, escaped to the West and were not vetted properly before entering the country.”
Snopes misconstrued this claim. In its fact check it wrote, “Instead of providing proof [that Omar’s father was a war criminal], Gateway Pundit simply dropped the name of a different and unrelated Somali man, Yusuf Abdi Ali, into the mix, conflating Mohamed and Ali without making any substantive connection between the two men.” Gateway Pundit, however, never claimed there was a connection between the two men. This is clear from the text. Nevertheless, Snopes fell back on racism to make its main point, writing that the alleged connection between the two men — a connection made not by Gateway Pundit but by the Snopes writer — was rooted in racism.
The mistake made by Snopes of assuming Gateway Pundit said something it didn’t is, in itself, a trivial issue of editorial errata. The real problem is that in its somewhat strident — and, on the face of it, unfounded — allegation of racism, Snopes made a far more substantive accusation: that claims about Nur Omar Mohamed’s possible ties to the Barre regime were “based quite literally on nothing but race.”
But other than commonality of being from Somalia, neither Omar nor her father has any known connection to Ali. The claim that Nur Omar Mohamed was “connected” to Siad Barre or that he committed war crimes in Somalia seems to be a leap made by Gateway Pundit based quite literally on nothing but race — the assumption that two people of the same ethnicity are automatically linked to each other.
In other words, in its fact check, Snopes committed a serious (and quite ironic) error. By falsely alleging that Gateway Pundit had “conflated” the two men, Snopes actually conflated two separate issues: the claim that these men were associated and the separate claim that Nur Omar Mohamed was “connected” to the Barre regime. Doing so allowed the Snopes writer, through a little bit of logical sleight of hand, to claim that because the first claim was racist, so was the second.
But the most serious error in the fact check was still to come. To support its claim about Omar’s father, Snopes cited a local Minneapolis news site called City Pages, which had reported that Omar’s father had worked in Somalia “training teachers,” offering no more detail or substantiation than those two words. About a week later, Politifact ran a similar debunking article, with its “Truth-O-Meter” pointing to false. That article, citing the same City Pages report, also claimed that Omar’s father trained teachers.
Snopes did not respond to request for comment. Politifact also did not respond to request for comment.
Over the subsequent years (right up till today), the issue of whether Omar had married her brother in a bid to secure him a US visa would crop up again and again — and with it, allegations that her father had entered the US illegally, namely by covering up his affiliation with the genocidal Barre regime, which ruled Somalia until the civil war in 1991.
Each time the issue arose, the Snopes and Politifact fact-checks were relied on as proof that the claim had been debunked. This continued into 2021, when Reuters issued its own fact check about Omar, which referenced the Snopes article. When Omar’s father died of COVID complications in 2020, the claim about his job as a teacher (or “teacher trainer”) was repeated by the New York Times, Time magazine, The Cut, Buzzfeed, Chicago Tribune and others.
The notion that claims that Omar’s father was a “teacher trainer” who had come to the country legally had been glazed into hardened fact. But as the media was repeating the claim about the recently deceased man, another outlet — this one very different from the mainstream media dominated by elite progressives — told a completely different story.
Weeks after the death of Omar’s father, Sahan Journal, a non-profit news organization that covers minority communities in Minnesota, ran an obituary of Omar’s father. Founded by award-winning journalist Mukhtar M. Ibrahim, a former reporter for the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio, Sahan Journal has received national recognition for its reporting and has collaborated with major outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
While long and detailed, the obituary’s very first sentence made an astonishing claim: “Nur Omar Mohamed was an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army well before the country plunged into anarchy following the fall of the Siad Barre regime in the early 1990s.” In case there were any doubts about his identity, the slug of the Sahan obituary states, “Best known in the U.S. as Ilhan Omar’s father, Nur was a prominent Somali military officer who encouraged his children to succeed.” (The Somali National Army was the primary military force of the Barre regime during its rule from 1969 and 1991.)
A Kenyan news outlet, The East African, citing another Kenyan paper, Nation, made the same claim, writing, “Omar’s father had served as a colonel in Barre’s army but he had to flee with his family via Kenya before settling in the US in 1995.” A then-Twitter account that identifies itself as belonging to Omar Shamarke, the former prime minster of Somalia, tweeted days after Nur’s death, “May Allah have mercy on Colonel Nur. May Allah grant patience and faith to his family, relatives, and the Somali National Army, of which he was a longtime member. I especially extend my condolences to his daughter, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and all the children he left behind.” (Translation: ChatGPT.)
According to the Sahan Journal obituary, after training in the Soviet Union, Nur returned to Somalia where “he began his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel. During the 1977-1978 Somali-Ethiopian war, he led a regiment.” A fellow colonel who served with him recalled in the obit that “Nur played a significant role in the war… He was one of the officers who were recognized for their work.” Omar’s Wikipedia article similarly states that her father “served with distinction in the 1977-78 Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia, and also worked as a teacher trainer.”
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Left: New York Times (2018) // Right: Sahan Journal (2020)
For Americans today, Siad Barre is an unfamiliar figure. But from the late 1960s until his fall in 1991 (when Omar’s family fled the country), Barre led a ferocious revolutionary regime characterized by Marxist-Leninist principles. But because Somalia lacked a history of economic class structure, internecine clan dynamics were substituted in its place. This led to one of the Barre regime’s many crimes, the slaughter of up to 200,000 members of the Isaaq clan, which is sometimes described as genocide. It was for this reason that high-ranking officials, particularly from the military, were generally barred from seeking asylum in the United States under provisions prohibiting individuals implicated in human rights abuses, persecution, or material support for a repressive regime.
(Cases like that of Yusuf Abdi Ali, the former Somali Army colonel discussed above who was deported last year, illustrate this policy in action.)
This was a bombshell — but one that fell in a proverbial forest. Neither Snopes nor Politifact updated their fact-checks about Nur Omar Mohamed. No news organization went back to re-report the story or examine the claims they had previously made. In the parallel universe of the mainstream media, Nur is (and likely will forever remain) a “teacher trainer.”
Ilhan Omar’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
That may have been for good reason. Like the story of her possible brother-marriage, outrage over Omar’s allegedly antisemitic tweets obscured a far bigger issue: Omar’s deep ties to the Somali government. According to journalist David Steinberg, in 2016 Omar, then newly elected to the Minnesota state assembly, flew from Nairobi to Mogadishu with a Somali politician named Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. Weeks later, Mohamed (known as Faramajoo, or “Cheese”) — a US citizen then on the payroll of the New York Department of Transportation — was elected president of the country in what the New York Times called “one of the most fraudulent political events in Somalia’s history.” Weeks later, a beaming Omar was filmed on a stage at a party celebrating the win where she stood behind a podium with Faramajoo’s face on it wearing a pin with his likeness.
According to Steinberg, before Omar spoke, her first husband (whom she would divorce in 2012 and remarry shortly after the party for Faramajoo, where she spoke) gave his own speech in which he praised the Somali politician who would become President Faramajoo’s prime minister. Two days later, Omar’s brother-in-law became permanent secretary to the prime minister.
Omar’s network of relationships with a government as corrupt as Somalia’s would have been problematic enough for a first-term congresswoman freshly appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Still, that could be put aside — American politicians frequently meet and campaign with foreign leaders as part of their job. But a tie between Omar’s father and the Barre — a tie that could have violated multiple provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act concerning members of regimes responsible for the persecution of minorities and also concerning membership in communist parties — would constitute a wholly different matter.
No journalist who cited the Snopes piece, which leaned on the City Pages article that made a passing reference to Nur’s “teacher training” credentials as its sole source for the claim, ever bothered to corroborate the claim. The problem is that the single source they relied on was not entirely reliable.
In 2017, an education technology company called Nexus Solutions sued City Pages for a series of articles written by Cory Zurowski, the reporter who wrote the original story about Ilhan Omar later referenced by Snopes and Politifact, a suit that Nexus settled with City Pages later that year. The suit alleged that Zurowski had made a number of false statements and misstated amounts of money related to a contract between Nexus and a Minnesota school district.
“These false statements were made in spite of the fact that the terms of these contracts and the payment amounts are public record and were accessible for fact-checking by City Pages,” a Nexus press release stated, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press reported at the time. According to the report, before bringing suit Nexus had asked City Pages to correct the false statements and retract the relevant articles, which the paper had refused to do.
What’s noteworthy in this context is that the Pioneer Press reported this two years before Snopes relied on the reporting by the same journalist, in the same outlet. This is not to imply that a single mistake should invalidate the reporter’s other work. However, for Snopes and Politifact to rely solely on this single un-sourced fact (that Omar’s father was a “teacher trainer”) reported by a journalist who had fairly recently been the subject of a lawsuit concerning the accuracy of his reporting and unwillingness to address clear-cut factual claims is troubling.
But this isn’t the only major credibility issue involved in this chain of events. In 2021, less than two years after the Snopes report about Ilhan’s father, BuzzFeed News reported that the company’s co-founder and CEO had plagiarized no less than 60 news articles between 2015 and 2019, copy-and-pasting text into Snopes articles to improve the site’s SEO.
This, of course, is an ethical and legal breach. But it also raised serious questions about the editorial procedures in place at Snopes, which the Times described as the “premier” fact-checking site. Snopes’ legitimacy as a fact-checking organization is rooted in the idea that the editorial procedures it employed were sufficiently stringent, and managed by enough strong oversight, to be able to accurately and consistently confirm facts and debunk falsehoods on topics that its writers generally lack domain expertise in. But if such safeguards were in place, it’s hard to understand how such a practice, carried out by the company’s CEO, could have persisted over a period of years.
If this had been about a city council official or a private citizen, there would be little to say. But, then again, it’s unlikely that the media, with the help of the fact-checking industry, would have pounced on it the way it did. Either way, this was not a passing issue. Rather, the question of her father’s career cuts to the very core of Omar’s story — whether she’s a refugee who fled violence in Africa to bring a message of multicultural enlightenment to America, or the child of a war criminal who used his powerful connections to cheat the system — and then grew up to do the very same thing as her father.
It’s this that explains the media’s inability to investigate relatively clear-cut claims about Nur Omar Mohamed. By mixing in verifiable claims about him with somewhat murkier claims about Omar’s possible marriage to her brother, along with outright false claims about her being arrested “23 times,” the media — with the willing help of the fact-checking industry — was able to create what I call an information stew, a mix of fact and fiction, ludicrous allegations and truth, that serves to obscure an undesirable reality.
And all of it was fired by the work of glorified blogs that, amid the Democrats’ declaration of an “epidemic of fake news,” had anointed themselves fact-checkers. That the entire endeavor was premised on the notion that this flimsy epistemological jury-rig could not be corrupted or, worse, could not itself become an instrument of corruption is truly beyond belief.
—Ashley Rindsberg
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