FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 25, 2024

Contact:

Matt Brodsky

[email protected]

Minneapolis, MN - Ilhan Omar’s Republican challenger for U.S. Congress (MN-5), Dalia Al-Aqidi, issued the following statement challenging the Minneapolis City Council to do the jobs they were elected to do, rather than passing performative resolutions on topics beyond their grasp that will only inflame tensions and promote antisemitism:

Today, the newly-elected Minneapolis City Council passed a deeply divisive, anti-Israel resolution that not only falls well beyond the scope of the Council’s purview but is corrosive to the kind of citywide healing many council members pledged to work toward since the George Floyd protests and riots of 2020.

Our city has no shortage of problems that require the Council’s urgent attention. Tackling crime would be a good start. Revitalizing downtown, which is a task entrusted to the City Council, will remain a pipe-dream as long as people don’t feel safe coming here.

It is mystifying why the Council would instead choose to focus on a one-sided resolution, “Supporting a permanent ceasefire and preventing loss of human life in the Middle East.” To be clear, it will do nothing to impact the conflict overseas between Palestinians and Israelis, nor will it make our own streets any safer. It will, in all likelihood, only contribute to acts of violent antisemitism that have spiked since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel.

This resolution was designed to rewrite history and whitewash the terrorist attackers and their motivations. It not only provides a free-pass to U.S.-designated terrorists but offers them a reward. Such moral bankruptcy would also prolong the suffering of both Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Over 1,200 men, women, and children were murdered in the brutal and premeditated bloodbath carried out by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and many Palestinian civilians. More than 240 were kidnapped to Gaza. More than 30 American citizens were slaughtered that day in Israel and many more were kidnapped, making this terrorist attack one of the worst carried out against American citizens in our own country’s history. The attack on the Jewish people was the deadliest since the Holocaust. 

The ceasefire the City Council claims to seek was in place up until the day those terrorists attacked Israel. But you would know none of this by reading the Minneapolis City Council’s resolution.

I would welcome the opportunity to go line-by-line through this repugnant and counterproductive resolution when I defeat Ilhan Omar at the ballot box in November, and take her vacated seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That is the venue for such a debate.

In the meantime, I call on the Minneapolis City Council to re-dedicate themselves to doing the job they were elected to do—like healing our community after the George Floyd protests and riots and tackling the rampant crime in our city—and leave matters of U.S. foreign policy to Congress and the President. Instead of focusing on wars overseas, the City Council should concern itself with the wars on our streets.

I am grateful to Council Members LaTrisha Vetaw, Linea Palmisano, and Michael Rainville for voting against the resolution and opposing the amendments that would have emptied the word genocide of its meaning. I also thank Mayor Jacob Frey for his opposition to the resolution and his speech today before the Council. I am also thankful for the tireless efforts of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

I also call upon Rep. Ilhan Omar to pressure her friends in Qatar, including those who sponsored her trip to the World Cup in Doha, and ask her to use her influence with the financial backers of Hamas to release the 136 hostages still held in Gaza, starting with the American citizens still held by the terrorist groups.

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www.DaliaForCongress.org