Dalia al-Aqidi, who sought to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in 2020 but suspended her campaign before the Republican primary, is running again for the Republican nomination in the state’s 5th Congressional District, she announced on Monday.
“Many people assume that because Ilhan and I are both female, Muslim refugees, we must think alike,” al-Aqidi, who immigrated to the United States from Iraq in 1993, told JNS. “We couldn’t be further apart.”
Al-Aqidi is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for Arab News. She previously told JNS that the U.S. House of Representatives was right to remove Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee due to her history of antisemitic and anti-Israel remarks.
“Ilhan accuses American Jewish citizens of dual-loyalty while I stand against the growing antisemitism she promotes,” al-Aqidi told JNS. “She suggests Israel shouldn’t be allowed to exist as a Jewish state, while I support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and its right to live in peace.”
The media adviser ended up securing 4.7% of the vote in the 2020 Minnesota Republican primary. Omar received 103,535 votes (58.18%) in the Democratic state primary and went on to win in the general election with 255,924 votes (64.27%).
On her campaign website, al-Aqidi commits to fighting for lower inflation and government spending; making downtown Minneapolis safer; promoting school choice; eliminating critical race theory from classrooms; making the United States a net energy exporter; and securing its borders and strengthening its alliances.
She sees Omar as the rule, rather than an exception, in the Democratic Party.
“The problem isn’t just about Ilhan Omar’s rhetoric. It’s about her policies, and they are ascendant among Democrats,” she said, as well as embraced by U.S. President Joe Biden. “The solution is to elect Republicans like me, who can take the fight directly to them and the regressive worldview they promote.”
On her website, she writes that her story bears witness to the “consequences of Omar’s version of an ideal government.”
“It was what I left behind in Iraq—the sectarian violence of warring factions or the brutal rule of an all-powerful dictator,” al-Aqidi wrote. “I didn’t come to America to import the pathologies I left behind.”
On social media, she posted that she decided to run, in part, because “criminals have the upper hand in my beautiful city.”
