Dalia al-Aqidi again seeks to unseat Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar

(JNS) — Dalia al-Aqidi secured 4.7 percent of the vote in the 2020 Minnesota Republican primary in an unsuccessful bid to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The Iraqi-born media adviser announced on Monday that she is again running for the Republican nomination in the state’s 5th Congressional District.

“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 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.”

In 2020, al-Aqidi secured 568 votes, which represented 4.74 percent of the Republican primary vote in 2020. That was well behind Lacy Johnson, who won the primary with 9,188 votes (76.62 percent), and Danielle Stella, who received 2,236 votes (18.65 percent).

Omar received 103,535 votes (58.18 percent) in the Democratic state primary, in which Antone Melton-Meaux got 68,524 votes (38.51 percent) and the other three Democratic candidates each received at least double the number of votes that al-Aqidi did.

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.”