At a recent public event, Representative Ilhan Omar was asked by a liberal Muslim activist if she and her fellow speaker Representative Rashida Tlaib would condemn female genital mutilation (FGM). Omar, rather than answering, announced that the question “disgusted” her and that she wanted “to make sure the next time someone is in an audience that they ask us the proper questions.” Since then, Omar has found herself in an extended Twitter spat with the former Miss Iraq, Sarah Idan—who has herself received fierce criticism for posing with her Israeli counterpart, and has called the congresswoman anti-Semitic. Nervana Mahmoud explains why Omar’s particular synthesis of Islamic radicalism with American liberalism puts her permanently at odds with other Muslims:

After the major conflicts of the 20th century, the United Nations and its predecessor organizations sought to resettle millions of refugees in new homes. But, as Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf explain in The War of Return, the UN has taken a different approach to those Arabs who fled their homes during Israel’s War of Independence, seeking instead to keep them and their descendants in a permanent state of a homelessness. Matti Friedman writes in his review: