Rep. Omar Wants to Replace July 4th With Muslim Heritage Month

July is when families load up screaming kids into a minivan for a road trip, when water parks overflow with the smells of cotton candy and chlorine, and Chicago shootings reach highs only previously witnessed in minor South American wars. Sprinklers rotate over dying lawns and glorious fireworks rise into the sky over a American million cities, towns and villages.

But Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and a bunch of other leftists would like to turn July into Muslim American Heritage Month.

“As we continue to see an uptick in anti-Muslim hate, it is important we recognize the resiliency and accomplishments of Muslim Americans with a formal resolution,” Rep. Omar claimed.

Except that July was already designated the National French-American Heritage Month.

I’m not clear on what Muslim accomplishment in America took place in July (another month later in the year comes to mind), but we celebrate our revolution on July 4th and the French celebrate theirs on July 14th. The French supported our revolution and we supported theirs (at least until it turned into the orgy of social justice killings and insane decrees that leftist revolutions always degenerate into whether it’s on college campuses or in countries).

"Muslim-Americans have played a major role in shaping our nation for centuries," Rep. Andre Carson, insists. "Designating July as Muslim-American Heritage Month is a wonderful opportunity to honor the trailblazers who came before us."

Muslims played little role in America until the 1970s with the embrace of Islam by black nationalist opponents of the United States and the onset of violent terrorist attacks like the Hanafi Siege in D.C. While the next phase of the 1619 Project will no doubt produce its alternative history which will reveal that Alexander Hamilton bowed to Mecca and Dolly Madison wore a burka, there’s little doubt among sane historians that the French were here first.

There are 12 million Americans of French descent and while the last time a congressional resolution on French-American Heritage Month was passed was back in 2002, that’s because Franco-Americans are much less vocal about occupying cultural territory than Omar and Tlaib. The resolution noted that the French had established parts of the United States, that Lafayette had fought for American independence, Tocqueville had explained America, and L'Enfant had laid out Washington D.C. (3 out of 4 ain't bad). The French were here first.

Though perhaps Rep. Carson can explain more of the “major role” that Muslims played “in shaping our nation for centuries” and how it exceeds that of the role played by the French.

If it weren’t bad enough that Omar, Tlaib, and Carson were spitting in the faces of 12 million French-Americans, they’re also hijacking Disability Pride Month. The Hamas Caucus could try to move Muslim Heritage Month to June, but that’s already Gay Pride Month. And when Islam and gay people meet, the latter tend to get thrown off tall buildings and then stoned to death.

August however is pretty clear aside from being National Immunization Awareness Month.

But, much like the Ground Zero Mosque had to be near the site of the greatest impact Islam has had on shaping American history, Muslim Heritage Month has to take over July.

No other month will do.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib had already introduced a resolution for April as Arab Heritage Month where it displaced Scottish American Heritage Month. (But what contribution have the Scots ever made to America compared to the centuries of Omar and Tlaib’s shaping of the country?)

Does Tlaib really need two months or a sixth of the calendar year? Heritage months are generally ethnic, not religious. But the Hamas Caucus wants two months to start with. Having seized one month from the Scots, they’d like to hijack another one from the French.

One of them has to be about violating the separation of church and state by promoting a religion.

And hating America.

July means fireworks, barbeques, and patriotic songs. But Rep. Rashida Tlaib would like it to be about honoring "the achievements, contributions and sacrifices of Muslim Americans in the face of rising anti-Muslim hate." Or, according to Tlaib, it will “provide an opportunity to foster religious tolerance nationwide and combat misinformation directed at the Muslim community.”

Like every theme month lately, this seems destined to be another ‘America Sucks’ month. But it will come packaged with an extra share of Dawah or Islamic missionary activity while informing us that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism and anyone who disagrees should be beheaded.

Los Angeles, which rushes wokely where angels fear to tread, is already celebrating Muslim Heritage Month through its libraries with Linda Sarsour’s biography and Rep. Omar’s biography. Don’t just think of Muslim Heritage Month as displacing July 4th when it’s also a great gimmick for selling otherwise unsellable books. And even as the Taliban retake Afghanistan and prepare to put those women who took off their burkas and hijabs in their place, Muslim Heritage Month is being used to promote The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family to small children.

Indeed, the resolution itself promotes the hijab by insisting that "women who wear the hijab, or headscarf" are discriminated against in America. The resolution then goes on to celebrate accused domestic abuser Keith Ellison and then, after appropriating July, tries to also appropriate the ice cream cone. It’s one thing to hijack the Fourth, but ice cream cones too?

“Whereas Syrian immigrant Ernest Hamwi’s invention of the ice cream cone is a practical confection with a near ubiquitous presence in American life,” the resolution falsely claims.

While the ice cream cone is indeed a most ubiquitous and practical confection, the ice cream cone was invented and patented by Italo Marchiony: an Italian-American immigrant.

First, Omar and Tlaib displaced the French and the Scots, and then the Italians.

Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian immigrant, did play a role in the ice cream business, and he patented his own cone decades later in the twenties, but he was Christian, not Muslim. Ernest was one of the many Syrian-Lebanese Christians who fled Muslim persecution and a famine to come to the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century. He married into a local American family and was buried in Valhalla Cemetery. His stepson, Arthur C. McGuffin, took over his company.

As July wanes and Omar and Tlaib try to appropriate the month and even its ice cream, replacing swimsuits with hijabs and the Declaration of Independence with the demonization of America as a racist Islamophobic society that only has two months to celebrate their heritage, instead of twelve, let’s remember the heroic American patriots who fought to keep us free.

The only heritage month we truly need is the heritage of our freedom from all tyrannies.

Including the one American soldiers were fighting from the “shores of Tripoli” in the First Barbary War of 1801 to the one that they are still fighting today against terror in our homeland.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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