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A Stopover in the Heartland
Is it Okay to Love the America of No Cliterodectomies, No Fatwahs?

By Dr. Naomi Wolf

July 9, 2025

I left my California idyll, and soared into milky, hazy US skies.

I touched down to change planes in Minneapolis, which I recalled as having been the corn-fed, friendly Midwest.

I saw that now, almost everyone employed by the airlines, as well as everyone working as ground crew, was of Somali descent, or were recent arrivals from Somalia.

They spoke Arabic or Somali to one another, not even bothering with English; passengers and colleagues alike were greeted with a hand to the heart. The flight attendants for Delta, out of Minneapolis, wore chic little grey attenuated hijabs, pinned to their hair. (They happened also to be in furious moods.)
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I have no problem with reasonable legal immigration; I have no problem with other religions. But I did wonder what had happened to all of the US-born former staffers that used to be employed in those fairly well-paying jobs. It was not diversity I was seeing now, but a new kind of hegemony.

I wondered what kind of security issue it might represent when an entire major US travel hub was now under the management of a single recently-arrived nationality; one that is not our own.

The fact that the entire sensitive Minneapolis-St Paul airport infrastructure — which I was surprised to learn is a joint civil and US military facility — is in the hands of Somalis, is an example, to me, of the chaos and vulnerability we import when we in the West lift humans wholesale out of their sometimes-dangerous, sometimes-abusive contexts, and re-situate them in influential Western contexts, with almost no acculturation, or assimilation metrics.

“The immigrant” is positioned always in liberal discourse as in need of “our” “help.” The narrative is always about “our” “responsibilities” to such immigrants, and all of the immigrants are always positioned within this narrative as being a/ helpless and b/ innocent. And C — the immigrants’ culture that is being imported along with the immigrant, is always supposed to enhance the United States’ culture, simply because it is “other” from the nasty, racist, homogenous culture of the United States.

In fact, this narrative actually to me itself seems to be quite racist; simply a new, NGO-reframed revamp of the condescending 18th-century European trope of the non-European innocent, admirable “Noble Savage.”

This narrative, indeed, reveals, in my view, a profound ignorance about the actual world — a lack of awareness of the kinds of struggles that peace-loving, justice-loving, freedom-loving people, living in failed states and under oppressive regimes, actually face.

Some societies are in fact neither helpless nor innocent.

At the level of leadership and of social contracts, and especially of the treatment of women and girls, Somalia, to take just one example, is a horrible, culpable society.

Individual Somalis no doubt are likely to be people of great decency. But look at Somali norms and society as a whole, which we are also importing when we resettle people en masse.

According to Amnesty International, all parties in that nations’ current civilian conflict, a confrontation between the government and a militia group named Al-Shabaab, abuse their own civilians and deprive their own people of human rights. In other words, no Somali party is innocent.

The crisis in Somalia is not currently derived from those cliches of racialized identities, “white against black”, or “colonizer versus colonized”. It is, rather, a crisis of Somali against Somali. And very specifically, it is a crisis of Somali men against Somali women and girls.

There are half a million internally displaced Somali people, 80 per cent of them women and children, who are suffering horrific abuses, including sexual assault, forced marriages, and “gender-based violence” — meaning beatings and female genital mutilation — at the hands of Somalis.

According to the European Union Agency for Asylum, female genital mutilation affects almost the entire female population of Somalia:

[Source: https://www.fgmcri.org/country/somalia/]

The chart above, explains FGM/C Research Institute, shows a dip in the ages 15-19 simply because girls that age may not have been “cut” yet.

In 2018, three young girls, two of them sisters, died within a single week in Somalia, from complications arising from female genital mutilation.

A 13-year-old girl died of female genital mutilation in Somalia in 2021 — and the Guardian reported a rise in the practice during the pandemic.

Yet, points out Amnesty International: “The federal [Somali] parliament failed to pass bills on sexual offences and female genital mutilation.”

According to the FGM/C Research Initiative, which centers on studying the issue of female genital mutilation, a staggering 99.2% of girls and women in Somalia aged 15-49 have endured female genital mutilation. The average ages when Somali girls are “cut” is from ten to fourteen years of age.

Even though, worldwide, many Muslim feminists and even progressive Imams are speaking out against the practice, and pointing out that female genital mutilation is not in fact demanded by Islam, 72% of Somali girls and women believe that this mutilation is a requirement of their religion.

The Somali community has the highest percentage of genitally mutilated women in the world; there are 61,000 Somali people in the state of Minnesota alone, and many sources confirm that Somali girls and women continue to suffer genital mutilation while in the United States. In other words, Somali immigrants in Minnesota have not stopped this abuse of “their” girls and women, just because they are now also Minnesotans. A scholarly article asserts that between 150,000 and 200,000 American African girls are still at risk of undergoing genital mutilation:

“Sanctuary for Families indicates that Somali and other African families import traditional practitioners from overseas into the United States to circumcise their daughters, and in some cases, they send their daughters abroad for circumcision. The practice of sending their daughters abroad has become known as “vacation cutting”’.

So these communities’ arrival physically in America did not magically heal this cultural corruption. This culture of mutilation has not in fact vanished. This nation did not magically wash this cruelty, away.

Somali “female circumcision” is different from other forms — it is by far the most severe. Somali FGM is Type III genital mutilation, which means the excision of the entire outer part of girls’ genitalia, and the stitching together of the raw wound that is left behind. Somali FGM involves: “the complete removal of the clitoris and labia minora, together with the inner surface of the labia majora (Jones, Ehiri, &Anyanwu, 2004; Rasaq, 2012; Weir, 2000).”

Women and girls subjected to this kind of mutilation suffer chronic bleeding, horrific pain during intercourse, problems in childbirth, infections, and dramatically increased mortality: “This increased mortality rate translates into an estimated 44,320 excess deaths per year across countries where FGM is practised. These estimates imply that FGM is a leading cause of the death of girls and young women in those countries where it is practised accounting for more deaths than any cause other than Enteric Infections, Respiratory Infections, or Malaria.”

Somalis now represent over one per cent of the Minnesota population. This organized, politicized community, of course, can now swing elections. Why should we think that, since this horrific practice endures even now in the US, a ten per cent make-up of Somalis in Minnesota, won’t alter American culture in the direction of this kind of misogyny — a form of misogyny that Somali women themselves are seeking to combat?

For that matter, why should we assume that a mass influx of immigrants from closed societies, will champion open societies?

There is no freedom of expression in Somalia, for example. Journalists are being killed, arrested and detained there. The head of a media group, Ali Nur Salad, was arrested when he posted on social media that the drug khat was being used by Al-Shabaab members. Salad was denied legal representation. He faces charges “including “offending the honour or prestige of the head of state”, “committing obscene acts”, “distributing obscene publications and performances”, “insult”, and “criminal defamation”, as well as restrictions on travel and [on] speaking to the media.”

The government of Somalia raids live television debates: “On 6 January, Somaliland intelligence officers raided the offices of MM Somali TV in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, interrupting a live debate about […] Ethiopia/Somaliland […]. They arrested the MM Somali TV chair, Mohamed Abdi Sheikh (also known as “Ilig”), Ilyas Abdinasir, a technician, and Mohamed Abdi Abdullahi, a reporter.” The International Federation of Journalists condemned the arrests.