The announcement to run Somali’s light-blue, white-star flag up a city hall flagpole came from the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. A social media post said the city planned to do so July 1, the day Somalia gained its independence from European colonizers in 1960.
Columbus and its suburbs are home to approximately 60,000 Somali Americans, the second largest in the United States, so it wasn’t surprising Columbus City Hall planned to do so.
Then came public backlash, however, especially since the flag-flying ceremony was just days away from America’s own 250th anniversary.
“Columbus, Ohio raising the flag of Somalia for America 250," Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, posted on X.
"City Hall is not a foreign embassy," Mehek Cooke, and attorney and political activist, posted on X. "As an Ohioan, I am repulsed by the anti-Americanism here.”
Then came the denial.
"A social media post created by a city department falsely stated that City Hall would raise the Somalian flag in recognition of Somali Independence Day,” an unnamed city spokesperson told Fox News.
The post was "inaccurate" and has been deleted, the spokesperson also said.
Linda Harvey, who leads Columbus-based Mission America, says she doesn’t believe the denial.
“Why would they put something out like that if it didn't have clearance?” she points out.
Harvey, who has battled Democrats in her state for many years, said she wasn’t surprised when a Somali American in the state legislature blamed “bigoty and xenophobia” for the backlash.
“Now, of course, they're going to play victim and say, ‘All these horrible people were so discriminatory.’ I think that's another ploy that the other side plays all the time,” she said.
Nobody at Columbus City Hall should have been surprised, she added, that many Americans were offended at the plan to raise another country’s flag just days from July 4th.
