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On June 25, 2019, the junk news site Taters Gonna Tate falsely reported that schools in Minnesota were teaching mandatory Arabic classes. The story falsely claims that students must learn Arabic in order to graduate because, After Obama allowed hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees to enter the USA and settle down in Minnesota, that state’s ethnic landscape changed radically. The website, along with others operated by the America's Last Line of Defense network of junk sites, claims to offer satire and that therefore nothing on the site should be believed. The story in question is a type of racial incitement that plays off ongoing hoaxes targeting U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota's 5th Congressional District. Omar is one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress and the first to wear a traditional head scarf, an achievement that has also made her a target for racist attacks. It also plays off overarching biases against Muslim people and immigrants, notably creeping sharia, the Islamophobic conspiracy theory that Muslim people are plotting to take over. Minnesota has between roughly 42,400 and 55,200 people of Somali heritage, not hundreds of thousands. The population makes up 1 percent of the state's total. And although Minnesota public school students can opt to learn Arabic, it is only one foreign-language offering. Others include Spanish, French, American Sign Language, Dakota, Ojibwe, Hmong, Japanese, and Somali — the mother tongue of Somalian people.
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