Ilhan Omar receives threatening 'patriarchy will rise again' package

The office of US Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar received a suspicious package on Tuesday that threatened “patriarchy will return”, prompting police to respond.

The package sent to Omar's office contained a “suspicious substance” and an accompanying note, according to the Minnesota congresswoman.

“The patriarchy will rise again. Merry f****** Christmas,” the note read.

US Capitol Police went to her office and found the package did not contain any hazardous materials.

“Everyone on our team is okay,” Omar tweeted at the time. “We reported the package to Capitol Police and they determined it to be safe.”

Omar, who has been on the receiving end of numerous hate messages and death threats since becoming a congresswoman, said the threatening package would not stop her from serving her district.

"They can send the threatening e-mails, phone calls and packages to distract us but nothing will ever slow us down as we serve the people of #MN5. I survived war, I got this," she said in a tweet.

Earlier this year, Omar’s communications director Jeremy Slevin accused a pro-Israel lobbying group of putting the lawmaker’s life at risk by sponsoring a Facebook advert attacking her.

The ad featured a picture of Omar alongside text that read: “For Ilhan Omar, there is no difference between America and the Taliban. Between Israel and Hamas. Between Democracies and terrorists”.

Omar was targeted in a similar way several months earlier, for her criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians in East Jerusalem and its bombing of Gaza.

Omar and Jan Schakowsky, another Democrat, recently proposed a bill designed to create a dedicated global Islamophobia representative within the State Department.

The Combating International Islamophobia Act "requires the State Department to create a Special Envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia", according to a press release from Omar's Congress website.

If passed, it would also force Washington's equivalent of a foreign ministry to "include state-sponsored Islamophobic violence and impunity in the Department's annual human rights report".