RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rep. Omar’s views may not have been entirely clear to Minnesota voters last November. A public broadcasting report shortly before her November election to the U.S. House described her this way:

Omar fled her native Somalia when she was 8 years old and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya. She came to the US as a 12-year-old and eventually settled in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, which has long been a first stop for new arrivals in the US. There, she “fell in love with democracy” and started spending time as a community organizer until she ran for office.

… For Omar, the inspiration to get involved in politics came from her family, who were always talking about politics, world news and democracy over meals.

But in a New York Times report almost two months after last year’s election, her experience in America didn’t exactly sound like a love affair:

Her arrival in this country was the first time, Ms. Omar has said, that she had confronted “my otherness” as both a black person and a Muslim. She became a citizen in 2000, when she was 17. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she decided to wear the hijab, as an open declaration of her identity. But from “the first day we arrived in America,” she said, she concluded that it was not the golden land that she had heard about.

“I think back to the orientations I went through a little over 20 years ago in the process of coming to this country, and in those orientations they did not have people who were homeless. There was an America that extended liberty and justice to everyone. There was an America where prosperity was guaranteed regardless of where you were born and what you looked like and who you prayed to,” she said, adding, “I wasn’t comfortable with that hypocrisy.”

Many Americans are no doubt sorry our country didn’t live up to her expectations. But if Ms. Omar thought prosperity in America was guaranteed, the fault lies with those expectations. The real guarantee that has inspired millions of people to come to this land is the freedom to succeed or fail.

And while Rep. Omar may claim that she “fell in love with democracy,” recent events suggest it was at best a temporary crush. How else to explain her recent tweet echoing the propaganda of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as he presides over a humanitarian disaster and prevents the restoration of that country’s democracy? Wrote Rep. Omar:

A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump’s efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican’s efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue.

There is no U.S.-backed coup. As the Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady explained recently, the Venezuelan constitution gives the democratically elected National Assembly the power to declare Mr. Maduro’s 2018 re-election invalid. “It did so at the time because the election didn’t meet minimum democratic standards. The Lima Group of Latin American nations, Canada, the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and the European Union all refused to recognize the election for the same reasons,” noted Ms. O’Grady, adding:

As a result, when Mr. Maduro’s first term expired on Jan. 10 there was no legitimately elected president and the seat was legally vacant. According to the constitution, the job then fell to the president of the National Assembly, Mr. Guaidó. The U.S. didn’t “anoint” him president, nor did he anoint himself; he is constitutionally obligated to accept the role for an interim period and organize a new election.

Dozens of democracies around the world have recognized Mr. Guaidó’s government, called for a new presidential election, or both. He has the backing of the Organization of American States, the Lima Group and the European Parliament.

The Venezuelan people are desperate to end the era of misery and hyperinflation. But this week Rep. Omar used an appearance on Capitol Hill by Elliott Abrams, the U.S. special envoy to Venezuela, to try to score political points on behalf of Mr. Maduro. RealClearPolitics has a video of the amazing exchange at the House foreign relations committee in which Rep. Omar essentially expressed the Marxist view of the Cold War. She attacked the former Reagan administration official for a 1982 atrocity in El Salvador by U.S.-backed forces that massacred hundreds of people. She didn’t mention that during the Cold War America’s communist foes massacred a hundred million people in atrocities too numerous to count. CONTINUE AT SITE