Martel: Rep. Ilhan Omar Derails House Hearing on Venezuela to Discuss… Anything but Venezuela

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Breitbart

Radical leftist Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) received an opportunity to redeem herself Thursday after displaying a shocking lack of knowledge on the situation in Venezuela on Twitter, referring to the Socialist International member party currently leading the opposition against that nation’s dictatorship as “far-right.”

Omar – who, despite a long record of antisemitic remarks and no practical experience with foreign policy, remains a member of the House Foreign Affair Committee – received time to question three expert witnesses for a panel that day titled “Venezuela at a Crossroads.” She could have used the time to offer a leftist defense of the brutal Nicolás Maduro regime in that country, or at least make the tired argument that his predecessor, the late dictator Hugo Chávez, was not so bad. It was a golden opportunity to prove to the American people she knew more about Venezuela’s modern history than she let on in casual Twitter opinions and prove that she deserved a voice on a panel about the U.S. role in that country.

Instead, when she received her time, she used it to attack one of the panelists, U.S. special envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams, for alleged stances he took on American policy in Central America in the 1980s.

Omar insisted that there was no reason for Americans to believe any analysis on Venezuela that Abrams was there to offer and repeatedly berated him for insufficiently opposing a hypothetical “genocide” in the country. She detailed the gruesome events of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, all but blaming Abrams for what transpired, but never offered clarity as to what relevance that event had to the situation in modern-day Venezuela. Ultimately, she did not address the other two panelists offering expert testimony and made no substantive statements on the situation in Venezuela today – or the situation in Venezuela nearly four decades ago, as she did with El Salvador.

Her outburst at Abrams – forbidding him from speaking after essentially calling him a liar – was a missed opportunity for her to prove detractors wrong about her shallow understanding of complex Latin American issues. By becoming the most talked about segment of the hearing, it also deprived the Venezuelan people of a platform for their woes to reach the mainstream American public. Most regrettably for Democrats, it also overshadowed more effective and informed attempts at discrediting Abrams or defending socialism in Venezuela from her colleagues, notably Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and Joaquin Castro (D-TX).

Omar did not, at least, forget to mention Venezuela entirely in her comments, but she presented the country as an afterthought. She asks Abrams, “Would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, if you believed they were serving U.S. interests?”

She repeatedly uses the word “genocide” as a hypothetical situation in Venezuela.

Omar did not mention Maduro or Venezuela’s legitimate president, Juan Guaidó, by name. She did not address the humanitarian crisis in that country, leaving most Venezuelans with no access to basic medications and so deprived of food the average citizen lost 24 pounds in 2017. As one of House’s new “democratic socialist” members, she could have also taken Maduro’s side, asked about the dictator’s theory that the U.S. is hiding soldiers in shipments of humanitarian aid, claims that U.S. sanctions are solely to blame for the lack of food in the country or reports that the Trump administration had corresponded with soldiers seeking to overthrow Maduro last year. Yet she did not offer any signs she was interested in these reports, either.

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No Venezuela for her...