Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota might wish to contain her area of concern to the United States for a little while. Just a thought.
No, I’m just talking about Omar’s now-infamous speech Saturday where she was speaking to a group of her constituents about the breakaway, unrecognized Republic of Somaliland and how she would work within the U.S. system to stop it from entering into a treaty with Ethiopia, according to Fox News.
The politics of Somalia wouldn’t necessarily be of much concern to Americans if it weren’t for a huge gaffe during her speech in which she called herself “Somali first.” (Ironic, considering — as the Jerusalem Post noted — she got herself into trouble back in 2019 for implying Jewish-Americans had dual loyalties between America and Israel.)
But, as Omar has done in the past, she bounded from one failure quickly to another closely related failure.
This time, it had to do with foreign policy concerns regarding El Salvador — a country whose president, Nayib Bukele, has drastically cracked down on gang violence to the point where he leads one of the safest countries in the Americas.
Omar, of course, calls Bukele’s methods “threats to democracy” and sent a letter to the Biden administration’s State Department just days before the Salvadorian elections Sunday saying it “must review its relationship with El Salvador and defend democratic values.”
Bukele’s response, TL;DR version: Thanks!
The full letter, as Omar touted in a Tuesday news release, “raises alarm over President Nayib Bukele’s recent declaration of a state of emergency, unlawful arrests and detention, harassment of political opponents, restrictions on press freedoms, and other authoritarian actions” and urges “the Biden Administration to address ongoing threats to democracy and human rights in El Salvador ahead of next month’s elections.”
“The State of Exception declared by President Bukele in March 2022 has provided the framework for tens of thousands of arrests without due process, including that of U.S. citizens, and has also served as a smokescreen for the targeted harassment of political opponents of the government, human rights defenders, environmental activists, and others,” Omar wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Should Ilhan Omar be a congresswoman?
“President Bukele has also, during his first term, overseen the militarized harassment of the legislature, a significant erosion of judicial independence, and the de facto criminalization of civil society,” she continued.
“With the election approaching, this crushing of dissent and restriction on multiparty democracy has extended to the arrests and arrest warrants of political opponents, including the former Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States, Rubén Zamora,” the congresswoman wrote.
The letter was also sent to members of Congress and co-signed by 13 other House Democrats.
Full letter⬇️ pic.twitter.com/SqerS7jte0
— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) January 31, 2024
Wow. This sounds really bad. Until, of course, you remember this is Ilhan Omar we’re talking about and maybe we should do a bit of research on the subject.
For instance, take Rubén Zamora, described in Omar’s missive as simply “the former Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States.” He was also, as the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, a member and the first presidential candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, an “insurgent group that became a legal political party of El Salvador at the end of the country’s civil war in 1992.”
The party took power in 2009 and held it until 2019, when Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) party was elected. In 2019, Reuters noted, more than 2,000 people were murdered in the country thanks to gang violence. In January, Justice and Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said only 154 murders were committed in 2023 after Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence.
Nevertheless, human rights groups and leftists like Omar are concerned about the fact that Bukele has taken strong measures to crack down on lawlessness — which Reuters, not known for being a hive of covert conservatism, noted “has been broadly popular with Salvadorans weary of years of gang violence, extortion and drug dealing” — and not with the revolutionary party that oversaw the rise of “gang violence, extortion and drug dealing.”
Bukele’s response to Omar’s urgent plea for Blinken and his peeps at Foggy Bottom to intervene in El Salvador’s elections was essentially a thank-you card for the endorsement.
“We are HONORED to receive your attacks, just days before OUR election,” the president said on X. “I would be very worried if we had your support.”
“Thank you,” he added, with the hands-praying emoji:
We are HONORED to receive your attacks, just days before OUR election.
I would be very worried if we had your support.
Thank you 🙏🏼 https://t.co/7V5a0AdpCV
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 31, 2024
A few hours later, he threw a little more shade Omar’s way, posting this: “I think the United States should have free and fair elections.”
I think the United States should have free and fair elections.
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 31, 2024
This would all be a pretty great own on Bukele’s part if it hadn’t come just four days after Omar pledged in a speech to defend the territorial integrity of a country with an unelected government that has “struggled to reestablish a functioning state following the collapse of an authoritarian regime in 1991,” according to nonprofit Freedom House. (It gives Somalia a “freedom” score of 7/100; El Salvador earns a 56/100.)
Amnesty International, meanwhile, notes that “[a]ll parties to Somalia’s conflict continued to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law with impunity” and that “[f]reedom of expression [has been] restricted, and journalists were attacked, beaten and arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.”
But guess which country’s “abuses” the congresswoman is focused on?
Look, I’m not saying that Ilhan Omar does much better when she focuses her attention on the country she’s supposed to be representing, the United States of America. However, she can’t embarrass herself any worse than she does when she tries to burnish her nonexistent foreign-policy chops.
Stick to domestic policies, Rep. Omar. And preferably ones that don’t involve people of Jewish descent.
