Rep. Ilhan Omar’s journey of discovery took a fascinating turn in a new op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday.
Judging by the piece, the Democrat from Minnesota could have been a speechwriter for President George W. Bush circa 2005.
Omar reflects on the horrors of war by sharing her personal experience fleeing from Somalia and living as a refugee in Kenya before coming to the United States when she was eight years old. But she also lays out her prescription: enforcing the same human rights standard on every country of the world.
“Valuing human rights also means applying the same standards to our friends and our enemies,” Omar writes.
She goes on to state that “peace and respect for human rights” are “universal values” and that we should “apply these universal values to all nations. Only then will our world achieve peace.”
The echoes are unmistakable.
In January 2005, Bush said, “America’s belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.”
Later in his address, he said, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
During eight years under Bush, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of applying our universal values of peace and respect for human rights.
So one has to ask: Is this the same Ilhan Omar who criticized President Trump for imposing economic sanctions against Venezuela for the brutal authoritarian rule of dictator Nicolas Maduro? His regime is responsible for the deaths of countless civilians by “death squads” to stamp out political dissent. That’s on top of his tanking a once-wealthy economy and forcing the vast majority of Venezuelans into poverty.
Similar to a beauty pageant contestant who gives a trite answer about “world peace,” Omar now argues that the United States can somehow impose our universal values of peace and respect for human rights to other nations by asking them nicely.
