Rich Lowry spoke up. He wrote an article under the
title: “Ilhan Omar's Big Lie,” and had it published in National Review Online
on February 18, 2019. You see that title and your first reaction is this: Humm
… I wonder what she lied about if she really did lie. But if she did, what
might the truth be?
So you read the article, and the first sentence you
encounter says this: “The Left distorts what happened in El Salvador in the
1980s.” You think that maybe Ilhan Omar stood at some podium and gave a speech
in the name of the Left (whatever that is) and told a whole bunch of lies, one
of them a BIG one. And so, you expect that you'll be reading all about Lowry's
correction of that big lie.
But the paragraph that follows hit you in the face
with a mega-attack on the woman; an attack that sounded like this: “Omar, who
is establishing herself as the most reprehensible member of the freshman class,
launched into Elliott Abrams.” Wow, you think to yourself. She must have really
launched into Abrams, for Rich Lowry to be so agitated as to launch into her
with this level of ferocity. Now you want to know what it is that she launched,
and how she might have launched it.
You continue reading the article, and what you
encounter is a transcript of Omar's questioning of Abrams. It goes like this:
“Would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war
crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving
US interests, as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?” Well, the
first part of that statement cannot be an attack because it's a simple
question: “Would you support...?” As to the second part, it is a reminder that
Elliott Abrams did support the outcome of the operations in those places,
calling them a “fabulous achievement.” And this cannot be an attack either. So,
where's the lie?
By now, you begin to see something screwy in Lowry's
article, and it gets worse. You find that instead of responding to Omar's
questions, Abrams complained to the chair of the Congressional Committee where
he was called to testify, that those questions represented an attack on him,
and he refused to answer them. This is also the position that Rich Lowry took
in defense of Abrams. And you wonder: what does that say? Well, it says there
is a consciousness of guilt on the part of these two gentlemen. And guess what,
my friend; the rest of Rich Lowry's article establishes the existence of that
consciousness of guilt beyond any doubt.
Look what Rich Lowry went on to say:
“It is true that the Reagan administration wrongly
minimized the 1981 El Motoze massacre. Ambassador Hinton doubted the initial
reports about the atrocity. Embassy officials couldn't investigate. When Abrams
publicly relayed bad information about the massacre, he was relying on the
erroneous reporting from the embassy. It is true that the perpetrators were
troops trained by the US”.
Thus, what happened in 1981 was that a series of
gruesome massacres were committed in El Salvador. The US ambassador in the
Latin American country doubted reports to that effect and relayed bad
information to the State Department in Washington. Based on those reports,
Elliott Abrams went public with the false information, and called America's
military effort in that country a fabulous achievement. A few months later the
truth came out, and everyone involved went public to correct the record …
everyone that is, except Elliott Abrams, the character that went public with
the false information in the first place. Here is how Rich Lowry described that
episode:
“In a speech in 1982, Ambassador Hinton said of the
death squads, the mafia must be stopped. The gorillas of this mafia are
destroying El Salvador. His replacement, Thomas Pickering, denounced the death
squads as murderers, torturers, and kidnappers who must be held to account. In
1983 Vice President Bush called the death squads, a cowardly group of common
criminals and murderers”.
As can be seen, everyone that did not speak publicly
in 1981 about the horrible events, came out in 1982 and 1983, and publicly
explained how they came to believe the erroneous information that was
circulated at the time. They took the opportunity to do the right thing, which
was to denounce the people that committed the atrocities. Everyone came out and
did so, except Elliott Abrams. Why?
And now, almost four decades later, Ilhan Omar tried
to give Abrams the opportunity to redeem himself. But instead of thanking her
for allowing him to set the record straight and denounce those who committed
the atrocities, he complained he was being attacked. Why?