Girl, 15, seeks justice for Gaza in world court

Mon Aug 31, 6:52 pm ET

THE HAGUE (AFP) – A 15-year-old Palestinian girl who says Israeli troops killed her father and two siblings in Gaza in January, sought justice from the International Criminal Court on Monday.

"I am here to lodge a complaint against the occupying army," Amira Alqerem told journalists in The Hague, seven months after her family was killed in an early-morning assault in the Tal Al Hawa neighbourhood that also left her severely injured.

"I hope this complaint will succeed because it is the truth," the soft-spoken teenager said, seated next to her lawyer on his way to the ICC to file the complaint with the office of the prosecutor.

In her court filing, Alqerem says her 67-year-old father Fathi, 16-year-old-sister Ismat, and 14-year-old brother Ala, were killed by Israeli army fire in the early hours of January 14.

The three children were awoken by an explosion to find their father's body, covered in blood, next to a crater near their house, the document claims.

Ismat and Ala went off to seek help, but were killed in another explosion. Amira, who had stayed behind with her dead father, was hit in the right leg.

"This was a crime against humanity, that is why we brought it to the ICC," said her lawyer Gilles Devers, who claims the attacks were aimed at civilians.

"Israeli politicians and military leaders must be held responsible."

Israel's 22-day offensive on Islamist Hamas-controlled Gaza left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead before ceasefire took effect on January 18.

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in February he had begun a "preliminary analysis" of alleged crimes committed by Israel during the Gaza offensive.

He has to date received complaints and evidence from the Palestinian Justice Minister Ali Kashan, the Palestinian National Authority, and over 360 other individuals and non-governmental bodies, his office said on Monday.

Amira, meanwhile, is undergoing physical and psychological rehabilitation in France.

"I am doing this for all the children of Gaza," she said through an interpreter.

"I want to do something to change the situation."

US harshly rebukes Israel on settlement plans

Excuse me: How 'harshly' must the US rebuke the Jews who depend on the American taxpayer's money for their daily bread?

By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer Matthew Lee, Associated Press Writer Sat Sep 5, 1:04 am ET

WASHINGTON – Alarmed by Israeli plans to build new housing units in settlements and dimming prospects for American peace efforts, the Obama administration on Friday put out a rare and harsh public rebuke of its main Mideast ally.

The White House said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's settlement plans were "inconsistent" with commitments the Jewish state has made previously and harmful to U.S. attempts to lay the groundwork for a resumption in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

"United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate."

Netanyahu's aides, speaking on condition of anonymity Friday because the plans have not been formally announced, said any Israeli settlement freeze would not halt building the new units and or block completion of some 2,500 others currently under construction. They also said the freeze would not include east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians hope to make their future capital.

The unusually blunt White House criticism reflected the administration's growing frustration with Netanyahu, whose decision would approve hundreds of new housing units in West Bank settlements before considering even a temporary freeze in construction, as President Barack Obama has requested.

The White House typically refrains from commenting on such moves until they are formally announced. But in this case, U.S. officials said they acted because Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell had already been briefed on the Israeli plans earlier in the week.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Mitchell and the Israelis had been having "a very open dialogue" in "very intense discussions." He would not elaborate.

But one U.S. official familiar with Mitchell's Wednesday meeting in New York with Netanyahu envoy Yitzhak Molcho and Israeli Defense Ministry chief of staff Michael Herzog said the Israelis "told Mitchell they were going to do it and he told them they could expect a sharp response."

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic exchange, said the meeting had "not gone well."

The official added that the White House statement was released before a formal Israeli announcement of Netanyahu's plans because "we wanted to send a strong signal early on."

Publicly, the State Department had described Mitchell's discussion with the Israeli delegation — which came after his talks with Netanyahu a week earlier in London — as a "good meeting."

The department said Mitchell would travel again to the Middle East next week to follow up. That trip is still on, officials said Friday.

"The process will continue," said one. The official also noted that the statement was not entirely negative and expressed appreciation for "Israel's stated intent to place limits on settlement activity."

"We are working with all parties — Israelis, Palestinians, and Arab states — on the steps they must take to achieve that objective," said Gibbs.

Netanyahu's refusal to bend on the settlement issue despite repeated U.S. appeals threatens to damage Obama's credibility in the Arab world. The administration is counting on Arab support for a resumption in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations but will not likely get it unless Netanyahu makes concessions on settlements.

The Palestinians have said they will not sit down for talks unless there is a settlement freeze and Arab leaders have made similar demands.

Palestinian teen killed in Gaza shooting

Reuters - A 14-year-old Palestinian boy died on Saturday after being wounded in a shooting incident involving Israeli soldiers in the northern border town of Beit Hanoun, Palestinian medical workers said.

Sat Sep 5, 6:56 am ET

GAZA (Reuters) – A 14-year-old Palestinian boy died on Saturday after being wounded in a shooting incident involving Israeli soldiers in the northern border town of Beit Hanoun, Palestinian medical workers said.

They said Ghazi al-Zaaneen was seriously wounded on Friday night when Israeli soldiers fired shots toward a neighborhood in the town.

A military official, who declined to be named, said soldiers had fired warning shots in the Beit Hanoun area on Friday night after spotting Palestinians approaching Israel's border.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said the military had launched an investigation.

Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Hamas-controlled enclave has been minimal since Israel ended a military offensive there in January.

Palestinians fired a mortar shell toward Israel on Friday and the army said it responded with artillery fire.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Sale of organs to be investigated

BMJ. 2001 January 20; 322(7279): 128.

PMCID: PMC1173179

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich

"A committee of experts has been appointed by Israel's health ministry to investigate"
Anybody out there want to bet what the outcome will be? I will bet the Jews investigating themselves will find themslves to be innocent! Deny! Deny! Deny!

A committee of experts has been appointed by Israel's health ministry to investigate claims by a Hebrew newspaper of illegal “sales of organs” and other alleged wrongdoings at Tel Aviv's L Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, the country's sole institution for the performance of postmortem examinations in cases of unnatural death.

The ministry's director general, Dr Boaz Lev, named a retired district court judge to head the four member panel, along with others from the ministry, a Beersheba hospital, and the Hebrew University's institute of applied chemistry.

In a weekend magazine cover story in the Yediot Aharonot Daily, reporters Ronen Bergman and Gai Gavra claimed that the institute—headed for the past 13 years by chief pathologist Professor Yehuda Hiss—had been involved in “organ sales” of body parts. Providing much ghoulish evidence, including “price listings” for leg and thigh bones and other body parts, the investigative journalists said that whole organs had been removed from corpses and transferred to universities for research and to medical schools for “practice” by students.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1173179

EU urges Israel to rethink settlement plans

"The European Union on Saturday urged Israel to scrap plans to build new Jewish settlements "
What will the EU do if the Jews tell them to take a hike? What recourse will the EU take against a very arrogant and demanding people?

Sat Sep 5, 11:58 am ET

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – The European Union on Saturday urged Israel to scrap plans to build new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, saying that would boost chances of fresh peace talks with the Palestinians.

"The negotiations with Israel have not finished and we have some weeks to go. I hope very much that we'll be able to get a change of that position" on Israeli settlements during the UN general assembly in New York next month, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said.

"We are very disappointed by some of the statements referred to in the last hours," said Solana, speaking in Stockholm at an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers.

"I hope very much that (Israel's plan) will not be realised," he added.

The Swedish EU presidency agreed.

Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said Europe had "very strong support for the American approach, notably regarding the settlements. They're illegal, they are an impediment to the peace process."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will consider a construction moratorium "for a few months" as demanded by Washington only after the green light is given to build hundreds of new homes in the occupied West Bank.

The announcement was sharply denounced by the Palestinians.

On Saturday in Cairo, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said there was no point in meeting Netanyahu if the Israeli premier approves a fast expansion of settlements before considering a freeze.

Abbas and Netanyahu have not met since the latter took over as the head of a right-wing Israeli government in early April.

US President Barack Obama has, with the support of Europe, called for a total freeze on settlements in a bid to revive the peace talks that have been suspended since the end of 2008.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090905/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflicteudiplomacy

Accountability and the organ theft controversy

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 5 September 2009

The hyperventilating by Israel's leaders over a story published in a Swedish newspaper last month suggesting that the Israeli army assisted in organ theft from Palestinians has distracted attention from the disturbing allegations made by Palestinian families that were the basis of the article's central claim.

The families' fears that relatives, killed by the Israeli army, had body parts removed during unauthoriZed autopsies performed in Israel have been overshadowed by accusations of a "blood libel" directed against the reporter, Donald Bostrom, and the Aftonbladet newspaper, as well as the Swedish government and people.

I have no idea whether the story is true. Like most journalists working in Israel and Palestine, I have heard such rumors before. Until Bostrom wrote his piece, no Western journalist, as far as I know, had investigated them. After so many years, the assumption by journalists was that there was little hope of finding evidence -- apart from literally by digging up the corpses. Doubtless, the inevitable charge of anti-semitism such reports attract acted as a powerful deterrent too.

What is striking about this episode is that the families making the claims were not given a hearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the first intifada, when most of the reports occurred, and are still being denied the right to voice their concerns today.

Israel's sensitivity to the allegation of organ theft -- or "harvesting," as many observers coyly refer to the practice -- appears to trump the genuine concerns of the families about possible abuse of their loved ones.

Bostrom has been much criticized for the flimsy evidence he produced in support of his inflammatory story. Certainly there is much to criticize in his and the newspaper's presentation of the report.

Most significantly, Bostrom and Aftonbladet exposed themselves to the charge of anti-semitism -- at least from Israeli officials keen to make mischief -- through a major error of judgment.

They muddied the waters by trying to make a tenuous connection between the Palestinian families' allegations about organ theft during unauthorized autopsies and the entirely separate revelations this month that a group of US Jews had been arrested for money-laundering and trading in body parts.

In making that connection, Bostrom and Aftonbladet suggested that the problem of organ theft is a current one when they have produced only examples of such concern from the early 1990s. They also implied, whether intentionally or not, that abuses allegedly committed by the Israeli army could somehow be extrapolated more generally to Jews.

The Swedish reporter should instead have concentrated on the valid question raised by the families about why the Israeli army, by its own admission, took away the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed by its soldiers, allowed autopsies to be performed on them without the families' permission and then returned the bodies for burial in ceremonies held under tight security.

Bostrom's article highlighted the case of one Palestinian, 19-year-old Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, from the village of Imatin in the northern West Bank, who was killed in 1992. A shocking picture of Bilal's stitched-up body accompanied the report.

Bostrom has told the Israeli media that he knows of at least 20 cases of families claiming that the bodies of loved ones were returned with body parts missing, although he did not say whether any of these alleged incidents occurred more recently.

In 1992, the year in question, Bostrom says, the Israeli army admitted to him that it took away for autopsy 69 of the 133 Palestinians who died of unnatural causes. The army has not denied this part of his report.

A justifiable question from the families relayed by Bostrom is: why did the army want the autopsies carried out? Unless it can be shown that the army intended to conduct investigations into the deaths -- and there is apparently no suggestion that it did -- the autopsies were unnecessary.

In fact, they were more than unnecessary. They were counterproductive if we assume that the army has no interest in gathering evidence that could be used in future war crimes prosecutions of its soldiers. Israel has a long track record of stymying investigations into Palestinian deaths at the hands of its soldiers, and carried on that ignoble tradition in the wake of its recent assault on Gaza.

Of even greater concern for the Palestinian families is the fact that at around the time the bodies of their loved ones were whisked off by the army for autopsy, the only institute in Israel that conducts such autopsies, Abu Kabir, near Tel Aviv, was almost certainly at the centre of a trade in organs that later became a scandal inside Israel.

Equally disturbing, the doctor behind the plunder of body parts, Prof. Yehuda Hiss, appointed director of the Abu Kabir institute in the late 1980s, has never been jailed despite admitting to the organ theft and he continues to be the state's chief pathologist at the institute.

Hiss was in charge of the autopsies of Palestinians when Bostrom was listening to the families' claims in 1992. Hiss was subsequently investigated twice, in 2002 and 2005, over the theft of body parts on a large scale.

Allegations of Hiss' illegal trade in organs was first revealed in 2000 by investigative reporters at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which reported that he had "price listings" for body parts and that he sold mainly to Israeli universities and medical schools.

Apparently undeterred by these revelations, Hiss still had an array of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time: "Over the past years, heads of the institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a 'storehouse' of organs at Abu Kabir."

Hiss did not deny the plunder of organs, admitting that the body parts belonged to soldiers killed in action and had been passed to medical institutes and hospitals in the interests of advancing research. Understandably, however, the Palestinian families are unlikely to be satisfied with Hiss' explanation. If the wishes of a soldier's family were disregarded by Hiss, why not Palestinian families' wishes too?

Hiss was allowed to continue as director of Abu Kabir until 2005 when allegations of a trade in organs surfaced again. On this occasion Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges and Hiss was given only a reprimand. He has continued as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir.

It should also be noted, as Bostrom points out, that in the early 1990s Israel was suffering from an acute shortage of organ donors to the extent that Ehud Olmert, health minister at the time, launched a public campaign to encourage Israelis to come forward.

This offers a possible explanation for Hiss' actions. He may have acted to help make up the shortfall.

Given the facts that are known, there must be at least a very strong suspicion that Hiss removed organs without authorization from some Palestinians he autopsied. Both this issue, and the army's possible role in supplying him with corpses, needs investigation.

Hiss is also implicated in another long-running and unresolved scandal from Israel's early years, in the 1950s, when the children of recent Jewish immigrants to Israel from Yemen were adopted by Ashkenazi couples after the Yeminite parents had been told that their child had died, usually after admission to hospital.

After an initial cover-up, the Yeminite parents have continued pressing for answers from the state, and forced officials to reopen the files. The Palestinian families deserve no less.

However, unlike the Yemenite parents, their chances of receiving any kind of investigation, transparent or otherwise, look all but hopeless.

When Palestinian demands for justice are not backed by investigations from journalists or the protests of the international community, Israel can safely ignore them.

It is worth remembering in this context the constant refrain from Israel's peace camp that the brutal, four-decade occupation of the Palestinians has profoundly corrupted Israeli society.

When the army enjoys power without accountability, how do Palestinians, or we, know what soldiers are allowed to get away with under cover of occupation? What restraints are in place to prevent abuses? And who takes them to task if they do commit crimes?

Similarly, when Israeli politicians are able to cry "blood libel" or "anti-semitism" when they are criticized, damaging the reputations of those they accuse, what incentive do they have to initiate inquiries that may harm them or the institutions they oversee? What reason do they have to be honest when they can bludgeon a critic into silence, at no cost to themselves?

This is the meaning of the phrase "power corrupts," and Israeli politicians and soldiers, as well as at least one pathologist, demonstrably have far too much power -- most especially over Palestinians under occupation.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10753.shtml

Articles which threaten Israeli security

By Bouthaina Shaaban

Thursday, September 03, 2009

The investigative report written by Swedish journalist Donald Boström and published in Sweden’s largest newspaper Aftonbladet about Israeli occupation forces killing Palestinians with the objective of stealing their organs raised a political and media storm in Israel meant to cover up a horrible crime perpetrated for years under the full gaze of the “free” world.

These criminal acts began in 1992 when Palestinians started to witness a sharp rise in the number of young Palestinians disappearing and of bodies of Palestinians killed by occupation forces being returned with organs like hearts, kidneys, livers and eyes missing.

“I was in the area at the time, working on a book,” Boström writes. “On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it … I travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Ahmad Ghanam.”

Bilal, 19, was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year; 69 of them went through postmortem examination. Boström describes in detail how Israeli occupation soldiers targeted Bilal, a leader of the stone-throwing children, at midnight on May 13, 1992, shot him first in the chest and he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then shot Bilal in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet, dragged him, then loaded him in a jeep and drove him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. He was flown to an unknown destination. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

It was clear that Bilal’s body was slit from his abdomen up to his chin. The families and relatives of Khaled from Nablus, the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Mahmood and Nafez from Gaza, all talked to Boström about their children who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.

Investigations in New Jersey have proven that Rabbi Levy-Izhak (Isaac Rosenbaum) from Brooklyn and other rabbis have run for years Soprano-like networks to sell the kidneys of Palestinian martyrs in the US black market. Patients in the United States paid up to $160,000 per kidney. In 2003, a medical conference showed that Israel is the only country in the world in which the medical profession does not condemn stealing human organs and does not act against those involved in such a crime. On the contrary, and as was revealed by a Dagens Nyheter report on December 5, 2003, and the Aftonbladet report of August 17, 2009, prominent doctors in major Israeli hospitals steal and transplant organs routinely.

When asked about the number of bodies sold by rabbi Rosenbaum, he answers proudly, “we are talking about a very large number,” and that his company has worked in this field “for a long period of time.” Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard University confirms that organ trafficking is widespread in Israel and believes that there is sufficient evidence to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli crimes.

Israeli media has turned the results shown by Aftonbladet’s investigative report into a diplomatic crisis between Sweden and Israel instead of demanding an end to this atrocious crime and bringing those corrupt criminals to justice. Headlines highlighted that the Swedish prime minister refused to apologize and that Boström refused to withdraw the report despite the fact that he received death threats. The question, however, is what should the Swedish prime minister apologize for? Israel, not Sweden, is accused of killing young people, stealing and trafficking in their organs and it is Israel which should be put on trial.

They behaved in the same way with Mary Robinson and others who defended the rights of the Palestinians. They raised a media storm about US President Barack Obama awarding her the Medal of Freedom because she took a courageous stand in support of justice in Palestine. They behaved in the same way toward the author of this article because she wrote a column in Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper in which she lauded Robinson’s courage in defense of human rights. The Jerusalem Post published an article against me on August 17, 2009 which is full of incitement and accusations which aim at creating negative preconceived ideas about the author.

The question here is why the Jerusalem Post article neglected to mention that Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Maria Lindh, whom I mentioned with Mary Robinson in my article, and who also took honorable stances in support of justice in Palestine, was arrested several times by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and was then assassinated in ambiguous circumstances.

This means that official circles in Israel divert attention from an atrocious crime committed against unarmed civilian Palestinians for over 60 years to a mere article which causes a diplomatic standoff. The same circles instruct the Jerusalem Post to attack my article which calls for honoring honest leaders of the world, like Robinson, for defending justice.

Has the world read about how Israel interrogates Palestinian women prisoners after stripping them naked to humiliate them? Is writing about them and defending their dignity a form of anti-Semitism and hostility toward Israel and the US? And why do Israeli media implicate the US in such crimes?

Despite the ferocious official Israeli campaign to silence free and honest individuals, the circle of those who believe in justice and freedom is getting wider. These are not only politicians, academics and journalists who are targeted by Israeli death or defamation squads who assassinate or muzzle them; they are the vanguard of a global movement to liberate the Palestinian people from this ugly barbarianism. The great thing is that they come from all religions and nationalities; and they will be remembered by history as the first to dare carry the torch of supporting freedom and justice for Palestinians. And surely, no one will remember those who fabricate charges and wage cheap propaganda against human beings, human rights, human dignity and freedom.

Professor Bouthaina Shaaban is political and media adviser at the Syrian presidency, and former expatriates minister. She is also a writer and professor at Damascus University since 1985. She earned a doctorate in English Literature from Warwick University, London. She was the spokesperson for Syria. She was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=106041

Israeli Schools Refuse To Admit Children Of Ethiopian Origin

from Palestine Monitor by Palestine Monitor

Over the summer, Israeli children of Ethiopian origin living in Petah Tikva waited to find out if any school in the Israeli city would accept them in the new school year, after the city's schools refused to enrol children of Ethiopian origin.

The children cannot be accepted into state secular schools until they have finished their compulsory conversion process, however state religious schools and private religious schools have refused to enrol Ethiopian children.

The Education Ministry announced on Monday that a compromise had been reached which would allow the Ethiopian Israeli children to start school along with all other Israeli children. However on arrival at their schools, Ethiopian children were not allowed into classrooms, and were sent instead to the library or the staff room, waiting there for several hours before being told to return to the Municipality. At the Education Department of the municipality, Ethiopian children with school backpacks crowded the corridors.

One mother, Esther Dasata, who has lived in Israel for 26 years, asked "Are they afraid our color will rub off on them?".

David Maharat from the Education Ministry told Israeli newspaper Haaretz "This is one humiliation too many. Schools are competing with each other over who will have fewer students of Ethiopian origin."

The Petah Tikva municipality was forced to intervene in 2007 when state religious schools were found to be segregating Ethiopian children, forcing them to learn in a separate classroom, and even giving them taxi fares so they would not take the bus home with other Israeli children.

Segregation in Israeli schools is a well entrenched policy, as Israeli citizens of Arab origin are well aware. SInce 1948, Israel has enforced a separate education system for Arabs and Jews. Last month Palestine Monitor reported that one-year-old Dana Zuabi was expelled from her day care centre in Sulam after 6 Jewish parents demanded her removal. Dana had been the first Arab child ever to attend the day-care centre.

A report published in March by monitoring group Dirasat found that the Israeli government invests $1100 in each Jewish pupil's education but only $190 for each Arab pupil. In state-run religious schools, Jewish pupils receive nine times more funding than Arab pupils.

Israel's racially-based education policies undermine its claim to be a modern, democratic state, and its policies of segregation, which stretch far beyond the educational system, inevitably draw comparisons to apartheid, or to the US south of the 1950s. However it was 55 years ago that the US Supreme Court recognized that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", paving the way for the civil rights movement. As Ethiopian children wait to be allowed into schools, it is clear that in the 21st century, even for Israeli citizens, civil rights are still not recognized in Israel.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in his visit to Israel last week, responding to this latest controversy, said that "I hope that your society will evolve".

Organ FailureThe arrests of rabbis who trafficked body parts uncover more complicated issues

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2223559

By Benyamin Cohen

Posted Friday, July 24, 2009, at 4:11 PM ET

Two state legislators and several rabbis were among more than 40 people arrested yesterday in New Jersey. With the right ingredients of salaciousness and scandal, the news appeared to be straight out of a Hollywood screenplay: corrupt politicians, money laundering, people being arrested by the busload, raids on synagogues, an Apple Jacks cereal box stuffed with $97,000 in cash, and rabbis trafficking organs. Allegedly, one paid $10,000 to an impoverished Israeli for his or her kidney and tried to sell it for upward of $150,000 in the United States. The criminal complaint quotes the rabbi as saying he was in the organ business for a decade. (And in a you-can't-make-this-stuff-up twist, it wasn't even the day's only story on Israelis trafficking human body parts.)

The rabbis' organ trafficking was only one of their many indiscretions. In addition to being against the law, it raises a complex bioethical issue for Jews, one laced in a culture of moral imperatives. Is illegally buying an organ really wrong if it's saving someone's life? Is paying for altruism, by definition, counterintuitive? Jews have been battling this quandary for a long time, especially when you consider how little they themselves actually help the cause of transplantation.

"Jews don't like to donate organs," says Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, one of the founding members of the Beth Din of America, the equivalent of the Supreme Court of the Jewish justice system. "They don't donate at the rate of other social groups." This imbalance—of taking more from organ banks than they are putting in—has put Jews around the world at odds with transplant technology. Israel has suffered for years with an organ shortage, forcing its residents to engage in "transplant tourism" in places across Europe and, most notably, in China. According to statistics from Israel's transplant authority and the United Network of Organ Sharing, the number of people who hold an organ donation card in Israel is at a paltry 8 percent. Most Western countries hover closer to 35 percent.

In an attempt to repair the disparity, Israel passed a law last year that made it easier to become an organ donor. But it took a while. Earlier versions of the bill failed because people feared it would lead to "rabbinical supervision" of the time of death: They thought doctors and rabbis might conspire to hasten a patient's death if they knew they could harvest organs. An Israeli organization called Adi, formed by a family who lost their son while he was waiting for a kidney transplant, has worked tirelessly to try to promote awareness among the Israeli populace of the moral imperatives of being an organ donor. But for a religion that prides itself on being a "light unto the nations," it's an oddly uphill battle. Some in the ultra-Orthodox community oppose the Adi initiative so fiercely that they have actually created "life cards" that state explicitly that the cardholder does not want to donate organs under any circumstances.

There are a whole host of reasons why Israelis—and Jews in general—don't wish to part with their anatomy even after they die. For some, it's simply taboo, yet another guilt-laden stigma in an already guilt-laden religion. Others believe it is a biblical commandment to be buried whole without any missing organs.

Related in Slate

Richard Epstein and Atul Gawande hashed out the merits of paying people to donate their organs, and Sally Satel took issue with the National Kidney Foundation's opposition to the idea. Will Saletan said that if we don't increase the supply of organs, desperate people will just keep selling their own. Judith Shulevitz parsed the debate over what Orthodox Judaism says about abortion.

Judaism is riddled with hundreds of laws that dictate our daily existence. Interestingly, the Torah itself rarely, if ever, connects a specific commandment to a specific reward; the logic being, if you knew the "value" of each commandment, it would be easy to pick and choose which ones to obey. Only twice in the entire Old Testament are rewards mentioned—by the commandment to shoo away the mother bird before taking her chicks (a mere flick of the wrist) and the commandment to honor your parents (an often lifelong difficult task). The Bible states that the reward for both those commandments is exactly the same: long life. In a sense, what Moses was teaching was that the value of the seemingly simplest commandment and of one of the hardest are actually in the same.

But Jewish law, just like secular legal theory, is filled with judicial loopholes. A major one is that for the sake of saving a life, a Jew is allowed to break just about any commandment. For example, if a Jew is injured on the Sabbath, he is certainly allowed to go to the hospital even though he normally doesn't drive on Saturday. Life or death matters trump all but a handful of commandments. And as far as organ donation goes, two biblical verses are trotted out to quell the uneasiness among Jewish donors. "You shall surely heal" (Exodus 21:19) and "You shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor" (Leviticus 19:16).

While this all sounds well and good, there's another Jewish law that can put a hamper in that artery you were about to donate: the prohibition against desecrating a dead body. Is posthumously donating an organ considered desecrating? Complicating this is determining what actually constitutes "dead"—does brain-dead count? Doctors might say one thing, while some rabbis might say another. Taking a Jew off life support can fast become an exercise in intellectual gymnastics once rabbis are consulted.

But most mainstream American rabbis agree on one thing: Organ donation is not only allowed but is considered something to strive for. Enter the Halachic Organ Donor Society, a nonprofit whose mission is to dispel the myth that Jewish law opposes organ donation. Their rabbinic advisory board, a veritable who's who of the spiritually elite, is promoted on their Web site next to the HODS version of an organ donor card. Even the HODS cards can't seem to define death perfectly: Carriers choose whether their organs may be harvested after "[i]rreversible cessation of autonomous breathing (as confirmed by brain-steam death)" or "[i]rreversible cessation of heartbeat."

Rabbi Broyde, a professor of law at Emory University and himself a member of HODS advisory board, favors making posthumous organ donation mandatory to provide a surplus of organs. "The real question is, Why is there a shortage? Why do people go out and buy kidneys? Because they desperately need kidneys and there aren't any," he says matter-of-factly. "There's no black market for feces," he adds. "There's no black market for things that nobody wants."

A 62-year-old friend of mine is the recipient of two organ donations—a kidney and a pancreas. It's why he's still alive and breathing. I asked him what he thought about the rabbis trafficking organs. Surely, he must be upset. After all, these rabbis were cheating the very organ bank system that had saved his life. His response surprised me: He said he had no problem with it. For him, it's all about saving lives.

On that level, it actually doesn't surprise me to find out rabbis were trafficking organs. It's salacious, yes, but not far-fetched. They sincerely felt they were not hurting anyone; indeed, by giving life to another, they probably felt they were mimicking the divine. They were in the business of saving lives. It certainly doesn't justify their illegal activities, but it does help explain it. As Broyde put it bluntly, "They probably wouldn't deal heroin."

Israel seeks lost children of Yemen exodus

Immigrant mystery: Graves to be opened in dispute over what happened to Oriental Jews who disappeared in the 1950s

PATRICK COCKBURN Jerusalem

Friday, 9 February 1996

PATRICK COCKBURN

Jerusalem

Forty-year-old graves are to be opened by an Israeli government commission of inquiry in an effort to resolve the bitter dispute over what happened to the children of Yemeni Jews who allegedly disappeared soon after arriving in the 1950s.

The controversy, which has already led to a gun-battle between militant Yemenites and police, is likely to deepen with the revelation that autopsies were secretly carried out on the bodies of children who died. Ami Hovav, an investigator with the government commission, told Israeli television: "Post-mortems were performed on the Yemenite children. That's why they were not returned to their parents."

Some 50,000 Jews came to Israel from Yemen in the 1950s and many of them and their families believe passionately that thousands of their children were abducted by the authorities of the day. They accuse them of allowing Jewish families from Europe to adopt children, whose parents were then told they were dead.

The digging up of graves is at the request of the Yemeni community. Examination by radar reportedly shows that some of the graves are empty. If this turns out to be true then Yemenites will see this as evidence of mass kidnapping.

"We have been authorised to open unmarked graves where Yemenite children are suspected to have been buried," said the retired judge who heads the commission, Yehuda Cohen.

Most controversially, an investigation by Israel's commercial television station says that medical experiments were carried out on Yemenite children. Dr Ya'akov Rotamm, director of a children's hospital, is reported to have said that doctors injected healthy children in order to evaluate the level of phosphorus in their spinal fluid. Dov Levitan, the foremost Israeli specialist on the immigration of the Yemenite Jews, said the allegation is "sick" and without foundation.

The dispute over the fate of the children has already exploded into violence. In 1994 Rabbi Uzi Meshulam and 40 Yemenite followers protesting over "the sale of 4,000 Yemenite children" in the 1950s, armed themselves with sub-machine guns and barricaded themselves in a house and synagogue in the town of Yehud near Ben-Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv. The siege ended after two months in an exchange of fire with police in which one man was killed. Rabbi Meshulam was sentenced to eight years in jail.

Previous investigations have revealed that most of the missing children were not kidnapped, but died in hospital. In the confusion of the camps for newly-arrived immigrants, many of whom were sick when they arrived, parents sometimes could not be found. A few healthy children whose parents could not be located were sent to orphanages or were adopted.

The dispute over what happened to the missing children has become a symbol of the discontent of Oriental Jews at what they see as the hostility or indifference of the Israeli establishment.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/israel-seeks-lost-children-of-yemen-exodus-1318037.html

Ran Greenstein

Johannesburg, South Africa

rangreen@sn.apc.org

Preface

This story was first offered to the Guardian’s Comment is Free site. It was received on August 26 by Brian Whitaker, a commissioning editor at CiF and a former Middle East editor of the newspaper, who responded that “we’re minded to use it” but that because the issue was “a hot potato” it would take “a day or two” to decide.

On September 3, more than a week later, Georgina Henry, CiF’s executive editor, replied, apologising for the delay but saying she was going to reject the piece. Her strange reasoning led to a short but revealing correspondence. I include it here for anyone interested.

The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

The Autopsy Surgeon Aftonbladet Forgot

By JONATHAN COOK

Counterpunch

September 4-6, 2009

The hyperventilating by Israel’s leaders [1] over a story published in a Swedish newspaper last month [2] suggesting that the Israeli army assisted in organ theft from Palestinians has distracted attention from the disturbing allegations made by Palestinian families that were the basis of the article’s central claim.

The families’ fears that relatives, killed by the Israeli army, had body parts removed during unauthorized autopsies performed in Israel have been overshadowed by accusations of a “blood libel” directed against the reporter, Donald Bostrom, and the Aftonbladet newspaper, as well as the Swedish government and people.

I have no idea whether the story is true. Like most journalists working in Israel and Palestine, I have heard such rumours before. Until Bostrom wrote his piece, no Western journalist, as far as I know, had investigated them. After so many years, the assumption by journalists was that there was little hope of finding evidence -- apart from literally by digging up the corpses. Doubtless, the inevitable charge of anti-semitism such reports attract acted as a powerful deterrent too.

Israel’s sensitivity to the allegation of organ theft -- or “harvesting”, as many observers coyly refer to the practice -- appears to trump the genuine concerns of the families about possible abuse of their loved ones.

Bostrom has been much criticized for the flimsy evidence he produced in support of his inflammatory story. Certainly there is much to criticize in his and the newspaper’s presentation of the report.

Most significantly, Bostrom and Aftonbladet exposed themselves to the charge of anti-semitism -- at least from Israeli officials keen to make mischief -- through a major error of judgment.

They muddied the waters by trying to make a tenuous connection between the Palestinian families’ allegations about organ theft during unauthorized autopsies and the entirely separate revelations this month that a group of US Jews had been arrested for money-laundering and trading in body parts. [3]

The Swedish reporter should instead have concentrated on the valid question raised by the families about why the Israeli army, by its own admission, took away the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed by its soldiers, allowed autopsies to be performed on them without the families’ permission and then returned the bodies for burial in ceremonies held under tight security.

Bostrom’s article highlighted the case of one Palestinian, 19-year-old Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, from the village of Imatin in the northern West Bank, who was killed in 1992. A shocking picture of Bilal’s stitched-up body accompanied the report. [4]

Bostrom has told the Israeli media that he knows of at least 20 cases of families claiming that the bodies of loved ones were returned with body parts missing, [5] although he did not say whether any of these alleged incidents occurred more recently.

Equally disturbing, the doctor behind the plunder of body parts, Prof Yehuda Hiss, appointed director of the Abu Kabir institute in the late 1980s, has never been jailed despite admitting to the organ theft and he continues to be the state’s chief pathologist at the institute.

Hiss was in charge of the autopsies of Palestinians when Bostrom was listening to the families’ claims in 1992. Hiss was subsequently investigated twice, in 2002 and 2005, over the theft of body parts on a large scale.

Allegations of Hiss’ illegal trade in organs was first revealed in 2000 by investigative reporters at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which reported that he had “price listings” for body parts and that he sold mainly to Israeli universities and medical schools. [6]

Apparently undeterred by these revelations, Hiss still had an array of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time: “Over the past years, heads of the institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a ‘storehouse’ of organs at Abu Kabir.” [7]

Hiss did not deny the plunder of organs, admitting that the body parts belonged to soldiers killed in action and had been passed to medical institutes and hospitals in the interests of advancing research. Understandably, however, the Palestinian families are unlikely to be satisfied with Hiss’ explanation. If the wishes of a soldier’s familiy were disregarded by Hiss, why not Palestinian families’ wishes too?

Hiss was allowed to continue as director of Abu Kabir until 2005 when allegations of a trade in organs surfaced again. On this occasion Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges and Hiss was given only a reprimand. [8] He has continued as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir.

This offers a possible explanation for Hiss’ actions. He may have acted to help make up the shortfall.

Given the facts that are known, there must be at least a very strong suspicion that Hiss removed organs without authorisation from some Palestinians he autopsied. Both this issue, and the army’s possible role in supplying him with corpses, needs investigation.

Hiss is also implicated in another long-running and unresolved scandal from Israel’s early years, in the 1950s, when the children of recent Jewish immigrants to Israel from Yemen were adopted by Ashkenazi couples after the Yeminite parents had been told that their child had died, [9] usually after admission to hospital.

After an initial cover-up, the Yeminite parents have continued pressing for answers from the state, and forced officials to reopen the files. [8] The Palestinian families deserve no less.

However, unlike the Yemenite parents, their chances of receiving any kind of investigation, transparent or otherwise, look all but hopeless.

When Palestinian demands for justice are not backed by investigations from journalists or the protests of the international community, Israel can safely ignore them.

It is worth remembering in this context the constant refrain from Israel’s peace camp that the brutal, four-decade occupation of the Palestinians has profoundly corrupted Israeli society.

Similarly, when Israeli politicians are able to cry “blood libel” or “anti-semitism” when they are criticised, damaging the reputations of those they accuse, what incentive do they have to initiate inquiries that may harm them or the institutions they oversee? What reason do they have to be honest when they can bludgeon a critic into silence, at no cost to themselves?

This is the meaning of the phrase “Power corrupts”, and Israeli politicians and soldiers, as well as at least one pathologist, demonstrably have far too much power -- most especially over Palestinians under occupation.

[1] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1109437.html
[2] http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
[3] http://www.slate.com/id/2223559/
[4] http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab
[5] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3766093,00.html
[6] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1173179
[7] http://www.israelfaxx.com/webarchive/2002/01/2fax0104.html
[8] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518

Palestinians pay the price for Israel's illegal settlements

As Benjamin Netanyahu is pressed by the US to halt the construction of settlements, Donald Macintyre exposes the reality of surviving in the West Bank

Thursday, 27 August 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted 'settlements must continue'

REUTERS

On a still, hot, August afternoon you can only hear the bleating of the lambs and the occasional bark of a dog. There are few places more exposed and isolated in the West Bank than the cluster of tents and caves that is home to Khalil Nawaja, his wife Tamam, their two sons and their 50 sheep.

It was close to here that the couple were severely beaten last summer by four masked, club-swinging Jewish settlers in the barley field. Tamam, her face still bleeding after being clubbed in the jaw, was driven in an Israeli Army ambulance to Beersheeva's Soroka hospital, where she required three days of treatment.

And it was here that they received the news last week that the Israeli police had closed an investigation without making charges, even though the attack was caught on video, causing shock and outrage across Israel and beyond when it was shown on television last year.

George Mitchell – President Barack Obama's point man for kick-starting Middle East peace talks – yesterday pressed Israel to halt construction of West Bank settlements as a "confidence-building" gesture toward the Palestinians. As the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu headed into the meeting with Mr Mitchell which took place in London, he stressed that settlers were entitled to "continue living normal lives".

But it is the Palestinian Nawajas who have found it difficult to live "normal lives" since the attack on their five-acre plot in the arid and remote hill country south of Hebron in sight of the red-roofed Jewish settlement of Susiya. "I cannot leave this place for a single day or the land will be theirs," said Mr Nawaja, 61, who was also injured in the attack 14 months ago.

The West Bank Area C – unlike the Palestinian cities – is under direct Israeli military control. But Mr Nawaja clearly feels unprotected from all sides. "We are in the front line. We are protecting the land. But the [Palestinian] Authority does not seem to care about the land or the people. If leave tomorrow I will lose the land."

The closure of the lengthy Israeli police investigation into the attack on the Nawajas has cast fresh doubt on the efficacy of law enforcement against a violent minority of the 300,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. According to one human rights agency, Yesh Din, around 90 per cent of investigations it monitored in 2005-6 into complaints by Palestinians against settlers – and 79 per cent of ones about assaults – ended without an indictment.

Lawyers representing another agency Btselem are appealing for an order to re-open the Nawaja case. The police file shows detectives ran up against a wall of silence from most Jewish residents. In one revealing extract from the documentation, an Israeli shepherd repeatedly invokes his "right to remain silent" and when asked if he can name anyone who was involved declares: "Does it say rat on my forehead?"

The fact that the faces of all four of the assailants were covered with shirts underlines the limitations of Btselem's enterprising policy of issuing video cameras to vulnerable Palestinian residents. But there are doubts about how quickly the police – despite describing the incident as "grave" – started to hunt in earnest for suspects and evidence.

It was nine days before they searched a settler farm, where the Nawajas were convinced their attackers had come from, and indeed returned to after the incident was over. The search yielded evidence including shirts similar to those in the video clip, two picks with club-like handles, and five 9mm bullets.

Although the owner of the farm, Dalia Har Sinai – a well-known local settler whose husband was killed by two Palestinian gunmen early in the intifada – accompanied police on their search, there are no indications that they formally questioned her. When The Independent contacted her house by telephone yesterday, Mrs Har Sinai was said to be on holiday but one of the building's apparently temporary occupants added: "She has nothing to say."

Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] police would say only that "no evidence linking the owner of the farm to the event has been found. There was indeed footage documenting the violence but all the assailants were masked. Nevertheless, police managed to locate seven suspects who were detained and one was brought to court for an extension of his remand." The statement added that the tractor had been found, which preceded the four assailants to the scene of the attack. Its owner had been "interrogated".

"Everyone seems to know who these men are except the police," Mr Nawaja said this week.

It was not the first time his family had been attacked on the land, the deeds of which date back to Ottoman times and show as his family's, according to Mr Nawaja. A year earlier, two unmasked settlers arrived with around 200 sheep who proceeded to eat the young crops. "I said: 'Why are you doing this? The land belongs to me.' They said: 'All the land is ours.' Then I tried to shoo the sheep away," Mr Nawaja recalled.

At this point, he says, one of the settlers grabbed him by the shirt collar while another smashed a stone against his face, dislodging two of his teeth: "When they saw the blood they took their sheep and ran away." Mr Nawaja was then helped by Israeli soldiers who called an ambulance and advised him to lodge a complaint with the police. Shown a series of photographs on four separate occasions of possible suspects, Mr Nawajah was scrupulous in telling police than none of them were the right men. "I recognised some of them but none were the men that attacked me."

About the second incident, he was initially much more hopeful, thanks to the presence of mind of his daughter-in-law Muna, who brought her Btselem video camera with her when the family was summoned to help Mr Nawaja's nephew Imran after he was threatened on the family's land. She hid behind the crops filming part of the attack. Imran testified that he was knocked to the ground and hit all over his body and, though dizzy, saw his uncle similarly attacked and managed to recover enough to throw some stones in retaliation.

Even if the demand being pressed by the Americans now is agreed by Israel, a freeze on new settlement construction will do little to help the Nawajas' sense of security; for that they may need the removal of Susiya settlers in the two-state solution that is presumed to be President Obama's endgame.

"They [the settlers] want us to leave and go to [the nearby town of] Yatta," Tamam Nawaja said: "They want us to leave this land, but it is our land."

US talks yield hope

The prospect of an early resumption of US-sponsored direct peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians appears to be inching closer following four hours of detailed talks at a London hotel between the American envoy George Mitchell and the Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli delegation claimed afterwards that it was nearing a "bridging" agreement with Washington on settlement building, the Palestinian pre-condition for restarting the moribund peace process.

But even if the mood music suggests a compromise by Mr Netanyahu and that Israel is willing to restrict settlement construction, it is not a complete freeze on settlements in occupied territory that the Palestinians, with backing from the US, had demanded. In particular, there is no indication that Israel is preparing to accept any curbs on its highly controversial building activities in Arab East Jerusalem. Israel's refusal to budge on this has strained relations with Washington.

Expectations are nevertheless high that President Obama wants to make an announcement on the resumption of peace talks before the end of next month. That will require substantial progress being notched up when Israeli officials sit down again with Mr Mitchell in Washington next week.

Katherine Butler

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/palestinians-pay-the-price-for-israels-illegal-settlements-1777740.html

Colombia: U.S. Bases Stoke the Flames of Regional Conflict

August 19th 2009, by Roque Planas - NACLA

It was a moment that promised to define a new era in U.S.-Latin American relations: Obama greeted Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas with a smile and a handshake, and Chávez responded with a gift and a heavily accented "I wanna be your friend." The Cold War-style chasm between Washington and the leftist leaders of the Andes that had widened during the Bush administration finally seemed to be narrowing a bit.

But a nearly completed agreement between Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the Obama administration to grant the U.S. military access to Colombian bases is rapidly undermining whatever diplomatic progress was made in that fleeting moment.

The Uribe administration announced on July 12 that it had nearly reached an agreement on the terms of a decade-long lease to allow U.S. military personnel to use Colombian military bases to conduct anti-drug trafficking and anti-terrorism operations. No draft of the agreement has yet been made public. The increased access would serve to replace the U.S. lease at Manta, Ecuador, the only U.S. base of operations in South America until the lease was allowed by the Correa administration to expire this month.

President Uribe defended the agreement as a necessary step in his administration's fight against drug traffickers and Marxist guerrillas at a public event in Santa Marta last week. "This agreement guarantees continuity in the era of an improved Plan Colombia," he said, referring to the pact that has funneled $6 billion in U.S. aid to the Colombian government and military.

The lease agreement has drawn criticism from Colombian congressmen across the political spectrum, who argue that the executive does not have the authority to allow foreign troops into the country. Liberal Senator Juan Manuel Galán claimed that the Uribe administration "bypassed the Senate." Senator Jairo Clopatofsky, an uribista of the right-wing Partido de la U, echoed Galán's criticisms.

Senator Jorge Robledo of the left-wing Polo Democrático Alternativo Article 173 which states that the decision to "Permit the transit of foreign troops through the territory of the Republic" falls to the Senate.

Colombian and U.S. authorities have sought to calm critics by reassuring them that the agreement will not constitute the creation of an autonomous zone of U.S. military operation. "Any activity performed within the framework of the agreement has to be coordinated and authorized by the Colombian authorities," said Minister of Defense General Freddy Padilla de León. U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Brownfield has reiterated the same point and has emphasized that the increased U.S. presence should not be misconstrued as a foreign military base. "They have their bases. This is a question of access," he said.

The national controversy provoked by the possibility of an increased U.S. military presence in Colombia pales in comparison to the international dispute it has caused. As a neoliberal island in a Bolivarian sea, Colombia's decision to host more U.S. military personnel has been interpreted by neighboring Ecuador and Venezuela as a security threat. Consequently, Colombia's diplomatic and commercial relations with its neighbors are crumbling faster than a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Colombia's relations with Ecuador have remained tense since March 2008, when the Colombian military attacked an encampment of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) located along the border, killing rebel leader Raúl Reyes and 16 other guerrillas. The Correa administration recalled its ambassador to Colombia in protest against the violation of Ecuador's sovereignty.

The latent conflict erupted once more in June, when Ecuador filed an arrest warrant with Interpol against former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos for the murder of an Ecuadoran citizen killed during the March 2008 offensive. Santos is a close ally of president Uribe and rumored to be a presidential contender in 2010 if Uribe does not seek re-election. The Uribe administration responded by releasing a video of FARC commander Jorge Briceño claiming that the FARC contributed $100,000 to Corrrea's presidential campaign. The video, which the Colombian government says was recovered from the computer of alleged FARC member Adela Pérez last May, was submitted to Interpol and leaked to the media. Correa denies any support of illegal armed groups in Colombia and has demanded that the FARC "say if they have donated money and to whom." The Economist reports that Ecuador's electoral commission has certified his campaign contributions.

Colombia's relations with Ecuador were further soured by Uribe's invitation of more U.S. troops, since Correa had only recently expelled U.S. military personnel from the Ecuadoran base at Manta. Correa promised in his presidential campaign to shut down the only U.S. military base in South America, although he later offered to renew it if the U.S. agreed to let Ecuador establish a military base in Miami. "If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadoran base in the United States," he said.

Correa has announced that any further aggressions from Colombia will invite a military response. An increased U.S. military presence in Colombia promises to ratchet up tensions with Ecuador. The U.S. president, in his first major statement on Latin America policy, said that "In an Obama administration, we will support Colombia's right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders..."

Venezuela's Chávez has also characterized the increased U.S. military presence as a threat to his country's national security. Chávez maintains that the United States supported an abortive coup in Venezuela in April of 2002-a charge that U.S. officials deny, though the Bush administration did not join the 19 Latin American countries who condemned the illegal seizure of power.

Largely in response to the Colombian government's decision to increase the U.S. military presence there, an indignant Chávez ordered the withdrawal of the Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia on July 27 and has threatened to freeze imports from Colombia and nationalize Colombian companies if he perceives "one more act of aggression." Venezuela is Colombia's second largest trading partner, followed by the United States.

The crisis in Colombia-Venezuela relations was stoked by allegations from the Uribe administration that the Venezuelan government supplied Swedish anti-aircraft rocket launchers to the FARC. The Colombian military seized the weapons in question at La Macarena in October of 2008, but did not notify the Venezuelan government until early this month, according to a press release. The Swedish government has requested an explanation from the Chávez government. Chávez denied the allegations, saying "Anyone can take a rifle [sic] and put a Venezuelan seal and a serial number on it."

Colombia's more distant neighbors have also taken a keen interest in the military agreement. Brazilian President Lula da Silva commented that "An American base in Colombia doesn't please me." Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who was tortured along with her father by the Pinochet government following a military coup supported clandestinely by Washington, has called a meeting of the Union of South American Nations on August 10 in Quito, Ecuador, to discuss the issue. President Uribe is not expected to attend.

Far from the smiles and handshakes of April, the Obama administration now finds itself at the center of Latin America's most explosive inter-state crisis. The "New Partnership in the Americas" promised by Obama on the campaign trail and at the Summit of the Americas looks increasingly elusive.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4730

South American Leaders Concerned Over Colombia-U.S. Military Plan

August 11th 2009, by Kiraz Janicke - Venezuelanalysis.com

Latin American Presidents Zelaya (Honduras), Correa (Ecuador), Chavez (Venezuela), Ortega (Nicaragua), and Morales (Bolivia) celebrate Correa's inauguration for a second term, in Quito, Ecuador. (Prensa Presidencial)

Caracas, August 11, 2009 (venezuelanalysis.com) - South American presidents expressed deep concerns over a United States plan to increase its military presence in Colombia at a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) Summit in Quito, Ecuador, on Monday.

Full details of the U.S.-Colombia military plan have not been released, but the U.S. is expected to have a significant presence at three air bases and two naval bases, in addition to the two Colombian military bases it currently operates in.

The discussion of the U.S.-Colombia plan was introduced by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during a ceremony to inaugurate Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa as temporary president of UNASUR.

"I don't want to sabotage your ceremony Rafael ... [but] we are very worried," Chavez said, explaining he felt a "moral obligation" to warn about "the winds of war that are beginning to blow" in the region.

The bases constitute a "threat" to Venezuela and "could generate a war in South America," Chavez added.

In an open letter circulated to his South American counter-parts at the summit Chavez warned that the June 28 military coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya and the U.S.-Colombia military plan signify that "the U.S. Empire ... has launched a retrograde and anti-historic counteroffensive, with the aim of rolling back the union, sovereignty, and democracy of our continent."

Correa agreed, saying, "It is an issue that concerns all of us, because it can destabilize the region."

Bolivian President Evo Morales, supported by Chavez and Correa, introduced a motion to the summit to condemn Colombia's actions.

The Colombian President Alvaro Uribe refused to attend the summit because of his strained relations with Correa (due to Colombian military raid on a guerrilla camp in Ecuadorian territory last year), but sent vice-Foreign Minister Clemencia Forero instead.

Earlier Uribe had also said he would not attend the summit, arguing it "is not the appropriate place" to discuss the U.S.-Colombia military plan "it is only an agreement between two nations."

"Some people do not want to talk. The Colombian government, for example, does not want unity. It is acting against the unity," Chavez said at the summit.

"The Colombian government does not want South American unity because it is tied to the empire's orders, it is subordinated," he added.

Although Colombia signed the UNASUR Treaty in Brazil in May 2008 - together with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and Surinam - the staunch U.S. ally has had an uneasy relationship with the regional bloc.

Uribe refused to host the temporary presidency of the organization and opposed the formation of the UNASUR Defense Council initially refusing to join it, but later changing his mind.

Uribe and U.S National Security advisor James Jones undertook a seven-country tour of South America last week to drum up support for the military agreement, saying the agreement was to assist Colombia in its internal conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and to combat narco-trafficking. Only Peruvian President Alan Garcia openly supported the plan.

During discussion at the UNASUR summit, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he was "disturbed" by the "climate of unease" resulting from the Colombia-U.S. plan, but argued UNASUR should not convert itself into "a club of friends, surrounded by enemies," but should resolve the issue with Colombia through dialogue.

He also called on U.S. President Barack Obama to meet with South American leaders to explain the plan, "I think we should directly discuss our discontent with the American government - directly with them," he said.

Silva also indicated that he was concerned over "information we receive about [U.S.] ambassadors that still intervene in internal electoral processes in our countries" and the reactivation of the U.S. Navy's Fourth Fleet.

Despite saying the Colombia-U.S. plan "is creating an unacceptable and unprecedented state of belligerency in the region," Argentine President Cristina Kirchner said she was worried about the tone adopted by other presidents at the summit towards Uribe.

The motion to condemn Colombia was not included in the final declaration of the summit, as no consensus was reached. However, the leaders agreed to hold a presidential summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, later this month to discuss the matter.

Kirchner argued this would "take away any excuses" Uribe had for not attending the summit in Quito.

The Colombian vice-foreign minister told the summit, "The bases will continue being Colombian, entirely under Colombian jurisdiction and sovereignty."

However, in an interview with Colombian television station RCN on Sunday, Chavez disputed the claim that U.S troops will be under Colombian jurisdiction, pointing out that under the agreement they are granted immunity.

"Do you think Colombia will be giving orders to U.S. troops? It is a lie, the U.S Empire would never allow it," he said.

Venezuela has broken off diplomatic relations with Colombia and cut subsidized oil to its neighbour over the military plan.

Relations between Colombia and its neighbours Venezuela and Ecuador have become increasingly strained in recent weeks. A few weeks ago Colombia said it has a FARC video proving the guerrilla group financed Correa's 2006 presidential campaign - a claim categorically denied by Correa.

Colombia has accused Venezuela of providing arms to the FARC, after Colombian soldiers found FARC was using rocket launchers allegedly from the Venezuelan military.

Both Venezuela and Ecuador have denounced the accusations as false, saying they are designed to justify the increased U.S. presence in the region.

In other news at the summit, the leaders of the UNASUR member states also called for the immediate and unconditional return of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, and affirmed that they will not recognise the outcome of any elections held while the coup government remains in power.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4717

Venezuela: U.S. Military in Colombia to Control Region’s Natural Resources

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August 25th 2009, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

President Chavez marks the location of major natural resources on the South American continent (VTV)

Mérida, August 25th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) -- With the highly anticipated summit of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) three days away, the debate over the U.S.'s increased presence on Colombian military bases continues. Venezuela vowed to defend its natural resources, Colombia accused Venezuela of expansionism, and Noam Chomsky analyzed the conflict during a visit to Caracas.

On national television on Sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said the intention of increasing U.S. troops in Colombia is to control the region's natural resources.

"The United States is desperate because they have few oil reserves left... that is the reason for their threats against us," said Chavez. "They know that in order to take over the Orinoco Oil Belt [in Venezuela] they should do many things, including overthrow this government."

Chavez said the U.S. also seeks to control Brazil's oil reserves, and a large fresh water reserve that lies in the territory of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Brazil recently announced the discovery of a 280 million barrel reserve 120 kilometers outside of Rio de Janerio.

"The United States also has its eye on the Amazon, that enormous treasure," said Chavez, as he took out a map of Latin America and marked where the major oil, timber, mineral, and fresh water reserves are located across the continent. "We should prepare ourselves to defend our natural resources," he said.

In the Organization of American States (OAS), Venezuela's ambassador, Roy Chaderton, said Venezuela "shares the concern of the nations of South America regarding the threats of foreign intervention and the use of our territories to develop expansionist military projects, destined to generate destabilization in the short term, as well as favor strategic imperial interests in the medium and long term."

Colombia's ambassador to the OAS, Luis Alfonso Hoyos, accused the Chavez government of having its own "expansionist projects," namely, Chavez's announcement that the Venezuelan Information and Communication Ministry will attempt to publish the president's weekly opinion column "Chavez's Lines" in Colombia.

Hoyos wrote an official statement that asserted, "The national government will repel all actions of the expansionist projects in Colombia ratified today by President Hugo Chavez."

Chavez said he intends to use his column to respond to the Colombian government's accusations that Venezuela supports Colombian guerrilla insurgents, amongst other misinformation and distorted news about Venezuela.

"I have the right to defend Venezuela with my words and address the people of Colombia... I call on the Colombian people not to allow themselves to be confused or intimidated," said Chavez. "Whoever claims to be anti-Colombian is anti-Venezuelan too, because we are the same thing."

Colombia firmly maintains that it will neither negotiate nor renege on its military plans with the U.S., and that neither President Alvaro Uribe nor Colombian Chancellor Jaime Bermúdez will attend this Friday's UNASUR summit. Most regional heads of state are expected to attend the summit, and a major item on the agenda will be the U.S. military buildup in Colombia.

In a press conference last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that the agreement with Colombia will not affect other countries in the region. "This is about the bilateral cooperation between the United States and Colombia regarding security matters within Colombia," including "drug traffickers, terrorists, and other illegal armed groups," she said.

"The agreement does not create U.S. bases in Colombia. It does provide the United States access to Colombian bases, but command and control, administration, and security will be Colombia's responsibility," Clinton continued.

In response, Chavez said the main issue is not who will administer the bases, rather that that U.S. plans to use Colombia as its base to expand covert intelligence operations across the region.

"Now they say they aren't bases... but really it is all of Colombia that they are converting into one base... the gringo [US] military personnel are going to be authorized to operate in any part of Colombia. They say they will ask for permission and limit their operations to Colombian territory. That's a lie, who's going to believe that story?" said Chavez.

Meanwhile, Brazil has drawn up a special military plan to defend its vast natural resources, according to its Defense Minister, Nelson Jobim. As part of the plan, France will assist Brazil in constructing a nuclear-powered submarine to patrol the oil reserves off the Brazilian coast, said Jobim.

Jobim also stated publicly that he had spoken with General James Jones, a national security adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, about the U.S. military presence in Colombia. "I told him that we must not forget that we are in a sensitive continent and that this type of thing must be explained and discussed beforehand, not carried out in a unilateral manner," said Jobim. "What we hope for is stability in the region, respecting the individual ideological options that the diverse countries may have."

Venezuelan Foreign Relations Minister Nicolas Maduro proposed the organization of "Peace Bases" in Venezuela and across the region. The bases "should be centers for the debate of ideas about the Latin American situation and to reject violence and the installation of U.S. military components in South American territory," said Maduro.

Regarding the UNASUR summit, Maduro said, "Venezuela has a very clear position and in this presidential summit, we seek important conclusions which allow the justification of our peace initiative, and that the North American military bases begin a process of reversion on the continent."

Maduro's idea was echoed by U.S. linguist, author, and activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky met with President Chavez in Caracas on Monday and spoke on national television of the need for a regional agreement not to allow foreign military presence. "Venezuela can help to advance this proposal, but it cannot do it alone," he said.

The U.S.'s military buildup in Colombia "is only part of a much broader effort to restore Washington's capacity for intervention," said Chomsky. He mentioned that the U.S. has already supported three coups d'etat in Latin America this century, first in Venezuela in 2002, then Haiti in 2004, and currently Honduras.

Chomsky urged Venezuela to continue its efforts at progressive political changes. "The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact if these projects are successfully carried out," he said.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4743

Colombian Elites Fear Bolivaran Revolution

August 25th 2009, by Nikolas Kozloff - Counterpunch.org

As a result of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's decision to allow six U.S. military bases on his country's soil the propaganda war has heated up in the Andean region. In neighboring Venezuela, Hugo Chávez says Colombia is seeking to destabilize the border and has hinted that war could be imminent.

When Uribe and Chávez slug it out rhetorically the two constantly employ historical references, in particular to the Great Liberator Simón Bolívar. A leader of the independence struggle against Spain, Bolívar was a member of the Caracas aristocracy and liberated Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador from imperial rule in the early nineteenth century.

Why is this Bolivarian rhetoric still so common and integral to politics in the Andean region? To answer that question I wrote a piece for the Washington, D.C-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs in March, 2008. I was prompted to write the piece in response to the political crisis stemming from a Colombian military raid on a FARC guerrilla encampment within Ecuadoran territory. For years the Colombian government has been at war with the leftist FARC and is wont to pursue its political enemy across its borders in Venezuela to the east and Ecuador to the south.

Then as now, Uribe's U.S.-assisted military brinksmanship resulted in a rhetorical outburst from Chávez. In light of the current crisis and threat of war perhaps it's instructive to revisit my original piece for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, followed by some up to date commentary:

Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela: A Close Call

"As last week's diplomatic crisis between Venezuela and Colombia demonstrates, Chávez has once again sought to appropriate historical symbols in an effort to score political points. Employing explosive language, Chávez remarked ‘Some day Colombia will be freed from the hand of the (U.S.) empire. We have to liberate Colombia.'

At its peak, the political battle lines of the triangular confrontation embracing Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador had been drawn. On the one side was Colombia, a key U.S. ally headed by rightist Álvaro Uribe. On the other side was Chávez, who seeks to turn Venezuela into a powerful regional player that may serve as a counterweight to Washington's desire to project its authority. Ultimately, Chávez seeks to plant his socialist economic agenda fused with a parliamentary democratic political system throughout the region and to this end he has been able to recruit key allies such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba.

Bolívar and His Historical Legacy

When Chávez employs the word ‘liberate,' he conjures up the epic struggles from South America's stormy political past which gave the continent its present borders. The Venezuelan leader clearly intends to make an association with Bolívar, a Venezuelan native hero who liberated Colombia from the Spanish. Bolívar, the ‘Great Liberator' is revered by many as a great hero in the lands that he freed from Spain.

A tactical military genius, Bolívar was also a skilled politician who in 1819 adroitly managed to briefly unify Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama into one large nation state called the Republic of Gran Colombia. The Great Liberator believed Venezuela would carry more prestige as part of a larger entity than it could ever hope to acquire on its own. ‘Only a Venezuela united with New Granada [Colombia] could form a nation that would inspire in others the proper consideration due to her,' Bolívar once argued. Because of Bolívar's cult-like status in the region, it's critical for Chávez to prove that he is on the right side of history, and that he, and no one else, has inherited the true mantle of the Great Liberator.

The Standoff

The recent crisis involving a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador is politically tailor-made for Chávez, and the Venezuelan leader has wasted little time in seeking to exploit it. The diplomatic tit-for-tat was set into motion on March 1st when, in flagrant disregard for Ecuadoran sovereignty, the Colombian government ordered an attack of a FARC guerilla camp site in Ecuador, a mile from the Colombian border. For years, the Marxist FARC has been locked in a protracted struggle with successive Colombian governments in Bogotá.

From a military and strategic standpoint, Uribe has some reason to be pleased: seventeen rebels were killed in the raid, as well as Raúl Reyes, the FARC's second in command. Though there's no evidence that the U.S. helped to plan the attack, the Southern Command in Miami might have played a role by providing intelligence to the Colombian military.

For years, the U.S. has provided billions of dollars in military aid to the Colombian government which has been at war not only with left wing guerrillas but also with other progressive forces such as indigenous peoples, human rights workers, and labor union activists. The Uribe government has been tainted by human rights abuses and its association with right wing paramilitary death squads.

While Uribe has been aggressively prosecuting the war almost from the onset of his presidential term, he has now succeeded in escalating the conflict beyond its borders. Predictably, Ecuador immediately recalled its ambassador to Colombia and ordered troops to deploy to the border. Predictably, Chávez backed up Ecuador by similarly recalling its ambassador to Colombia and massing troops on its western border. Uribe then hit back against Chávez, accusing him of supporting the FARC guerrilla insurgency and encouraging terrorism.

Employing Bolívar as a Rhetorical Tool

Although it has always been somewhat unlikely that the border dispute would result in actual military hostilities, it appeared to be very risky (at least for part of the time). For a while, Chávez appeared intent on stepping up his non-stop public relations blitz against President Uribe. For the Venezuelan leader, part of his future efforts are likely to hinge on appropriating historical symbols such as Bolívar and casting the Colombian regime as enemies of the Great Liberator and his legacy. Bolívar, Chávez has said, was a socialist like himself; was stridently opposed to the United States, and, also like himself, was determined to build a classless society. What's more, the Venezuelan leader argues, Bolívar's dream of uniting Latin America represented a threat to oligarchs and imperialists, thus awakening the ire of the United States.

Chávez has no doubt taken some historical liberties and embellished his causal intellectual ties to Bolívar. The Liberator never talked about class struggle per se, though he did refer to the need to abolish slavery. The Liberator also issued decrees for the establishment of schools (for boys as well as girls), deplored the misery of indigenous peoples, and ordered the conservation of forest resources.

But Bolívar was perhaps most forward looking when he spoke of the necessity of integrating Latin America. It was Bolívar, early on, who understood that the region had no future unless it confronted both Europe and the U.S. as a unified bloc. The United States, Bolívar once famously declared, seemed ‘destined by providence to plague America with misery on behalf of freedom.'

Chávez has said that he will not rest until Venezuela is liberated from the ‘imperialist and anti-Boliviaran threat.' He frequently draws comparisons between Bolívar's struggle against the Spanish Empire and his own political confrontation with the United States (which Chávez habitually refers to as "The Empire"). Employing his usual penchant for making over self-serving historical connections, however far-fetched they may be, Chávez recently warned Colombian ‘oligarchs' not to tangle with Venezuela. ‘Don't even think about it,' he said, or ‘you would run into the soldiers of Bolívar.'

Bolívar's Cult of Personality in Venezuela

Given the prominence that Chávez has attached to Bolívar in his public speeches, it's not surprising that books about the Great Liberator are briskly selling in Caracas. In Venezuela, Bolívar is revered as a God-like figure and his popularity continues to soar. Indeed, a popular religion based on the fertility goddess of María Lionza has appropriated Bolívar as one of its central ritual figures. The faith is based on indigenous, black, African, and Catholic roots, and priests hold ceremonies in which the spirit of the Liberator is channeled through a medium who coughs when Bolívar is present, since Venezuela's most distinguished native son had a debilitating case of tuberculosis. Meanwhile, religious altars of the faithful generally feature a portrait of Bolívar.

Venezuela's currency, main squares, and universities bear the Liberator's name. His sayings are taught in schools, broadcast on the radio and emblazoned on government buildings. Chávez almost reverentially has referred to his political movement as a ‘Bolivarian Revolution.' Chávez has renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and has reportedly left a chair empty at meetings to honor the Liberator.

Chávez supporters, or Chavistas, have dubbed the areas they politically control as ‘liberated zones of the Bolivarian Republic,' and adorn offices and homes with portraits of the Liberator. Chávez has promoted so-called Bolivarian Circles, local grassroots groups at the local or barrio level, which lobby the government for important grass-root resources.

Meanwhile, Chávez champions Bolívar's idea of a unified South America, and echoes the Liberator's words during his televised speeches. Chávez also likes to appear on television with a portrait of Bolívar near at hand. Riding along Caracas highways, one may see repeated instances of murals juxtaposing portraits of Chávez and Bolívar.

In Caracas, a key historic landmark is Bolívar's house as a youth. Located along downtown streets crowded with informal vendors, the house is often full of visiting school children. In conjunction with the author's next book, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (to be released April 1 with Palgrave-Macmillan), a visit is paid to the museum, and its director, Mercedes García, is interviewed.

According to her, Chávez's chronically lengthy speeches awakened an interest in the Liberator. The volume of people visiting the museum has been increasing, and at the time I visited, 3,500 individuals were showing up every week. In particular, there was great curiosity amongst the military, and soldiers from all over the county were paying visits to the museum.

War of Words Between Chávez and Uribe: It's All About Bolívar

Uribe however has sought to question Chávez's almost exclusive appropriation of Bolívar as a political icon. ‘The truth, President Chávez, is that if you are pursuing an expansionist project in this continent, Colombia has no place for that project,' Uribe remarked. ‘One cannot set fire to the continent, as you are doing, speaking one day against Spain, the next against the United States; abusing Mexico one day and Peru the next, and the day after that, Bolivia,' Uribe continued. ‘One cannot abuse a whole continent, or set it on fire as you do, by speaking of imperialism, when you, based on your own ambitions, are looking to set up an empire.'

Seeking to rip down Chávez's historical narrative, Uribe said ‘We cannot abuse history, we cannot stain the memory of our heroes, by disfiguring them in popular demagoguery, in misleading the people. We cannot mislead the people by misinterpreting the legacy of the Liberator Bolívar. Bolívar was an integrationist, but not an expansionist.'

Bolívar, Uribe continued, brought independence to South American nations, ‘but he did not bring them [newly independent countries] a new era of subjection.' Turning up the rhetoric, Uribe added, ‘Bolívar did not spend his time trying to remove European domination from the Americans, only to impose his own terms with the power at his disposal-as you wish to do-on the people of Venezuela and on the people of Colombia.'

Sparing no opportunity to exploit his favorite subject, Chávez has accused Uribe of being a spokesperson of the ‘anti-Bolivarian oligarchy.' The Colombian oligarchy, Chávez remarked, ‘Doesn't want peace and believes it can mess around with us. Neither the Colombian oligarchy nor any other oligarchy can mess with us. Venezuela needs to be respected.' In one of his typical bombastic flourishes, Chávez added that when Uribe accused him of carrying out Bolivarian expansionism in South America, the Colombian politician was talking like the U.S. President. Underneath Uribe's mask, Chávez said, lurked President Bush.

Colombian Elite: Fearful of Bolivarian Revolution

Uribe's diplomatic ripostes are not surprising, given the fortress mentality now prevalent within the Colombian elite. Within a rising tide of left social movements and progressive-minded regimes that have flourished throughout the region, Colombia remains a bastion of conservatism and reaction. What's worse, many ordinary Colombians are beginning to gain inspiration from Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian Revolution, thus adding to the Colombian elite's sense of political isolation.

In several Colombian provincial states, Bolívar has again been politicized. Recently, Colombians formed Bolivarian Circles similar to those common in Venezuela. In Barranquilla, a Colombian port, barrio and social activists, union organizers and some members from the Polo Democrático left opposition have united to form the Corriente Bolivariana Colombiana (Colombian Bolivarian Current), a political organization that claims almost 5,000 members and fields candidates in local elections.

A worrying consideration for the Colombian elite is that Chávez may have an ideological impact not only upon ordinary Colombians, but also those Colombians living in Venezuela. For years, Colombian immigrants have fled the war in their country, fleeing across the border and seeking greater economic opportunity. Unfortunately for the Colombian elite, many émigrés have returned to Colombia and helped to organize Bolivarian movements at home.

Oscar Manduca, a Bolivarian organizer and candidate in Atlántico state on the Caribbean coast, has remarked, ‘This is a social movement against poverty in Colombia. Venezuela's revolution can help change things here through solidarity and cooperation across the frontier.' Meanwhile the Movimiento Bolivariano de Colombia S A (sin armas)-the Bolivarian Movement of Colombia (without arms)-is presenting an electoral challenge to right wing politicians who control politics along the Colombian frontier in Santander state.

Containing the Bolivarian Revolution

Ever since Chávez was elected in 1998, the Colombian media establishment has been implacably opposed to the Venezuelan leader and commonly refers to Chávez as a dictator or caudillo. Venezuelan commentator Gabriel Bustamante believes that Colombian journalists ‘don't know, and don't want to know, anything positive' about political and social changes in his country. ‘Revolutions threaten their privileges, so there is a need to create Chávezphobia -an excessive and irrational fear about Chávez and even Bolívar to try to stop Colombians being influenced,' he said.

There would seem to be a fair degree of truth in what Bustamante says. The newspaper El Tiempo, a bastion of elite sentiment in Bogotá, has editorialized that ‘Caudillos like Chávez have historically impeded the consolidation of liberal democracy in Latin America.' Rafael Nieto, a columnist at the Colombian magazine Semana, worries that ‘Polo Democrático leaders going to Caracas and Bolivarian officials in Bogotá could become a daily occurrence.'

Echoing elite opinion, the Uribe government has acted to limit Chávez's political influence within Colombia. Before diplomatic relations wound up in tatters, Uribe was careful in handling Chávez when the latter visited Colombia. Uribe forced the Venezuelan president to meet him at an isolated hacienda rather than allow his presidential motorcade to travel through the capital.

What's more, a meeting with opposition Polo Democrático leaders had to be conducted after midnight, in private at the Venezuelan Embassy. When Chávez asked to visit Bolívar's historic hacienda in central Bogotá, the authorities (who were afraid that the Venezuelan leader would come into contact with ordinary Colombians) denied his request. Meanwhile, Colombia's intelligence services cracked down on the Corriente Bolivariana Colombiana, raiding a political meeting of the group on the coast. Armed Forces Commander Freddy Padilla commented that ‘Bolivarian circles are spreading all over Latin America, and particularly here in Colombia we want to prevent this from happening.'

Santander: Chávez's Great Historical Villain

Within this climate of escalating political tensions, Chávez has whipped up a furor by making skillful use of his own historical narrative. He has referred to the ‘Colombian oligarchy' as the most rancid and criminal elite group in Latin America. The oligarchy, Chávez says, descends from a despicable historical figure named Francisco Paula de Santander. For Chávez, Santander, Bolívar's Vice President, is a great historical villain.

It was Santander, Chávez charges, who was most responsible for bringing down South American unity and dashing any hope that the Bolivarian independence struggle might lead to real political change. By 1825, Bolívar's influence on the countries that he had liberated was on the wane. Returning to Bogotá from his military campaigns, the Liberator resumed his duties as president of Colombia but found that he had little political support from government officials and the local citizenry.

In 1827 he pushed for a new Colombian constitution that would have increased the power of the president. But a constitutional convention in 1828 rebuffed Bolívar and rejected any change to the constitution. It was a stunning reversal for him. Egged on by his supporters however, he struck back by assuming dictatorial powers. Predictably, such a move did not go over well amongst Colombia's political elite.

Sporadic uprisings broke out in opposition to Bolivarian rule, and in 1828 a group of conspirators in Bogotá, tiring of his dictatorship, broke into the presidential palace intent on murdering him. It was Santander, Chávez claims, who was the intellectual author of the plot to kill Bolívar and thus sabotage the Great Liberator's political project.

Though Bolívar survived the infamous ‘Black September Night' attempt against his life, Colombia's continued opposition to his united Latin America dream disillusioned him. Dispirited and disheartened, the Great Liberator resigned as president. By now sick with tuberculosis, Bolívar departed Bogotá for the Caribbean coast.

Gran Colombia was already in shambles: Venezuela had left the Republic as had Ecuador and the new nations Bolívar helped to found were wracked by violence and internal dissension. Bolívar died on the way to Cartagena on December 17, 1830, at the age of 47. Bolívar asked to be buried in his home city of Caracas, but he had so many political enemies that his family feared for the safety of his remains. In 1842, his body was finally taken home.

Seeking to take advantage of Bolívar's tragic death and political eclipse, Chávez has remarked, in yet another questionable historical leap, that Uribe is a spokesperson for the ‘Santanderean' and ‘anti-Bolivarian' oligarchy. Uribe responded in turn that the Venezuelan president was manipulating history and that Santander "gave us the example of adherence to the law. The truth, President Chávez, is that we cannot make a mockery of the law, as you do, trying to abuse General Santander, and exchange the rule of law for personal whim."

Bolívar's Death: Chávez Suspects Foul Play

Taking his picturesque concept of history to yet greater political heights, Chávez is now intent on proving that Bolívar was poisoned by corrupt oligarchs and did not succumb to tuberculosis. The Venezuelan leader asserts that in Bolívar's day, tuberculosis was not lethal enough to cause death in a few scant weeks. As evidence to support his version of the medical arts, Chávez points to one of Bolívar's letters in which the Liberator discusses his future plans. Bolívar wrote the letter shortly before his own death.

‘Some say he [Bolívar] was very ill and knew he was going to die, and he wanted to die by the side of the sea and he died happy, and Colombia was happy and Venezuela was happy,' Chávez said in a long speech. ‘How the oligarchs fooled us, the ones here, the ones there. How the historians who falsified history fooled us.'

The Venezuelan leader recently convened a high commission, led by his vice president and composed of nine cabinet ministers and the attorney general. Their mission: exhume Bolívar's remains, which lie in a sarcophagus at the National Pantheon in downtown Caracas, and conduct scientific tests to confirm Chávez's contention-that diabolical assassins murdered Bolívar. ‘This commission has been created because the executive considers it to be of great historical and cultural value to clarify important doubts regarding the death of the Liberator,' Venezuela's official Gazette said.

Even Chávez's most stalwart supporters say their leader may have gone too far this time. ‘This doesn't make any sense,' said Alberto Mueller Rojas, a retired general who works as a presidential adviser on international affairs and military matters. ‘Why should I care? Bolívar died. If they killed him, they killed him. If he died of tuberculosis, he died of tuberculosis. In this day and age, this doesn't have any significance.'

In his historical novel, The General in His Labyrinth, the legendary Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez portrayed Bolívar as a man of the people opposed by a reactionary oligarchy. However, neither García Márquez nor any serious historian has suggested that the Liberator was poisoned. John Lynch, a Bolívar biographer, points out that as the Liberator lay dying he was watched over by a ‘qualified and conscientious' French doctor whose medical bulletins were later published in Caracas. Lynch has accused Chávez of "a modern perversion" of the mythical cult of Bolívar.

It's unlikely that Chávez will ever be able to prove his historical hypothesis by exhuming Bolívar's tomb, but at least he will have succeeded in scoring more points in the never-ending propaganda war against Uribe. As the frail diplomatic engagement continues in the upcoming weeks, and Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela try to tame their simmering wrath, it won't be surprising if we hear yet more Bolivarian rhetoric coming from adjunct professor Chávez. Almost two hundred years after his death, Bolívar is still the central and defining figure in the lands that he formerly liberated, a region still wracked by chronic political instability, poverty, and glaring social inequalities."

Looking back on my article written a little more than a year ago it is striking how little politics has changed in the Andean region. Indeed, Chávez continues to employ Bolivarian symbols and his government has sought to pass an education bill based on "the Bolivarian doctrine": a term used by the Venezuelan President to describe his socialist political movement. The measure has generated considerable controversy with some protesters claiming that the bill will open the door to socialist indoctrination in schools. In the international arena meanwhile, Chávez has said that the U.S. seeks to fracture Bolivarian unity by installing its bases in Colombia and Soto Cano in Honduras [for more on the U.S. airbase at Soto Cano, see my previous columns].

Chávez never misses a chance to use Bolívar for political ends. In a column for the state-run Bolivarian News Agency the Venezuelan President recently made allusion to an early diplomatic encounter between Bolívar and the United States. In 1817, American ships sought to supply arms to Spanish forces opposed to Bolívar in Venezuela. When Bolívar captured the two ships Secretary of State John Quincy Adams sent a Baltimore journalist with political ambitions named John Baptiste Irving to negotiate with Bolívar.

In her book Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Doctrine to Petroleum's Empire, historian Judith Ewell writes that Irving was instructed to secure the release of the ships and the handover of the vessels to their rightful owners. Irving was also told to secure an indemnity for the lost cargo. Bolívar received Irving graciously as he hoped that the diplomatic envoy would extend U.S. political recognition to his movement.

However, diplomatic negotiations quickly deteriorated: Bolívar would not back down on his position vis-a-vis the ships while Irving failed to provide the coveted recognition. Bolívar grew disenchanted with the U.S., a power which in his view had failed to provide adequate support for South American independence movements. According to Ewell, Irving did not take Bolívar's dismissal of the shipping issue lightly. For several months, the American fired angry notes back to Adams which characterized Bolívar as a tyrant and a "Don Quixote with ambition." "The wheels of his [Bolívar's] government," Irving wrote, "are clogged already with imbecility." In 1819 Irving finally gave up his mission and returned to the U.S.

In his column Chávez made reference to the Irving-Bolívar diplomatic spat, writing that the U.S. has historically sought to head off Latin American unity. To this day, Chávez says, Washington continues its geopolitical strategy in such nations as Honduras and Colombia. A few days ago, during a summit of South American nations held in Quito, Ecuador Chávez continued to hark on this theme.

Ecuador has pursued a political alliance with Venezuela and recently the Rafael Correa government refused to renew a lease for a U.S. military base located at the port city of Manta. In Quito, Chávez was joined by Correa as well as the deposed President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. During the summit Chávez compared Uribe to General Francisco de Paula Santander and remarked that in Ecuador "Bolívar's sword is more alive than ever."

"Now I understand why Bolívar got tied up with Manuela Sáenz," Chávez added. The Venezuelan was making reference to Simón Bolívar's lover, a native of Quito. As I note in my book Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left which came out just after I wrote my piece for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Sáenz is a potent political symbol linking Venezuela to Ecuador.

"To this day," I wrote in my book, "Ecuador and Venezuela still have the same flag colors. Saenz belonged to the aristocracy and met the Liberator after the famed Battle of Pichincha. She accompanied Bolivar on his military campaigns, carrying out intelligence work, raising funds for independence forces, and cheering on the troops. Saenz also demonstrated great valor on the battlefield, seeing action during the Battle of Ayacucho...Saenz's love letters to Bolivar are preserved in a Quito museum, along with some of her garments and an oil painting showing her in her childhood."

In her day, Sáenz remarkably rose to the rank of coronela or colonel. Like Chávez, Correa is a politician who makes skillful use of historical symbols. Indeed, Correa recently raised Sáenz's rank to generala or general in recognition of the woman's efforts in the South American independence struggle.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008)

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4744

Playing the ‘Anti-Semitism’ Card Against Venezuela

September 4th 2009, by Eric Wingerter and Justin Delacour - NACLA

In the early morning hours of January 31, vandals broke into Tiferet Israel, a Sephardic synagogue in Caracas. They strewed sacred scrolls on the floor and scribbled "Death to the Jews" and other anti-Semitic epithets on the walls, before making off with computer equipment and historical artifacts. Understandably, the incident frightened and upset many in the Venezuelan Jewish community. Right away, U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times and The Miami Herald, linked the incident to Venezuela's increasingly strained relations with Israel, after the two countries suspended diplomatic relations two weeks earlier over Israel's bombing of Gaza, then still under way.

A Herald editorial went so far as to describe an "official policy of anti-Semitism" in Venezuela and implied that Chávez's foreign policy had unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic violence in the country, culminating in the assault on the synagogue.[1] Some international NGOs were no more nuanced. Just hours after the break-in, the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was already implicitly comparing the Chávez government to the Nazis, calling the synagogue attack "a modern-day Kristallnacht."[2]

But the Caracas police investigation bore out a different story. Authorities quickly realized that the synagogue's security fence had been cut from the inside, prompting detectives to investigate the break-in as an inside job. Within the week it became clear that the attack had in fact been a robbery disguised as anti-Semitic vandalism, carried out by the synagogue's privately contracted security team. Eleven men were arrested for their role in the plot, and their statements to the police indicated that the graffiti and desecration were intended to throw off investigators.[3]

Although the arrests helped ease the anxieties of Venezuela's Jewish community, the international media pressed on with the storyline of a politically motivated attack. The very week that the Venezuelan Israelite Association issued a statement praising the swift and successful investigation, The Washington Post ran an editorial titled "Mr. Chavez vs. the Jews," which again blamed the robbery on the government, or, more specifically, on an ugly comment left on a "pro-government Web site," demanding "that citizens ‘publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park' and called for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, seizures of Jewish-owned property and a demonstration at Caracas's largest synagogue."[4] The editorial concluded that the synagogue was then "duly attacked."[5] The idea that the sacking of the Caracas synagogue was based purely on anti-Semitism has persisted, even showing up in a recent piece authored by two academics in the high-brow Boston Review. The authors claim the attack is a sign of "state-directed anti-Semitism."[6]

Such hyperbolic media coverage exemplifies the tendency of the U.S. press to portray left-leaning Latin American governments as hotbeds of anti-Semitism. In the case of Venezuela, where the government has never made any overtly anti-Semitic public statements, much less enacted policies targeting its Jewish citizens, the storyline has been promoted in three key ways: (1) attributing anti-Semitic acts or statements by private citizens to the government, (2) conflating legitimate criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism, and (3) relying on press statements by U.S.-based Jewish organizations like the ADL or the Simon Wiesenthal Center, often at the expense of Venezuelan Jewish organizations, which regularly complain that their views are misrepresented, even flatly contradicted, by U.S. groups pursuing their own agendas.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this disconnect occurred in January 2006, when the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal all reported that Chávez, during a Christmas Eve speech, had invoked an age-old anti-Semitic slur, labeling Jews as Christ killers.[7] The story originated with an alert circulated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but on closer inspection it became clear that the group had deliberately edited the speech to manufacture the slur. The original speech contained a long riff in which Chávez decried the unequal distribution of global wealth:

The world has enough for everybody, but it turned out that a few minorities-the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolívar from here, and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia-a minority took possession of the planet's gold, silver, minerals, water, good lands, oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few: Less than 10% of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world.[8]

The reference to the betrayal of Latin American liberation hero Simón Bolívar by some leaders after the War of Independence indicates that Chávez was speaking metaphorically about wealthy elites in general, rather than any group in particular. But the translation published by the Wiesenthal Center shortened the statement significantly and altered its meaning as follows: " . . . the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world."[9]

The center's editing job included quotation marks, implying that it was a direct quote, but failed to include ellipses, which would have signaled to readers that words had been removed. The Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), the nation's largest Jewish organization, was swift and severe in condemning the Wiesenthal Center, issuing a public letter complaining that the U.S. organization had "interfered in the political status, in the security, and in the well-being of our community." The group added: "You have acted on your own, without consulting us, on issues that you don't know or understand."[10]

But in the three years since the "Christ killer" incident, some U.S. NGOs, media, and politicians have continued to neglect Venezuelan Jewish organizations while persisting in their attempts to demonize the Chávez government. In May, Representative Connie Mack (R-Fla.) introduced a House resolution condemning the Venezuelan government as anti-Semitic in response to the synagogue break-in.[11] Once again, Venezuelan Jewish organizations were forced to mobilize. As CAIV explained to the Pittsburgh-based Jewish Chronicle, the resolution may have derailed an ongoing dialogue that had been initiated between the Venezuelan government and the Jewish community in the months since the break-in. Fred Pressner, former president of CAIV, pointed out that Venezuela's government had reacted well to the earlier attacks, noting that "all of our institutions are protected by the police-we cannot complain about that."[12]

Pressner and the CAIV worked with House Democrats to block Mack's resolution. In the end, the conservative congressman pulled the language from consideration, but he has indicated that he will seek to reintroduce it again soon, whether or not it is opposed by Venezuela's Jewish leadership.[13]

This is not the first time that U.S.-based propagandists have sought to portray a left-leaning Latin American government as anti-Semitic. In May 1983, the ADL issued a meagerly sourced report claiming that Nicaragua's Sandinista government systematically repressed and forced into exile the country's tiny Jewish community.[14]

Eager to garner U.S. congressional funding for a brutal mercenary campaign to topple Nicaragua's government, President Ronald Reagan promptly added the charge of anti-Semitism to his propaganda offensive against the Sandinistas.

However, subsequent investigations by U.S. Jewish leaders found that, among the estimated 50 practicing Jews who lived in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinista revolution, most had ties to the toppled dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and left the country of their own accord.[15] Rabbi Gerald Serotta, a Jewish chaplain at George Washington University who traveled with a delegation to Nicaragua in 1984, told The Washington Post that "there wasn't one person in the country with whom we met who believes there was special discrimination against the Jewish community."16 Serotta added that "we are convinced that whatever lack of due process there was during the revolutionary period . . . was not especially discriminatory to Jews."

Other sources corroborated Serotta's observations. For example, the University of Central America's Historical Institute noted that Nicaraguans with strong ties to Somoza left the country during the revolution, and that "the Jewish people who left in 1979 were part of a larger exodus from Nicaragua of those who felt their future would be uncertain with changes by the revolutionary government."[17] At no point was credible evidence presented that religious intolerance and/or ethnic persecution caused the departure of Jews from Nicaragua. In fact, not even Anthony Quainton, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, could produce evidence to support the charges of anti-Semitism. In a confidential cable from Quainton to Secretary of State George Shultz in 1983, the ambassador noted that "the evidence fails to demonstrate that the Sandinistas have followed a policy of anti-Semitism or have persecuted Jews solely because of their religion."[18]

There are a number of parallels between Reagan's charges against the Sandinistas and the more recent claims against Venezuela's government. In both cases, the claims are rooted not in facts but in the desire of interested parties to publicly censure Latin American governments they dislike. In the case of Nicaragua, the Reagan administration methodically tailored its narrative to appeal to various religious constituencies within the United States.[19]

Because a factual storyline would have had little propaganda value, the administration favored wild tales about "Marxist-Leninist" Sandinistas suppressing not only Jews but also Christians. However, leading Evangelicals and Jesuit scholars, like the Jewish delegation that found the charges of anti-Semitism unsubstantiated, rejected Reagan's assertions that the Sandinistas persecuted Protestants and Catholics for their religious beliefs.[20]

Yet given that large segments of the U.S. public have always been poorly informed about Latin America, it was not such a stretch for the Reagan administration to spread outlandish tales of religious persecution as a means of rallying conservative constituencies behind its wars in Central America. In the political culture of the United States during the Reagan years, the Marxist-Leninist label served as an epithet whose purpose was to project an image of a society where all forms of "freedom"-including religious freedom-were under attack. Naturally, Reagan's propaganda offensive got an important boost from his allies in the media and the foreign-policy establishment. Conservative media fed the hysteria about the Sandinistas' alleged persecution of Jews and Christians, while the ADL continued promoting its storyline in letters to The New York Times.[21]

In this regard, the confluence of interests between the ADL and right-wing U.S. politicians has become a marriage of convenience. The ADL and other groups often use charges of anti-Semitism as a form of subterfuge designed to sully the image of governments and intellectuals who criticize the policies of the Israeli government. Meanwhile, right-wing U.S. politicians can use the anti-Semitism claims as a means of attacking the left more generally.

As its treatment of Venezuela and Nicaragua suggests, the ADL and likeminded groups tend to make accusations that are not supported by facts, indicating that their motives have less to do with confronting anti-Semitism than with attacking those who do not share their enthusiasm for Israeli policies. Both the Sandinistas and the Chávez government have been sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians and critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but their differences with Israel-like their differences with the United States-have deeper roots in U.S.-Israeli complicity in the repression of Latin American social movements and the left.

As the NACLA Report made clear in its March/April 1987 issue, Israel provided military assistance to the Somoza dictatorship from the 1950s right up to the Sandinistas' overthrow of Somoza in 1979.[22] The journalist Christopher Dickey once noted that, even as Somoza's defeated National Guardsmen scurried to leave Nicaragua in July 1979, they "looked nothing so much as Israeli soldiers, with their Israeli Galil rifles, and for those who had not thrown them away, their Israeli paratrooper helmets."[23] Then, in the mid-1980s, Israeli arms dealers funneled weapons to right-wing Nicaraguan mercenaries-mostly Somoza's former National Guardsmen-who fought to overthrow the Sandinistas.[24]

Israel's complicity in Latin American human rights abuses was most glaring in Guatemala, where more than 200,000 people, mostly Mayans, were killed over the course of the country's 36-year civil war.[25] At the height of the Guatemalan military's atrocities in the early 1980s, the country's military government was largely isolated internationally, relying exclusively on Israel for military training and assistance.[26] In February 1983, CBS anchorman Dan Rather pointedly observed that "Israel has helped [Guatemala] wage a war with no questions asked."[27]

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist and expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has documented how certain zealous supporters of the Israeli state seek to "discredit all criticism of Israeli policy as motivated by an irrational loathing of Jews."[28] But clearly many Central Americans have historical grievances with the Israeli state, grievances that cannot be dismissed as anti-Semitism. Given the legacy of U.S.-Israeli complicity in the repression of the Latin American left, it is hardly surprising that left-leaning governments in the region would tend to empathize with others who have suffered Israeli-sponsored repression.

As Finkelstein notes, "Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve its conflicts with the Palestinians diplomatically or faces a public relations debacle, its apologists mount a campaign alleging that the world is awash in a new anti-Semitism."[29] Finkelstein makes a strong case that to conflate empathy for the victims of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism is itself a form of defamation, one that helps sustain Israeli repression in the occupied territories.

Of course, to point out that some groups misuse charges of anti-Semitism is not to deny the existence of retrograde attitudes toward Jews in Latin America. Indeed, anti-Semitic attitudes and stereotypes are not uncommon in the region. The Chávez government, for its part, has consistently drawn a distinction between its criticisms of Israeli policy and the anti-Jewish bigotry that some of the government's supporters sometimes display. For example, after Venezuela suspended diplomatic relations with Israel over the bombing of Gaza, the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs was careful to point out that Chávez "has always opposed anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination and racism."[30] Just three weeks before the diplomatic break with Israel, the World Jewish Congress issued a press release congratulating Chávez for "supporting a clear condemnation of anti-Semitism" in a joint declaration with the presidents of Argentina and Brazil.[31]

The sad irony is that unsubstantiated charges of anti-Semitism serve very few interests. Certainly the cheap comparison of the Caracas synagogue burglary with the Kristallnacht only trivializes one of the most horrific events of the last century. And by refusing to consult local Jewish leaders-or worse, by directly contradicting them-groups like the ADL and the Wiesenthal Center risk exacerbating the struggles of the communities they ostensibly represent. Moreover, accusing anyone of anti-Semitism without bothering to provide plausible evidence does more harm than good to the cause of fighting anti-Semitism.

On the policy front, the problem goes far beyond a simple distortion of history. The deliberate misrepresentation of events in Latin America has had disastrous consequences for the region and its people. In their haste to demonize the Sandinistas in the 1980s, some U.S. media and public figures helped lay the ideological groundwork for a U.S.-sponsored Nicaraguan war, whose legacy of violence and impoverishment persists. To continue making unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism against left-leaning Latin American governments will only generate further misunderstanding today.

Eric Wingerter is a freelance writer living in Washington. His blog, BoRev.net, focuses on Venezuela and U.S. media coverage of Latin America. Justin Delacour is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of New Mexico.

Notes

[1] "Commentary: Venezuela Sees Rise in Anti-Semitism," The Miami Herald, February 9, 2009.

[2] "ADL Condemns Violent Attack on Caracas Synagogue," press release, including statement by Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, January 31, 2009.

[3] James Suggett, "Robbery, Not Anti-Semitism, Motive for Attack on Venezuelan Synagogue," Venezuelanalysis.com, February 10, 2009.

[4] James Suggett, "Venezuelan Jewish Community ‘Profoundly Grateful and Moved' by Government's Efforts," Venezuelanalysis.com, February 13, 2009.

[5] "Mr. Chavez vs. the Jews," editorial, The Washington Post, February 12, 2009.

[6] Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez, "United by Hate: The Uses of Anti-Semitism in Chávez's Venezuela," Boston Review, July/August 2009.

[7] "Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur," media advisory, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, January 23, 2006.

[8] Thierry Meyssan and Cyril Capdevielle, "¿Hay que quemar a Hugo Chávez?" Voltaire Network, January 18, 2006.

[9] For more on this, see Rod Stoneman, Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised-A Case Study of Politics and the Media (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008), 103.

[10] Marc Perlman, "Venezuela's Jews Defend Leftist President in Flap Over Remarks," The Forward, January 12, 2006.

[11] "Mack Introduces Resolution Supporting Venezuelan Jewish Community," press release, the office of Congressman Connie Mack, May 12, 2009.

[12] Eric Fingerhut, "Jewish Reps Oppose House Resolution Supporting Venezuelan Jews," The Jewish Chronicle, June 4, 2009.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Edward Cody, "Managua's Jews Reject Anti-Semitism Charge; Sandinistas, U.S. Embassy Dispute Rabbi's Widely Circulated Report," The Washington Post, August 29, 1983.

[15] "Rabbi Disputes Reagan Point About the Jews in Nicaragua," The New York Times, March 19, 1986.

[16] Marjorie Hyer, "Jewish Group Finds No Anti-Semitism by Sandinista Regime," The Washington Post, August 25, 1984.

[17] Cody, "Managua's Jews Reject Anti-Semitism Charge."

[18] Michael McDowell, "Jesuit Says Sandinistas Backed," The Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 29, 1983.

[19] Cody, "Managua's Jews Reject Anti-Semitism Charge."

[20] Marjorie Hyer, "Nicaraguan Minister Opposes Aid to Contras," The Washington Post, March 15, 1986; McDowell, "Jesuit Says Sandanistas Backed."

[21] Morton Rosenthal, "Nicaragua's Chance to End Anti-Semitism," letter to the editor, The New York Times, September 27, 1983; Nathan Perlmutter, "So Are the Sandinistas Anti-Semitic? Of Course, They Are," letter to the editor, The New York Times, April 5, 1986.

[22] Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, "Getting Down to Business," NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 25-38.

[23] Christopher Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (Simon and Schuster, 1985), 41.

[24] "The Israeli Connection: Deadly Trade," NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 13.

[25] Weekly News Update on the Americas, "Rigoberta Menchú Files Genocide Charges in Spain," NACLA Report on the Americas 33, no. 4 (January/February 2000): 2, 4.

[26] Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, "Guatemala: The Paragon," NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 31-36.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xxxiii.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Tamara Pearson, "Venezuela Expels Israeli Ambassador in Solidarity With Palestinian People," Venezuelanalysis.com, January 7, 2009.

[31] "World Jewish Congress Welcomes Clear Commitment by Latin American Leaders," press release, World Jewish Congress, December 18, 2008. '

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4769

Venezuelan President Strengthens Relations with Libya, Algeria, and Syria on Tour

September 5th 2009, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (ABN)

Merida, September 4th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - On a diplomatic tour through Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez visited Libya, Algeria, and Syria this week to concretize bilateral economic and political accords and strengthen relationships among countries of the Global South.

After commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Libyan revolution alongside the leader of the revolution, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Chavez expressed his support for unity and anti-imperialism on the African continent in a speech before a special summit of the African Union in Tripoli, Libya."Africa should never again allow countries to come from across the seas to impose certain political, economic, and social systems. Africa should be of the Africans, and only by way of unity will Africa be free and great," said Chávez.

Chavez also met with the presidents of Niger, Mauritania, and Mali during the summit. He compared the African Union's disapproval of the U.S.'s military operations on the African continent through AFRICOM to the rejection of the increased U.S. military presence in Colombia by the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) during a summit in Argentina last weekend.

In Algeria, Chavez and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika drew up what they called a "work map" for bilateral cooperation. Chavez invited Algeria, which is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries along with Venezuela and Libya, to form a mixed enterprise with the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA to exploit Venezuela's vast Orinoco Oil Belt.

"The oil in the [Orinoco Oil Belt] is heavy, and Algeria's is light. There we have potential to produce mixtures and improve our oil," said Chavez, adding that cooperation in the production of natural gas, petrochemicals, the fishing industry, and tourism were also on the agenda.

On his tour, Chavez also promoted the South America-Africa Summit, which is scheduled to take place on September 25 to 27 on the Venezuelan resort Margarita Island. So far, fifty-four African heads of state have confirmed their attendance.

In the week leading up to the summit, Venezuela's ministries of education, culture, women and gender equality, and foreign relations will host thousands of diplomats, university students and professors, politicians and cultural workers from the African continent at the III Cultural Festival of the Peoples of Africa. The festival's purpose is for the peoples of both continents "to recognize themselves as part of the same origin, the same struggle for life, liberty, and self-determination," according to the event organizers.

Syria

Chavez was greeted by a large crowd upon his arrival in the Syrian province of Swaida. The Syrian government named a street after Venezuela in honor of Chavez's visit.

In a speech before the crowd, Chavez referred to the people of Syria as "architects of resistance" to imperialism, and reiterated the need for Global South countries to unite.

"We should fight to create consciousness that is free from imperialist doctrine... fight to defeat backwardness, poverty, misery... to convert our countries into true powers through the consciousness of the people," said the Venezuelan president.

Chavez also strongly criticized Israel's military occupation of Palestinian territories. This policy, and most recently Venezuela's severance of diplomatic ties with Israel to protest Israel's bombing of Gaza earlier this year, has garnered strong support for Venezuela among many countries in the Middle East.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad met with Chavez, who was accompanied by Foreign Relations Minister Nicolas Maduro and Commerce Minister Eduardo Saman, to lay out plans for a joint oil refinery that is to be completed in 2013, as well as a mixed enterprise to produce canned olives and olive oil.

In addition, Chavez proposed the installment of a branch of the Caracas-based Latin American news network Telesur in Syria, "so they can watch the news from the Latin American world." He offered the support of Venezuela's national telecommunications company CANTV to improve Syria's telecommunications services.

The Venezuelan leader will now head to Iran, Belarus, and Russia, countries with which Venezuela has already signed an array of energy cooperation accords, and finish off his tour in Spain, where he will meet with Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4770

The U.S. Invades and Occupies Pakistan

The U.S. Invades and Occupies Pakistan

Israel Schemes in Kurdistan

Israel's Schemes in Kurdistan

Swedish FM cancels Israel visit amid 'organ harvesting' controversy

Last update - 03:08 06/09/2009

By Barak Ravid

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has canceled his visit to Israel, scheduled for September 11, in view of the continued tension in relations between the two countries.

Bildt explained that the decision to cancel the visit stemmed from "bad timing" in terms of the ongoing talks between the U.S. and Israel on the peace process. However, a source at the Foreign Ministry said that the real reason was concern in Stockholm that the Swedish minister would receive an icy welcome in Jerusalem.

Relations between Israel and Sweden suffered a major setback following last month's publication of an article in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet alleging that IDF troops shot and killed Palestinians and then harvested their organs. The Swedish foreign minister, whose country now heads the European Union's rotating presidency, refused Israel's demand that the Swedish government condemn the report, arguing that freedom of the press was paramount in his country.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has described the Swedish official stance as being "hypocritical."

Unlike Sweden's unwillingness to condemn the content of the article in the tabloid, Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos condemned the decision of a Spanish daily, El Mundo, to publish an interview with convicted Holocaust denier David Irving.

According to a political source in Jerusalem, a senior Swedish foreign ministry official called Israel's ambassador in Stockholm, Benny Dagan, and informed him that Bildt had decided to "postpone" his visit. The Swedes did not ask about an alternative date, which essentially makes the decision a cancellation.

The Swedish official told Dagan that the cause of the postponement was "bad timing" having to do with the peace process. "You are still in the midst of talks with the U.S. and nothing is finalized, so there is no point in coming," the official told Dagan.

Bildt informed the visiting ministers of EU countries of the trip's cancelation during a conference hosted in Stockholm Friday.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1112574.html

Israel hobbling West Bank economy, says Tony Blair

By Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem

Friday, 28 August 2009

Wataniya Mobile has been frustrated by Israel's hesitance to allow smooth roll-out of the new mobile phone service in the West bank

Israel's delaying tactics over the launch of a new Palestinian mobile phone network could deal a substantial blow to the West Bank's economy, Tony Blair warned yesterday in his capacity as the international community's Middle East envoy.

Wataniya Mobile, based in Qatar, has been preparing for the launch of Palestine's second mobile telecoms company since 2007, with the second largest private investment in West Bank history, amounting to $700m.

But the company is frustrated by Israel's continuing refusal to release adequate frequencies and is threatening to close down its operation next month, seeking the return from the Palestinian Authority of its $140m licensing fee.

"This would be a setback for Palestinian economic progress," said Ruti Winterstein, a spokeswoman for Mr Blair's mission to Jerusalem. "Wataniya was meant to be a big boost creating jobs, money and competition. Mr Blair is pushing the Israelis to release the frequencies."

A spokesman for the Israeli ministry of telecommunications said Israel had allocated "more than enough" spectrum for Wataniya to launch.

Palestinian leaders argue that keeping Wataniya on hold undermines claims by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants to stimulate the Palestinian economy.

"This is a serious indication of a lack of real will to give Palestinians the ability to grow economically," said Nabil Shaath, an adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas, adding that the launch would create 2,500 jobs.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-hobbling-west-bank-economy-says-tony-blair-1778400.html

Spain FM 'regrets' interview with Holocaust denier

Last update - 23:49 05/09/2009

By Haaretz Service

Spain's foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, "regrets" that the major Spanish newspaper El Mundo published an interview with a British Holocaust denier, David Irving, AFP quoted a spokeswoman as saying.

"The foreign minister, while maintaining the most absolute respect for freedom of expression, regrets that space was given to a historian who denies one of the biggest tragedies for humanity in modern history," she was quoted as telling reporters in Stockholm.

"These types of statements deeply hurt the Jewish people," she added, according to the French news agency.

The daily published the interview with Irving, who was sentenced in Austria in 2006 to three years in prison for Holocaust denial, as part of a series of six interviews with experts on the Second World War. The series was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the war's outbreak.

Earlier this week, Israel's Ambassador to Spain, Rafi Shotz, sent a letter to the editor of El Mundo requesting that he drop the upcoming publication.

In return, the paper printed Shotz's letter, emitting a line where the ambassador referred to the interview as "cheap, sensational propaganda." The editor also wrote a response to the letter, in which he referred to Shotz's standing on the matter as "extreme and stubborn."