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#41... Oct 10,
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P. 7, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS * October 10, 2005...
Behind the Scenes
with Michael Collins Piper
Plot to Kill
Chavez
Brainchild of Israeli Lobby
By Michael Collins Piper
 |
Hugo
Chavez, the colorful Venezuelan nationalist strongman, is now officially
a target of the powerful neo-conservative, pro-Israel network that
directs policy inside the Bush administration.
Although the major media portrayed television evangelist Pat Robertson’s
recent call for the United States to assassinate Chavez as some
sort of reckless outburst — which the administration formally,
if not convincingly, denounced and for which Robertson offered his
own less-than-sincere “apology” — the record shows
that the pro- Israel “neo-cons” have had Chavez in their
gunsights for some time now.
For the last five years, the neo-conservative “high priests
of war” — along with their allies in pro-Israel journals
and newspapers in the United States and worldwide — have been
muttering ominously that Chavez and his government are “anti-Semitic”
and hostile to the interests of Israel.
Probably not coincidentally, Robertson’s call for Chavez’s
murder came on Aug. 22 — just shortly after the neo-conservative
journal, The Weekly Standard, published
a broadside aimed at Chavez in its Aug. 8 issue, claiming that Chavez
“is a threat to more than just his own people.”
The article was devoted to the thesis that the Chavez government
is a threat to the tiny but wealthy Jewish population in Venezuela—roughly
22,000 people in a nation of 22
million.
The Standard bemoaned the fact that Venezuelan
state television broadcast a report speculating that Israel’s
intelligence service, Mossad, may have been linked to the assassination
of a local official in Venezuela. As such, police officials conducted
a raid on a Jewish school that was believed by the government to
be housing weapons that may have been involved in the crime. This
act of national defense, against a perceived threat from the clandestine
services agency of a foreign power, Israel, was presented by the
Standard as some sort of Adolf Hitler-style
Gestapo action.
Asserting that “hostility to Jews has become one of the hallmarks
of the Venezuelan government,” the Standard
cited a U.S. State Department “Report on Global Anti-Semitism”
that purported to document, in the Standard’s
words, “how openly anti-Semitic the Venezuelan government
now is.”
Of particular concern to the pro-Israel journal is that one of Chavez’s
closest advisors was the late Norberto Ceresole, described as “an
Argentinian writer infamous for his books denying the Holocaust
and his conspiracy theories about Jewish plans to control the planet”
and whose book hailing Chavez, in its opening chapter, forcefully
raised questions about Zionist influence worldwide.
Chavez himself has backtracked in the face of Zionist criticism.
In 2000, when he announced a trip to Iraq to visit Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein, Chavez taunted neo-conservative media critics by
saying, “Imagine what the Pharisees will say when they see
me with Saddam Hussein.”
Actually, complaints by Israel’s supporters against Chavez
go back to the beginning of his first years in office. In 2000,
the Stephen Roth Institute on Anti-Semitism and Racism at the Tel
Aviv University in Israel issued a report on Anti-Semitism Worldwide
1999/2000 which targeted Chavez declaring:
Venezuela has undergone a dramatic political
transformation since the 1998 general elections, which has had
a negative impact on the Jewish community. The new administration’s
cool stance toward the community and toward Israel has encouraged
anti-Semitism, evidenced particularly
in the mainstream press . . .
Some observers [point] to the president’s close relations
with Libya, Iraq and Iran, which would serve to explain his hostility
toward Israel as well.
The Israeli report also raised the specter of
Chavez’s friendship with the aforementioned Ceresole —
“the well-known Argentinian anti-Semite” — driving
home the point that Chavez is likewise considered an enemy of Israel.
Meanwhile, although Americans who heard of Robertson’s violent
provocation against Chavez were told by the media that Chavez was
a “leftist” and a “friend of Fidel Castro”
— charges certain to inflame many Americans — the fact
that the pro-Israel network had an axe to grind with Chavez was
carefully kept under wraps, with the Israeli lobby’s criticisms
of Chavez confined to small-circulation journals, such as The
Weekly Standard, read almost exclusively by supporters
of Israel, such as Robertson.
In order to manipulate the American public, the major media has
helped the Bush administration by stoking up fears of Chavez being
some sort of new “communist threat” when nothing could
be further from the truth.
In truth, Chavez has modeled himself and his domestic revolution
on the tradition of Simon Bolivar, who liberated the Andean colonial
provinces from the Spanish imperial crown and who in traditional
American history texts has been called “The George Washington
of South America.”
Although Chavez is a critic of rampant global super-capitalism,
which he calls “the demon,” Alma Guillermoprieto pointed
out in the Oct. 6, 2005 edition of The New York Review
of Books that “a great many businessmen have
prospered under his rule, and he has made it clear he sees a significant
role for the private sector and, most particularly, for foreign
investment.”
(#41....
October 10, 2005.
.
American Free Press)
