Hugo Chavez says that “the blood shed in Gaza is the blood of humanity. Venezuela kisses each and every one of you and stresses that it supports the Palestinian people and all those who suffer from the occupation.” Quite the humanist, our Hugo, no? Except that the above photograph shows him embracing Zimbabwe’s dictator, Robert Mugabe, whose most recent contribution to his country’s suffering is a cholera epidemic that has claimed 1732 lives.
The grotesque rape of Zimbabwe by Mugabe, his family and his cronies has left western solidarity activists unmoved. There is violence at Israeli embassies and consulates around the world, but Mugabe’s envoys carry on as normal. Given that he has the blessing of a far left poster boy like Chavez, we shouldn’t be too surprised by that; in fact, one can safely say that the only time demonstrators would pour into the streets on the issue of Zimbabwe would be in the unlikely event of outside military intervention to remove the Mugabe regime.
Mugabe is not the only tyrant in Chavez’s circle. Recounting his expulsion from Caracas, the now former Israeli Ambassador to Venezuela, Shlomo Cohen, says: “I estimated that something like this could happen. After all, he is an ally of Iran who maintains very close relations with the government in Tehran.”
You don’t say…
The great open dirty secret of Mugabe is that the people who are keeping him in power is actually the ANC in South Africa. And since they ‘own’ the word apartheid and are seen as the go-to people whenever you need to excoriate someone for something, there’s no one who will speak up and inquire just why they feel they need to help keep Mugabe in power. Apart of course from the ideological similarities of old line Communism and close ties to the KGB/FSS. In reality ZA needs Mugabe because they don’t want to inherit his problems and they don’t want more people fleeing the country into ZA.
But back to il Chavez. When oil was $150/bbl Chavez bought a fleet of MiG-29 fighters and generally provoked an arms race in South America. In the decade past - the peasants are no better off, unemployment and inflation are 30% and he has to hire gangs to terrorize political opponents, such as they are with an El Presidente for Life.
Chavez hates Israel for the same reason the Arab states do. In a pragmatic way it deflects their angry poor uneducated people from rising up at their lot in life and lopping off their leaders heads.
Which is why the few Jews who live in Venezuela should seriously consider leaving. Anywhere. Uruguay, Argentina, Israel, Canada…anywhere.
I frequently walk past the Zimbabwe embassy in London - a grand Edwardian building in high British imperial style - and am moved to see the dignity of the protesters (mostly black Zimbabwean exiles) who regularly gather there, sometimes singing, sometimes standing in quiet mourning, ignored by the mainstream media. Such a stark contrast to those outside the Israeli embassy…