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M. Hier, A. Cooper and H. Brackman:
Be Our Guest: The big, bad bully in our backyard
Last week, while most of the world banded together to condemn Russia 's thuggish invasion of little Georgia , another oil-fueled villain was busy patting the aggressor on the back.
We speak of Venezuela 's President Hugo Chavez , all but forgotten in recent weeks as other international bad guys have hogged the headlines. Chavez urged the Russians, with whom he recently concluded a multibillion-dollar arms deal, to go all the way and topple Georgia's democratically elected government.
When Chavez was still in elementary school, his hero Fidel Castro , brought the world to the nuclear brink. Now, armed with our petrodollars, he's "Castro on steroids" - boasting that "If Russia's armed forces want to be present in Venezuela, they will be given a warm welcome."
The man is proving himself to be far more than a nuisance. He is an increasingly ambitious menace. The two men vying to be the next President must not let him out of their sights.
This year alone, Chavez will rake in a staggering estimated $50 billion in oil revenues from American pockets. Here's what he is doing with it:
• Ramping up Venezuelan-Iranian collaboration. Chavez has paid frequent visits to Iran , where he has made high-profile pronouncements that "God willing, with the fall of the dollar, the deviant U.S. imperialism will fall as soon as possible."
In conjunction with $17 billion in "joint development projects," Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen have traveled to Venezuela to share their technological know-how on al-Fateh Iranian missiles. Venezuela was the only country to vote "no" on a 2006 International Atomic Energy Agency resolution condemning Iran for "failures and breaches of its obligations to comply" with its treaty commitments not to develop nuclear weapons.
Adding to the concern: Colombia 's government, which Chavez wants to topple, recently seized 30 kilograms of uranium from a jungle lab operated by Chavez-allied FARC terrorists.
• Abetting Mideast and Latin American terror networks. The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control identified a Venezuelan diplomat operating in Syria and Lebanon as among the key "facilitators and fund-raisers" for Hezbollah . And a new group in Venezuela, "Hezbollah in Latin America ," took credit for planting bombs outside the U.S. Embassy.
Meanwhile in Colombia, Chavez-backed, Tehran -friendly FARC terrorists, though weakened by the recent rescue of American and other hostages, still hold 700 people for ransom.
• Threatening the "oil weapon." We import almost 4 million barrels a day from Venezuela, making the country our fourth largest source of oil imports. Chavez knows how vulnerable that makes us. In the event of U.S. or Israeli action against Iran's nuclear program, he pledges to shut the spigot.
• Fomenting anti-Semitism. If you thought Chavez was just about money and power, you're wrong. There's a twisted ideology lurking beneath the surface. Chavez has long been associated with extreme leftist Venezuelan anti-Semites as well as extreme rightist anti-Semites such as Holocaust denier Norberto Ceresole .
Venezuela's government-controlled media incessantly equated " Hitler and Sharon" and blamed Israel for the Iraq war. And as Chavez landed in Tehran in 2004, his police mounted a raid on Caracas ' Club Hebraica, including its Jewish day school. Some 1,500 children were held hostage while uniformed thugs ostensibly looked for contraband Israeli weapons.
During the 2006 UN memorial to Auschwitz victims, only Venezuela tried to turn the commemoration into a propaganda platform for the Palestinians. Later, Chavez blamed "the descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ" for South America 's ills.
Almost 200 years ago, President James Monroe pledged to protect the fledgling republics of the Western Hemisphere from conquest. It's time for a new doctrine to thwart Chavez and company while we wean America from dependence on oil despots.
Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper are the dean and associate dean respectively of the Simon Wiesenthal Center . Harold Brackman, a historian, is a consultant to the Wiesenthal Center. Petroleumworld does not necessarily share these view.
Editor's Note: This article appears in the NY Daily News, on Aug. 25, 2008. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
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Petroleumworld News 08/26/08
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