Venezuela: When the Counter-Revolution was Televised

The reported refusal (al Jazeera) of Venezuela's opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, to accept the presidential electoral victory of Nicolás Maduro reminds me of the documentary The Revolution will not be Televised, by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain. The whole thing is about an hour and a quarter long, but I found this section on Youtube which shows the counter-revolution in frighteningly close-up detail.


  

The coup was memorably described at the time by The Guardian's Duncan Campbell as Bush's Bay of Piglets and it was, of course, a miserable failure.

Viva democracia!

Remembering Hugo Chavez

Here's what I remember most.  Back in 2009:

Chavez has ordered Ambassador Shlomo Cohen to leave in protest over the attacks in Gaza. Israel says Cohen was given until Friday to depart, and the nation is considering expelling Venezuelan diplomats in response.

I got that from AP via google news but it's no longer there. I kept the whole report here.

False flag operation against synagogue in Venezuela?

Antisemitism is big news after the Gaza massacres. But how much of it is manufactured? In Caracas, a major synagogue was attacked and defaced.

The result:

The attack produced a deluge of condemnation of President Hugo Chavez, a vocal critic of Israeli foreign policy who last month expelled Israel's ambassador over the war in Gaza. Members of the U.S. Congress said in a letter that Chavez had fostered a climate of fear against the Jewish community, and the World Jewish Congress was also critical.

Why should there be condemnations of Chavez, who strongly condemned the vandalism? Because this is the line now. Everybody in the media says it: if you criticize Israel with the tone that it deserves, you create a "climate of antisemitism." Chavez is the iconic leftist leader, and therefore can be used to "prove" the line.

Now, I wouldn't moderate one word in anything I wrote about Israel even if I knew it would stoke antisemitism. And nobody else should. We won't be silent in the face of horrible crimes. We must explain clearly why our words are not an attack on Jews. Beyond that, the blame is with those who want to hear a racist message. But the truth is the very opposite of the new media line. Everyone can read the substantial quantity of cow manure that is published daily on the web about the Jewish control of the world. It should be obvious even to our not so bright journalists that Western support for Israel, Obama's silence on Gaza, the whitewashed, propagandistic reporting of the mainstream media, the slavish support for child-murderers in the U.S. Congress, etc., are what nourishes the spread of antisemitic themes, and not the criticism of Israel.

The very same people whose actions, whose identification with and support for the murder of 400 children, in addition to being simply unforgivable, also feed hatred and give ammunition to white supremacists, now accuse Chavez, and the left in general, of stoking antisemitism.

Wouldn't it be convenient if someone burnt a synagogue just in time to help them make the case?

Venezuelan investigators on Sunday said seven police agents and four civilians were arrested in connection with an attack on a synagogue that sparked international condemnation.

The Venezuelan public prosecutor's office said the civilians included at least one security official from the synagogue and that all had been captured in raids over the weekend. "These people were apprehended during raids carried out between Saturday and the early hours of Sunday in different parts of Caracas. They will all be charged by the Public Prosecutor's office," the office said in a statement. (Haaretz )

Anybody familiar with Venezuelan politics knows that the police is a stronghold of the opposition. Chavez had to introduce army units to do police work because the Caracas police only protects the rich suburbs and participates in racketeering. So now we have seven police officers and a guard at the synagogue suspect of involvement in attacking the synagogue. The information is still too sketchy for a conclusion, but this begins to look like a classical U.S. sponsored false flag job.

Venezuelan ambassador condemns antisemitism

Here's an interesting article in the Monthly Review by the Venezuelan Ambassador to the Organisation of American States, Roy Chaderton Matos. If I had read what he claims in his first paragraph in a zionist rag I would not have believed it but here's a good chunk of what he wrote:

Watching television footage of one of the necessary and legitimate protests against the Israeli Embassy in Caracas, I spotted a lone sign with a slogan that left me thunderstruck. The slogan was something like: "We condemn Hitler for not having completed his work of extermination. . . ."

The frightening message, totally alien to the Bolivarian process and the Chavista commitment to liberty, democracy, equality, and social justice, shows that, every now and then in our struggles and protests, "loose cannons" come dog us and that we have to detect them and neutralize them and expel them like any foreign body.

Those hidden anti-Semites are much like other "loose cannons" such as professional anti-clericalists who shout, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" when they encounter a believer, incited by the undeniable fact that a majority of the Venezuelan Catholic hierarchy refused to use their potential capacity to become a bridge between Venezuelans in the opposing camps and instead embraced the ultra-right-wing Creoles and the immoral dictatorship of the media. What's lost on these pseudo-Chavista infiltrators is the deep Christian foundation of our socialist process and the social fact that most Venezuelan Catholics, including nuns and priests at the grassroots, are committed to the Bolivarian revolution.

None shall ever be permitted to use the recurrent crimes against humanity committed by the mediocre and murderous militarist elite of the State of Israel as justification for twisting the just rebellion of the Palestinians and solidarity with them into anti-Semitic aberrations.

No leftist has the right to forget that the Jews -- historically persecuted, not by the Muslims who for centuries opened their doors for them, but by first the Christian crusaders, then the inquisitors, and finally the Nazis -- have a historical tradition of pioneering solidarity with social rebellions and progressive thought. Never forget such illustrious Jews as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Bob Dylan. Never forget the participation of Jews, even at the cost of their lives, in civil, labor, social, and anti-war struggles in the United States or struggles against the ultra-Catholic military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. Never overlook the fact that, in the United States, against the organized anti-Chavista campaign supported by the "Israel lobby" in that country, American Jewish intellectuals have spoken up: the most famous intellectual in the world, Noam Chomsky, so often cited by President Chávez, and Joseph Stiglitz, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, who has supported us in our struggles against the dictatorship of neoliberalism.

Now let's just have that list of Jewish names again:

Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan? His Excellency obviously never heard "Neighbourhood Bully". Still, it could've been worse. More embarrassing anyway.

EU should follow Venezuela and Bolivia

Here's a plea from several Israeli citizens to the EU to apply sanctions to the racist war criminals of the State of Israel:

The leaders of the western world are wringing their hands in despair at the sight of the horrors inflicted on Gaza (Gaza crisis, 16 January). The UN general secretary, the French president and others are holding intensive discussions with some of the leaders of the Middle East in an attempt to put an end to the carnage in Gaza. Word, words, words.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinian civilians get killed, thousands are bleeding to death, tens of thousands are uprooted and wandering in vain in search of some shelter to protect them. The Israeli army bombs hospitals and Unrwa relief centres, and, defying international convention, it uses white phosphorus bombs against civilians. "What else can we do?" these leaders keep asking. Well, here is what you can do: move from words to deeds. Only immediate, decisive and strict sanctions against the state of Israel and its limitless aggression will make it realise that there's a limit.

We, as Israeli citizens, raise our voices to call on EU leaders: use sanctions against Israel's brutal policies and join the active protests of Bolivia and Venezuela. We appeal to the citizens of Europe: please attend to the Palestinian Human Rights Organisation's call, supported by more than 540 Israeli citizens (www.freegaza.org/en/home/): boycott Israeli goods and Israeli institutions; follow resolutions such as those made by the cities of Athens, Birmingham and Cambridge (US). This is the only road left. Help us all, please!

Prof Yoram Carmeli Haifa University
Prof Rachel Giora Tel Aviv University
Dr Anat Matar Tel Aviv University
Jonathan Pollak
Dr Kobi Snitz Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
And 17 other Israeli citizens

Meanwhile I have just received an email saying that there are rumours of an impending ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Rafah into Egypt.