By SHMULEY BOTEACH

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710740265&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The picture of the president of the United States smiling broadly as he met President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela startled me. Our president is a nice guy. Chavez is anything but.


The State Department maintains that Chávez has attacked democratic traditions and has put Venezuelan democracy on life support with unchecked concentration of power, political persecution, and intimidation. Foreign Affairs magazine says that Chávez is a power-hungry dictator with autocratic and megalomaniacal tendencies whose authoritarian vision and policies are a serious threat to his people. In testimony before the US Senate, the South American project director for the Center for Strategic International Studies said that Chavez's government engages in "arresting opposition leaders, torturing some members of the opposition (according to human rights organizations) and encouraging, if not directing, its squads of Bolivarian Circles to beat up members of Congress and intimidate voters-all with impunity."

In spite of a presidential term limit of six years, Chávez has suggested that he would like to remain in power for 25 years. Hmmm. An autocratic dictator who abuses human rights and undermines democracy being warmly embraced by the American president. There's something wrong with that picture.

Then there was the incident of President Barack Obama seeming to bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 summit in London. The president's people denied it was a bow, but it certainly was a sign of great deference from the American president to the dictator of a country who just six weeks ago sentenced a 75-year-old woman to 40 lashes for having been secluded with her nephew after he delivered bread to her home. This is the same Abdullah whom, when asked why Saudi Arabia prohibits the public practice of religions other than Islam, said, "It is absurd to impose on an individual or a society rights that are alien to its beliefs or principles."

Obama is also pursuing a renewed relationship with Cuba, a country which engages in systemic human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions. Censorship is so extensive that Cubans face five-year prison sentences for connecting to the Internet illegally. And not only is emigration illegal, but even discussing it carries a six-month prison sentence.

WATCHING ALL THIS, I was wondering what the new standards were. How oppressive must a leader be before we determine that he has not merited a hug by the democratic standard-bearer of the free world, the president of the United States? Yes, I get it. We have to speak to our enemies, and America has to push "reset" on its relationship with many of these countries. We should try and change them through charm. But who said the president himself, rather than a lower-level diplomat, must do so?

And if Obama feels that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez, must it be with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show girl scouts selling cookies?

It must surely be disheartening for those who suffer oppression in countries like Venezuela, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to see the American president backslapping their oppressors when these victims have always looked up to the United States as their champions.

In Turkey, Obama boldly declared that "the United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam."

But the person who was at war with Islam, Saddam Hussein, the man who killed nearly one million Muslims, was removed by a country which has already paid with the lives of 4,500 of its servicemen and women. The same is true of the Taliban, another group whom the Obama administration is considering talking to, who beat Muslim women in the streets of Afghanistan. Yet the president seems reluctant to publicly identify these real enemies of Islam.

LIKE MANY AMERICANS, I have been awed by our president's capacity to draw those who hate us near. He is a man of considerable charm and grace. But I have to admit that I am increasingly troubled by his seeming inability to call out rogue dictators.

While he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised, "As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide." But in a press conference in Ankara with President Abdullah Gul, he refused to use the word "genocide" when challenged by a reporter on the issue. Yet, it was Obama's early foreign policy adviser Samantha Power of Harvard who wrote A Problem from Hell, the definitive book on the American non-intervention in repeated 20th-century genocides, beginning with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks which killed 1.5 million between the years of 1915 and 1923. When I read the book it changed my life.

As a Jew who does not want the world to forget the Holocaust, I can only imagine the pain of the Armenian community as it struggles to have modern Turkey acknowledge the crime. And why should modern Turkey not oblige? No one is blaming it for something that happened 90 years ago. It is not today's generation which is at fault. But nations must come to terms with their own history. Could any of us imagine what kind of country the US would be if it denied that it was ever responsible for the abomination of African-American slavery and segregation?

ALL THIS LEADS to one important question. Suppose Obama succeeds in building friendships with Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad and the Taliban. What then? Does America still get to feel that it stands for something? Will we still be the beacon of liberty and freedom to the rest of the world, or will we have sold out in the name of political expediency? And do any of us seriously believe that presidential friendship is going to get a megalomaniac like Hugo Chavez to ease up on the levers of power, or are we just feeding his ego by showing him he can be a tyrant and still have a beer with the president of the United States? Will the Iranians really stop enriching uranium through diplomacy rather than economic sanctions?


Those questions need to be answered before it is too late....or is it too late now already...

Oye pero suelta al moreno ya! wow how about Mccain and others they still alive too. Obama is te president and thats end of the story.

Chevez is a great man - Obama is not - so why not smile. Venez can help the US economy and is already helping poor US citizens with heating oil.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13116.htm
Pirate Preacher Man! read.
S.

My personal preference was not Obama, but you should leave him alone, your quest seems like a personal vendetta of some sorts. He is the US elected president and is a breath of fresh air compared to cowboy Bush.
Obama could be Mr. Nice guy and be diplomatic all he wants, without double crossing the feelings and beliefs of the majority voters that put him in power. To shake somebody's hand, bow or be nice in front of the cameras does not mean shit when the time for serious negotiating comes.
Your dogmatic stiffness reminds me of the Ayotollah Khomeini while exiled in France publishing booklets on
"How to defecate in a Holy way", (I am not kidding).
Look at the Japanese hours before they attacked Pear Harbor they were still trying to brown nose the state department in DC, to mislead and confuse.
Obama is following Teddy Roosevelt's motto " Speak softly and carry a big stick".
Your criticism is negative and has a hidden agenda, try to use your time for positive subjects instead of
stirring up trouble.

Coño si no e' Haiti entonce e' sobre Obama. Lo Dominicano no tiene lugai en e'te foro.
Why does DT.com get all the creeps, why do these intrusos think we care?

Manhattanite, I swear to God I am starting to believe CabareteWilliams has a picture of Obama up en su ceiling and plays with himself, every night, while looking at the picture.

I have never seen a grown-ass man so 'fatally attracted' to another man my whole darned life!.

It's like Obama fucked him and them left him for another man and now all he wants to do is get even.

Y entiendo lo que tu dices de que si no es de Haiti, es de Obama (u otra mierda no relaccionada con la RD)......I even started a thread about that a long time ago.

Pero como dicen, "cada loco con su tema". JAJAJA.

At some point in your rant, you mention "Systematic human rights abuse, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions" You were talking about Cuba, but it sounds like a perfect description of Isreal. Do not be upset because the days of the Jewish lobby are over, and yes, they are over. Aipac, agents for a foreign government had tried to buy it's way into Congress. These crimminals were recorded and caught and will be tried for deeds. These are black days for people like you, in more ways than one !

To compare Cuba to Israel is a bit silly. Apples and oranges.
Israel: surrounded by naitons with 10 times their population determined to eliminate them. Their women and children are routinely slaughtered by terrorist bombers. They are in a state of war.

Cuba: Once a propserous island oasis - and it would today be one of the most wealthy islands if Castro and his thugs had not taken over. It is not in a state of war. No one is threatening to destroy it. And the people torturing and putting into prison the Cubans are their own fellow Cubans..

Nice try - but no cigar - no comparison.

(PS - you may want ot look up the word rant - before you use it )

ABC, you are a communist coming out of your closet - Chavez is street thug, no class, a Dictator shutting down free press and he is typical of the worst of what Latin American countries can produce...he is a bully and a clown!

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tore into President Barack Obama Monday for his friendly greeting of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying Obama is bolstering the "enemies of America.”

Gingrich appeared on a number of morning talk shows comparing Obama to President Jimmy Carter for the smiling, hearty handshake he offered Chavez, one of the harshest critics of the United States, during the Summit of the Americas.

“Frankly, this does look a lot like Jimmy Carter. Carter tried weakness, and the world got tougher and tougher, because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators – when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead,” Gingrich said on “Fox & Friends.”

Two Republican senators, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and John Ensign of Nevada, joined in the criticism Monday, with Ensign calling Obama's greeting of Chavez "irresponsible."

By Saturday afternoon, Chavez had gifted Obama a book critical of U.S. involvement in Latin America, the images were being replayed on television, and the White House had a new talking point: that handshakes and smiles are not enough, that actions speak louder than words.

But Gregg told MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday that while Chavez is "not a strategic threat,” Obama’s greeting of him is “not a good way to start your presidency."

Gingrich on NBC’s Today Show that Obama’s warm greeting of Chavez was "proof that Chavez is now legitimate, is acceptable."

And Ensign called Chavez "one of the most anti-American leaders in the entire world. He is a brutal dictator and human rights violations are very, very prevalent in Venezuela. And you have to be careful.”

Gingrich first raised the issue on Friday, the night Obama and Chavez first met at a reception.

“I think it sends a terrible signal to all of Latin America, and a terrible signal about how the new administration regards dictators,” Gingrich said on Fox, also citing Obama’s willingness to talk to Iran, his handling of North Korea and overtures to the Castro government in Cuba. “I don’t think there’s any downside to talking to him. But I think being friends, taking a picture that clearly looks like they’re buddies hurts in all of Latin America.”

Are we to forget that pres Bush Sr. shaked hands with Saddam and noriega?

both dictators...

chavez as was Hitler were elected into power !