I have a letter in Jewish Currents magazine (March-April ’06) responding to Bob Cartwright’s adulatory article on Hugo Chavez in the previous issue. In my letter I argue that Cartwright glossed over Chavez’s professed admiration for dictators on the order of Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro. I also noted that Chavez traveled to Libya in 2004 to accept the grotesquely named Gadhafi International Human Rights Prize; previous recipients include Castro, Louis Farrakhan and the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. “I don’t doubt that anti-poverty initiatives are called for in Venezuela,” I wrote, but Chavez’s choice of soulmates “call[s] his democratic credentials seriously into question.”
In response, Cartwright skirts the issue, arguing that a country’s ties to undemocratic governments do not make that country undemocratic. Narrowly and bureaucratically speaking, that’s true. But I was addressing Chavez’s temperament and ideological affinities.
Cartwright notes: “Israel maintained cooperative relations with the apartheid government of South Africa and dictatorships of Central America during the 1970s and ’80s, for reasons of self-interest and U.S. pressure. Do these relationships mark Israel as ‘undemocratic’?” No, but this behavior sullied Israel’s reputation greatly and remains an embarrassment and a black mark on its historical record. Surely Cartwright wouldn’t argue that in the Israeli case, we should shrug our shoulders and sweep the facts under the rug. But that, in effect, is what he’s doing in regard to Chavez.
Cartwright then asks: “Should Franklin Delano Roosevelt have turned down Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ award in 1941 because Hitler won it in 1938 and Stalin in 1939? Does the fact that FDR accepted the award somehow prove that he was not committed to democracy?” As far as I know, FDR did not “accept” Time’s distinction anymore than Hitler or Stalin did. The very notion is ludicrous. Time’s award is not an award — it is an editorial pronouncement, made entirely apart from moral considerations and bestowed on the person who has most influenced world events in a given year. To compare it to the Gadhafi prize is absurd.
Cartwright again: “Winners of the Gadhafi prize other than those mentioned by Adler have included Nelson Mandela, the African Center for the Combat of AIDS, the child-victims of Bosnia Herzegovina, and Ahmed Ben Bellah (hero of the Algerian revolution).” I think Mandela was given the award while still in prison; regardless, his consorting with Gadhafi is not one of his finer points. As for Gadhafi’s record on AIDS, he has framed five Bulgarian nurses for supposedly giving AIDS to Libyan babies — a transparent attempt to divert blame from his substandard hospitals. The child victims of Bosnia obviously have no say over who chooses to honor them. Ben Bella now presides over the Cairo Conference, which refers to Israel as “the Zionist entity” and has proclaimed “solidarity with the Iraqi resistance and the heroic Palestinian Intifada.”
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