Hugo Chavez, anti-Israel president of Venezuela and Iran ally, dies

NEW YORK (JTA) -- Hugo Chavez, the longtime president of Venezuela who spouted anti-Israel rhetoric and befriended Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has died.

Chavez, who ruled the South American country for 14 years, died Tuesday following a long battle with cancer, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro said in a televised speech. Chavez was 58.

An anti-capitalist, Chavez took office in 1999, rising to power with the massive support of the country's poor. Despite battling cancer, Chavez was reelected last year. He underwent four surgeries in Cuba, his last one on Dec. 11.

The Jewish community of Venezuela has had strained relationships with the government following a flood of attacks against Jewish houses of worship in 2009. Venezuelan police officers were among those implicated in the attacks.

Venezuela severed ties with Israel following Israel's three-week Gaza operation Cast Lead launched in December 2008, expelling the Israeli ambassador and staff.

In May 2010, following Israeli Navy clashes with a flotilla trying to evade the country's blockade that resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish activists, Chavez called Israel a "genocidal state" in a national broadcast and said the Mossad was trying to kill him.

"Israel is financing the Venezuelan opposition. There are even groups of Israeli terrorists, of the Mossad, who are after me trying to kill me," he said.

Along with befriending Ahmadinejad, Chavez also was an ally of the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Chavez, who was anti-American, was a socialist leader who was credited with reducing poverty and expanding access to health care, food and education to Venezuela's poor while undermining the democratic country's system of checks and balances and repressing its media.

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http://www.jta.org/news/article/2013/03/05/3121241/hugo-chavez-president-of-venezuela-dies-of-cancer

Belmokhtar, Mastermind of Algerian Gas Plant Attack, Killed in Mali

Another mass murderer bites the dust....MFBSR

The Al Qaeda-affiliated leader of the Signed in Blood battalion was killed by Chadian forces in Mali, reports Jamie Dettmer.

TRIPOLI—The veteran jihadist leader who masterminded the seizing in January by Al Qaeda-linked militants of an Algerian natural gas plant that left more than 30 hostages dead has been killed in northern Mali, according to Chad's armed forces.

French military officials in Mali said they could not confirm the death, but Libyan intelligence sources say the claim by Chadian army chiefs is accurate.

The death was announced first on Chad's state television by General Zacharia Gobongue, who said that Chadian armed forces killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar while attacking a terrorist base in the Adrar de Ifhogas mountains in northern Mali. Several other jihadists were also killed in the assault, which was carried out by Chadian soldiers experienced in desert fighting.

His death is seen by analysts as a severe blow for Islamist rebels in Mali, who have retreated to mountain redoubts in the face of a fierce French-led intervention that was launched last year.

On Friday, Mali-based Islamists suffered another setback when Al Qaeda commander Adelhamid Abou Zeid was killed. His death was announced by Chad's President Idriss Deby, whose soldiers are among the African forces supporting the French in Mali.

This is a very heavy blow to Al Qaeda and the Jihad movement in the Sahel," says Abdel Bari Atwani, the editor-in-chief of Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper, who has followed for years Belmokhtar's jihadist career.

"He was the fox of the desert and had huge experience and was the link between the older and younger generations of jihadists. To have him killed at this crucial time will hurt Al Qaeda. But as we have learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, Al Qaeda will bounce back."

President Deby also cautioned against assuming the fight was all but finished in northern Mali. "The war is not over, even if the enemy have been put to flight," he said.

Belmokhtar was part pirate and part jihadist. He made a name for himself as far back as the 1990s as a successful cigarette smuggler in the Sahel, earning him the nickname "Marlboro Man." He was also dubbed "The Uncatchable One.

An Algerian native with a storied two-decade history of armed militancy, Belmokhtar was one of the leading figures of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and commanded a highly effective cell of fighters in north Mali until October, when Yahya Abou El Hamame was appointed over him as AQIM's "Emir of the Sahel."

He broke away from the Al Qaeda franchise and formed a new jihadist group called the "Signed in Blood" battalion. Even so, the Algerian-born Belmokhtar remained a steadfast supporter of Al Qaeda, according to Andrew Black, who wrote a study on Belmokhtar for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington DC-based think-tank.

"He was the fox of the desert and had huge experience and was the link between the older and younger generations of jihadists."

"In the Sahel the jihadist groups are very fissiparous," notes Stephen Ellis of the African Studies Center at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. "They split and re-form regularly only to split again."

Terrorism analysts believed that Belmokhtar had more than one objective in mind when he ordered his fighters to seize the gas facility in Algeria in January. They think he was trying to boost his own standing among jihadists after his organizational break with Al Qaeda, hoping that eventually he would be rewarded with the leadership of AQIM.

One of his associates, Oumar Ould Hamaha, told the Associated Press in the autumn that Belmokhtar wanted to "enlarge his zone of operation throughout the entire Sahara, going from Niger through to Chad and Burkina Faso."

Born in Ghardaia, Algeria, in 1972, Belmokhtar traveled to Afghanistan as a 19-year-old to join training camps run by jihadists, returning in 1992 to his homeland, where he helped to set up the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) that subsequently merged with al-Qaeda.

Jamestown Foundation's Black says above all Belmokhtar was a shrewd operator who earned his reputation as one of the most daring jihadist-gangster leaders in the Sahara desert.

Belmokhtar was linked to a string of kidnappings of foreigners in North Africa, including the 2003 kidnapping of 32 European tourists. In 2008 he was behind the kidnapping of two Canadians, one of whom was the former U.N. Niger envoy Robert Fowler.

Belmokhtar's Saharan activities were helped by his strong links with local Tuaregs—at least two of his four wives are believed to be Tuareg. The kinship connections were useful also for AQIM. His death could well contribute greatly to a further unraveling of the AQIM-Tuareg pact, already under strain from the French intervention.

A wily fighter, earlier this year he was thought to have ordered his men to light cooking fires inside empty houses to trick French warplane pilots into believing they had found his hideout. After striking the pretend camp, French ground forces stormed the houses only to find no sign of Belmokhtar.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/02/belmokhtar-mastermind-of-algerian-gas-plant-attack-killed-in-mali.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning

By Jamie Dettmer

Syrian Revolution Is A Movement To Kill Christians

Assad is a bad man, but the "rebels" are far worse.
MFBSR

The Syrian Revolution is for the establishing of an Islamic state, and in so doing, Christians are being killed by the Islamist. But I fear the future, knowing that the time is coming in which a full out massacre will be implemented by the Islamist in Syria. The fall of Assad will mean a mass cleansing of anybody who believes in the Bible, since the Assad regime protects the Christian population.

Just in late November, two car bombs went off in a Christian and Druze suburb of Damascus killing forty-five and injuring 120. In a recent report by the UK's Independent, one Syrian said that the rebels "wanted to kill us because we were Christians. They were calling us Kaffirs [infidels], even little children saying these things. Those who were our neighbours turned against us".

Archbishop Issam John Darwish said that there has been "an influx of jihadists in the rebels in the last six, seven months".

On November 8th of this year Agenzia Fides reported that the Catholic Church was trying to rescue ten Christians who were abducted by Islamists as they were traveling from Aleppo to Beirut.

According to an article written by Beatriz Schiava

Christian neighborhoods like Bab Touma, Qatana, the Christian Quarters of Damascus, Hamidiye, and neighborhoods of Aleppo such as Sulaymaniya, AL Jarbiriya, Al Tilal, Villas, and many others have been targeted with bomb attacks and snipers that kill and injure hundreds of innocent bystanders.

On September 25, the Vatican News stated that 150 Greek Catholics, working in their apple fields near the village of Rableh between the Lebanese border and the city of Qusayr, were kidnapped. The next day, another 130 Christians from Rableh were kidnapped by armed thugs. The perpetrators behind this was a Sunni Islamist group from Lebanon called Ahmad Ammoun.

Though Ahmad Ammoun was said to have no known connection with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), it turns out that they do have a relation. As I reported on the event , both Ahmad Ammoun and the FSA are Salafist, and both have waged attacks on Christians and Alawite Muslims.

Attacks on churches, looting, the seizing of private property, and murder, are now common crimes done against Christians.

Christians who are not wealthy enough to leave Syria have stayed behind, becoming an easy target for rebels, who have blocked there homes.

In September, it was reported that 150 Christians took up arms to prevent rebels from entering major areas of Aleppo. In the Christian quarter of Jdeidah, Christian militia, with Syrian military assistance took out Free Syrian Army thugs who were hiding in the Ferhat Square of the area. The reason? FSA members were hiding in buildings killing random Christians. According to one Christian witness named John,

FSA snipers were on the rooftops and they were attacking the Maronite church and Armenian residents there

Manaf Tlass, a very famous rebel in Syria, has a cousin named Abdul Razzak, who commands the notorious al-Farouq brigade of the opposition, which was responsible for the forced exile of 80,000 Christians out of Homs.

In Aleppo, about 100 rebels invaded a Christian area of the city. One report on Syria had this to say:

The violent situation deeply hurts the entire Syrian population, the Christian community as well as other people groups. But about two or three weeks ago we observed an increase of violence that specifically is targeting Christians or Christian neighborhoods. Bombs now are placed in Christian areas where there is no strategic or military target at all.

Also in Aleppo, in November, a bomb went off near a Syriac Orthodox Church leaving between 20 and 80 people dead. An Armenian church was also bombed after being raided and vandalized by rebels.

One Christian named Michel said that the persecution toward Christians began after the first protest against the Assad regime. He continued to say:

Then suddenly arms were being used and there were Arabs from different countries," he said. "They broke into Christian houses and accused them of blasphemy. …

Michel also recounted a horrific event which happened to his family while he was gone from his home:

It was indescribable fear. They burned tyres in front of the house and wanted to burn the house," he said. [My wife] took the children and was jumping over walls from one street to another until they managed to escape.

The St. Gevorg Church in Aleppo's Armenian Nor Kyugh district was put to flames by rebels, being almost put to ashes, while the Mesrobian Armenian school next to the church was also attacked. Moreover, in the Armenian district of Damascus a bomb went off which killed 10 people, and wounded another 50.

Agnes Mariam, the Mother Superior of the Melkite Greek Catholic monastery of St James the Mutilated in Qara, said that while the Assad regime does "not favour Christians", "The social fabric of Syria is very diverse, so Christians live in peace."

Right when Assad's regime topples, the Christians will be amongst the greatest victims.

While Israel has not gotten involved in the revolution, it is not optimistic either. Syrian rebels have taken almost all of the villages near the frontier with the Golan Heights. Ehud Barak said:

Almost all of the villages, from the foot of this ridge to the very top, are already in the hands of the Syrian rebels

One rebel named Mateen said that the rebellion has

a big fight against the Jews ahead of us. We will take that up, God willing.

Pope Benedict XVI has in fact objected to any giving of arms into Syria, where they will be given into the hands of the rebels:

The import of weapons has to finally stop, …Without the import of arms the war cannot continue. Instead of importing weapons, which is a grave sin, we have to import ideas of peace and creativity.

Where are the voices from major contemporary churches? Where is Rick Warren, Joel Olsteen? America and Europe have not offered any help for the Christians, and while mainstream churches stay silent, the U.S. government and Western allies are making matters worse. Within hours of Obama's second victory, Western allies had already designed a development for Syria, expecting a much more aggressive approach to Syria by the president. England and Turkey have been discussing the use of NATO against Bashar al-Assad, expecting more support from Obama.

Lets not forget that Obama last month recognized the official Syrian opposition as a legitimate group, saying

I'm encouraged to see that the Syrian opposition created an umbrella group that may have more cohesion than they've had in the past, …We consider them a legitimate representative of the aspirations of the Syrian people. We're not yet prepared to recognize them as some sort of government in exile, but we do think that it is a broad-based representative group.

What will this do? Remember Egypt. What caused the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian revolution to be so confident? They got Obama's approval in his famous "New Beginning" speech of 2009 which he did in Cairo (a speech which, I believe, will be judged by history as one of the most destructive acts of a U.S. president).

While Obama has been vocal on his support for the Syrian revolution and the toppling of Assad, his administration is now considering giving weapons to help the rebels. The New York Times reported in November:

While no decisions have been made, the administration is considering several alternatives, including directly providing arms to some opposition fighters.

Turkey wants NATO to provide them with surface-to-air missiles to supposedly protect the country from the Syrian military, and State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland said that the Patriot missile system would not be "for use beyond the Turkish border."

But I fear that the Obama administration's and NATO's involvement will go beyond just talk, and enter into them working with terrorist groups, just as they did when they worked to oust out Gaddafi, as Walid Shoebat reported:

Appointing Libyan fighters to oust Qaddafi was akin to appointing the same individuals with the same ideology as Al-Qaeda. That ideology was established by the fighting groups that were involved in the Afghan-Russian war. It was these groups that were aided by NATO forces and supported by the Obama administration, which wanted the removal of the Gaddafi regime.

From what I have heard, the reasons why America is in support of toppling Assad is because they see him as a brutal tyrant who needs to be removed. Also, because America sees the Shiites as the major threat, and believe that by removing Assad, Iran will then be weakened significantly. But what America and the rest of the West needs to realize, that that by getting rid of Assad, this will pave the way for Turkey to invade Syria, and begin to arise as a major superpower in the Middle East.

With all of this said, the point is clear. Islam is anti-Christian ideology, and by allowing its fundamentalist followers to take Syria, the Christians living under it will live the lives of slaves and victims of genocide.

Theodore Shoebat is the author of the book, For God or For Tyranny.

http://shoebat.com

Analysis: Arab daily praises Israel, gets bashed

The popular Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat published two articles recently that presented a relatively positive view of Israel compared to the usual strongly negative image of the country in the Arab media.

Dr. Amal al-Hazzani, an assistant professor at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, wrote an article about a week ago titled "The Israel we do not know " – and received a flood of hate mail. He went on to write another article, published Thursday, responding to the harsh reaction.

A look at the two articles, as well as the public response, is telling of where the acceptable boundaries in Arab culture lie when it comes to discussion of Israel.

In the first article, Hazzani analyzed the results of the Israeli elections, noting that the focus had been on internal issues and that politicians had acted with devotion and sincerity to promote the interests of the people as a whole.

This has not been the case in Arab countries since the Arab Spring, he said. There, Arab politicians focus on "their affiliation to a certain group" and "heap insults upon Israel from their luxurious hotel rooms. However, they are still unaware as to where, why and how these feelings of hatred towards Israel came about."

He lamented that Israel's neighboring Arab states "are ignorant of the Hebrew language," noting that in Syria and Lebanon, people preferred to study French rather than the language of the country threatening their national security.

Arab youth know nothing about Israel, he said, claiming that a "generation that harbors dreams and expectations different to those cherished by a leader like Netanyahu" had emerged there.

He called attempts by some analysts to compare young Israelis' social protests with the Arab Spring protests "ridiculous." The Arabs struggled against undemocratic "regimes that were light years away from their citizens," he said, whereas Israel is "truly democratic" and the protests there were over living standards, not "starting from scratch as in the Arab Spring states."

He argued that not all Israelis supported the oppression of the Palestinians, and implied that Arabs were not aware of this, partly because their intelligentsia did not talk about it.

By contrast, he said, there are many opportunities to study Arabic in Israel, and Israelis are fully fluent and absorbed in Arab culture, its strengths and weaknesses. This helps explain why Israelis have become so successful and powerful, he stated.

The article was not entirely positive vis-à-vis Israel, as it still spoke of an "oppressive occupying state," among other things. But the aspects of Israel that it did portray in a positive light were apparently too much for some readers.

Hazzani's second article opens by describing the flood of hate mail he received from people who accused him of "calling for a normalization of relations, promoting the Hebrew language, and glorifying Israeli liberalism."

"This response was to be expected because I breached a taboo," he says, but this "outrage will not change the reality. Israel will remain as it is; a small state but stronger than the rest of the Arab world."

He goes on to defend himself by asserting that he was only trying to say Arabs had to understand their enemy.

Hazzani says Arabs fear that learning about Israel will somehow mean they are recognizing its legitimacy, but that is not necessarily so. This attitude permeates Arab media, which is scared to deal with issues relating to culture, economics, and even some political issues when it comes to Israel, for the fear that it "promotes Zionism," he says.

During the latest wars in Gaza and Lebanon, he notes, Arab TV stations generally refused to invite a guest representing the Israeli side. "Only Al-Arabiya dared to buck the trend, and it was not long before some branded it as Zionist for choosing to do so."

The Arabs, he concludes, "have been preoccupied with [rage] and blind hatred since 1967. During this time, Israel has managed to build eight public universities and 200 museums that receive nearly 4 million tourists a year. It has also become a rival to the US in the programming and software industry."

This episode illustrates that Arabic discourse is still bound by a cultural enmity that refuses to let go of the traditional Arab narrative of the conflict, despite some gestures from time to time.

Hazzani, though critical of Israel, was able to present some positive aspects of Israeli society without being completely blinded by hatred.

The fact that even he could not present these facts without being bombarded shows that Arab society is nowhere close to accepting the legitimacy of, or peace with, Israel.

Yet there is some hope in the fact that Asharq al-Awsat had the courage to publish the article – albeit from its safe headquarters in London.

By Ariel Ben Solomon

www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?ID=302574&R=R1