By SHMULEY BOTEACH,Jerusalem Post
Obama's Big Adventure World Tour includes time for dictators
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.”
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.”
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?