Neg for Venezuela Practice Debate

---Israel/Cuba Lobby

Triggers intense opposition from both Israel and Cuba lobbies and their Congressional allies

Madsen, 11

Wayne Madsen, Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. Has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club., 6/20/11, http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/06/20/the-outsourcing-of-influence-peddling-to-the-israeli-lobby.html

The confluence of the Israel Lobby with pressure groups such as those that support the Saakashvili regime in Georgia is not an isolated situation. Before the rise to power of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Israel could rely on the support of successive Turkish governments. Turkey, in turn, established its own Washington-based lobbying group, the American Turkish Council, which was modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It was recently learned from Turkish government officials in Washington that the secret network of Turkish military officers, politicians, intelligence officers, professors, and journalists known as “Ergenekon,” which plotted a series of coups against independent-minded Turkish governments, was a construct of the CIA and Mossad. An in-depth investigation of the Ergenekon network conducted by the Turkish intelligence service discovered that many of the key players in Ergenekon were Dönme, the descendants of Turkish Jews who converted to Islam and, to varying degrees, now practice a combination of Kabbalah Judaism and Islamic Sufism while remaining secular and Turkish nationalist in the mold of Turkish state founder Kemal Ataturk. Similarly, the Israel Lobby has made common cause with the right-wing Cuban exile community in Florida, which has become as influential in the politics of south Florida as the many Jews and Israelis who live there. The convergence of interests of pro-Israelis and Cuban Gusano exiles can best be seen in the current chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who represents a congressional district in south Florida. Ros-Lehtinen, who is of Cuban Jewish descent, is one of AIPAC’s and the ADL’s best friends in Congress. She is also a vociferous opponent of the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua, both of which have severed diplomatic relations with Israel and have recognized the independence of Abkhazia, to the dismay of Israel, AIPAC, and the ADL. While Ros-Lehtinen rattles sabers against Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and other Latin American nations that have recognized Palestine within its 1967 borders, she supports continued U.S. military assistance to Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama, Israel’s last four remaining allies in Latin America. Ros-Lehtinen, while decrying alleged human rights “abuses” in Venezuela and Nicaragua, is silent on actual abuses in Colombia, where Israelis routinely supply weapons and advisers to the government in its inhumane war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), peasants, and labor unionists. The trial in New York of Russian air cargo services owner Viktor Bout for allegedly trying to sell weapons to the FARC is one outcome of the strategic alliance between Israel, its U.S. Lobby, and the right-wing Latin American exiles and intelligence operatives who call Miami their home. The conviction and imprisonment of former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, considered a major agent-of-influence for Israel in Russia and a one-time potential President of Russia, has placed Russia in the same category as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Abkhazia, Turkey, and other nations that have incurred the ire of the Israel Lobby either directly or via outsourcing deals made with strategic allies such as the Georgians, Cuban exiles, or, now, in the case of Turkey, the Armenians. In the past, AIPAC always ensured that “Armenian genocide” resolutions failed in the U.S. Congress, a payback for Turkey’s support for Israel. With Turkey adopting an independent foreign policy, AIPAC and the ADL are now strategically allied with the Armenian lobby to push for Armenian genocide resolutions in Washington and elsewhere.

---Israel Lobby (Extension)

Triggers Israel lobby and congressional backlash to economic involvement in venezuela

Cole, 12

Juan, Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, 1/11, http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/juan_cole_ahmadinejad_in_latin/
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has begun a four-nation tour in Latin America that will include Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador. In part, the trip is for propaganda purposes. With the European Union joining in an Israeli-inspired U.S. boycott of Iran’s Central Bank, which in essence translates into a boycott of buying Iranian petroleum, Tehran is desperate to underline that it still has friends in the world. Most of these are in Asia, but Latin America still does have regimes that will defy the U.S. attempt to isolate Iran. In one sense, these are not important countries geopolitically or economically. But an embargo strategy of the sort that the U.S. is pursuing depends heavily on there being no significant leaks. Venezuela has $4 billion worth of joint projects with Iran. (This article stresses a military dimension, with Revolutionary guards posted to the Iranian embassy in Caracas and a comparison to Soviet policies in Latin America, which led to the Cuban missile crisis. I see these Iranian moves more as an aid to espionage than being military in character.) Venezuela is also significant because in 2009 it established a joint bank with Iran, which allows Iranian financial institutions to interface with other banks via Caracas. Some in the Israel lobbies in the U.S. Congress have urged financial sanctions on Venezuela in order to close this loophole. But that step would make it difficult for the U.S. to pay for Venezuelan petroleum, a significant source of America’s oil imports. As it is, the U.S. Government won’t accept contracts from the Venezuela state petroleum company because the latter helps Iran with gasoline production. I doubt the U.S. government itself did much business with the company so it sounds to me like another symbolic sanction. I doubt Brasilia much likes the idea of a U.S.-Europe financial and energy boycott of a country of the global South. The U.S. just expelled the Venezuelan consul in Miami over a Univision investigative report alleging a Cuban-Venezuelan-Iranian plot to hack U.S. nuclear facilities. (Note to the Cuba and Israel lobbies: This story is not very plausible and you wouldn’t want one of its members to be in the U.S.—hackers can be anywhere and like anonymity.)

Jew Hating is explicit Venezuela policy – sparks lobby demands for isolation

Samuels, 10

Shimon Samuels is Director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which holds consultative status at the Organisation of American States and the Latin American Parliament, 3/25/10, http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/29926/analysis-in-venezuela-antisemitism-state-policy

A new report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has criticised the Venezuelan government for encroaching on the civil and political rights of its people, and particularly those of its Jewish community. The report expressed particular concern about the rising number of antisemitic incidents, and noted that the government-controlled media "contributed to creating an atmosphere of intimidation and violence against the Jewish community in Venezuela". This is cause for serious alarm. However, it is hardly surprising. Since Hugo Chavez took power, antisemitic expression has grown exponentially: in government media; in the dissemination of the Protocols of Zion; in the accusation that "Semitic banks" are sabotaging the economy; in the fact that the Caracas Jewish school was raided twice by armed forces "searching for Mossad-supplied arms caches"; in the desecration of two synagogues; and in the closing of the Israeli Embassy. The Venezuelan ambassador to Moscow even alleged that Jewish citizens implicated in a 2002 anti-Chavez coup were "Mossad agents". The origins of Mr Chavez's attitude can be traced to the influence wielded over him by his Argentine, pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying school companion, the late Norberto Ceresole, who - in his 1998 book on Mr Chavez's election victory - warned of the Venezuelan "Jewish mafia". In a 2004 Christmas Eve message, Mr Chavez claimed that "the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar and crucified him in their own way… took possession of the riches of the world. A minority appropriated the world's gold, the silver, the minerals, the water, the good lands, the oil and has concentrated the riches in a few hands…" Here he was mixing the motifs of the Jews as Christ-killers and of Marxism. The next year, Mr Chavez compared the Spanish conquest of the Indians to the situation of the Palestinians and, a year after that, tolerated the appearance of "Hizbollah Venezuela", an indigenous Wayuu Indian tribe that has embraced Shiah Islam and is essentially a jihadi transplant into the region. Much, too, has been made of the burgeoning Venezuela-Iran strategic alliance. This is primarily anti-American, but its antisemitic/anti-Zionist quotient is an added binding factor. A weekly Caracas-Tehran flight was inaugurated in November 2004 by Mr Chavez, who arrived in Iran at the very moment his Special Forces raided the Caracas Jewish School. Mr Chavez is undoubtedly obsessed with a world Jewish conspiracy represented by the less than 12,000 Jews remaining in Venezuela. They are becoming the scapegoat for his dysfunctional administration and the economic crisis that is engulfing a country blessed with oil, coffee and sugar. One third of the Jewish community has fled, fearing Soviet-style state antisemitism. Indeed, such a policy has all the appearances of having already begun. A pro-Chavez television show named Venezuelan Jewish leaders as anti-Venezuelan conspirators, and called on other Jews "not involved in the conspiracy" to publicly denounce their coreligionists. A Chavista newspaper editorial questioned whether "we will have to expel them from our country… as other nations have done." The Wiesenthal Centre's 2009 appeal to the Organisation of American States to conduct an enquiry into Venezuelan government–inspired antisemitism has resulted in its associated Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Report. Within this catalogue of Caracas's violations of fundamental rights, it unambiguously documents the government's incitement to Jew-hatred as a policy of state. For as long as this autocratic regime strategically endangers the Western hemisphere and targets the classic scapegoat, pro-democracy activists will surely lobby for its isolation from the international community.