October 15, 2007  Here is a superb update by the JOURNAL's Mary Anastasia O'Grady on the Chavez propaganda efforts to gain global approval for his faux ploys with FARC negotiations. You will recall that in the Clinton years, Bill Clinton agreed that negotiations with the FARC and their sister group the ELN would be held in.....Havana with full UN diplomatic courtesies extended to these happy FARC drug runners then called "diplomats." I called them FARC vacationers and money launderers abusing the UN and the USA while 1/2 of Colombia was under the FARC control. Matters should never return to this late 1990s silliness.
 
There is only one thing to do about the FARC.... they are to abandon their three nation [Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador] field of narco terror and crime, one way or the other. Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, and Peru must cancel all FARC participation, however large or small. Chavez does not in any way functionally encourage this reduction of the FARC and Chavez must be factually held accountable for his assistance to the FARC. Uribe's Colombian position is correct and warrants support not only from his neighbors but the global community since we are all weary of the wedge issues expounded by these thugs. The OAS has said nothing and done....even less on the narcotics issue and now the weapons running issues.
 
Personally, we believe the number of hostages tragically held by the FARC to be double- around 6,000 which we believe includes the unknowns....street children whose families long ago abandoned them who have been seized and are trained/warehoused inside Colombia's subterranean FARC camps. These are the new workers for their new hybrid poppy fields....small hands, free labor. The entire horror warrants a full review and we hold yet our position as insisting that this enslavement crime of kids be part of the FARC review. We have gotten none willing to circle on this story and wish that they would. Our sources are priests in the Andes who tell tales of the street children being snatched and forced in to FARC work camps. They are the "disappeareds" and a steady source of slave labor. We have no reason to assume this to be apocryphal. Nothing has dissuaded us from this tale. We do know that the young ones are trained in bizarre Marxist cults and forced in to FARC labor.

Hugo Chavez is currently forcing young Venezuelans in to cult like servitude to his "higher" aspirations too. Rafael Correa thinks this is a good idea. Other unemployeds or so called union activists are paid day wages to cruise around the Andes to encourage PR ploys in support of the FARC, supposedly demanding "human rights" for these criminals who will cut one's throat as soon as look at you. Someone has to manually work and milk their new heroin poppy fields. We believe that the UN, which encourages this silliness on negotiating with the FARC and must cease this too, has more than enough probable cause to demand full review on child slavery at the very least and shut these thugs down, if they but would. The church writ large has a huge role to play in all this if they but would. Forced child slavery is never acceptable and huge hostage numbers is a real problem too.
 
This whole week an American cable news station will be doing small TV segments on the new heroin trade, passing through the Southwest, foisted upon Americans....mostly little kids. We cannot say that this is an in depth reporting effort but from what was aired last night, it is commendable because it begins to open the door to expose the burgeoning heroin trade targeting little kids...grade school kids with craven advantages on the new victims. Last night's segments showed local, state and US DEA officials working toward prevention with local schools on this new, craven horror. We do not know what the Russian mafia is doing in LatAm with Afghan heroin, because Chavez holds himself above accountability and above the law and refuses even UN drug reporting, but we can only guess that much flies from Iran on Chavez's daily cargo flights from Iran [uninspected, unaccountable and as such...not known for what we do know: Chavez is moving weapons, cash and drugs around Latin America freely: air Iran is not a good thing at all] in to Caracas for transshipments through Mexico and in to fools in North America. Heroin is not marijuana and is not cocaine. Heroin is a guaranteed addiction and is a killer of many things. It does not belong in the "Western hemisphere."

Heroin does not belong in this hemisphere and its burgeoning trade must be stopped now. Heroin trade makes all other drug issues almost irrelevant for its primacy is so destructive...it alters any George Soros-funded cocktail party niceties about legalizing narcotics and strips the basics to a crude fundamental which is this: heroin is not to be allowed in this hemisphere. It is only here to cause harm and swift profit and must end.
 
The JOURNAL article states that Hugo Chavez is hardly an honest broker here. That is so. He has a pro FARC, pro crime agenda. Several pro drugs groups work in this approach also. The USA has many pro drugs, Soros-backed NGO groups and  DNC "decision makers" who are openly pressuring Uribe to negotiate some more with the FARC and are squeezing Uribe by threat of no free trade to soften up on the FARC. This is wrong thinking. None benefit from negotiating with narcoterrorists and none should abandon freedom loving allies like Colombia, as is currently underway. In fact, neither the FARC nor Chavez are accountable, reliable, honorable, honest or true to anything but self interests. Neither Chavez nor the FARC are supportable. To this we add the Soros and Chavez propaganda groups who are aiding the pro FARC, pro Chavez efforts. Chavez is crafting a whole new bank called Banco del Sur to wash their heroin monies through, with no functional banking norms.

He calls this a "development bank." Joe Stigletz was in Caracas last week, as we have already reported, praising Chavez's new bank. Stigletz, the darling of US AID ninnyhammers, also works for Soros and Chavez's ardent groups of activists, even while at Colombia University.  Stigletz is hardly an honest broker here either. Stigletz said he was also advising Chavez on global financial positions. We remind that Chavez only seeks to cause harm to free economies. U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has spent more time with the pro FARC and pro Chavez, do-drugs Soros groups and persons than she has with Uribe and the anti FARC leadership. It is past time for U.S. cabinet rank ONDCP's John Walters to have a strong talk with Pelosi and hold her publicly accountable for her publicly accountable efforts of her high office paid for with U.S. tax dollars for toying with the pro FARC activists..
 
Chavez needs to shut down his governmental support for the FARC and abandon manipulating the facts. The USA must do this also.

Support for any efforts to abet the FARC terrorists, even under the sleazy data war of pro drugs propaganda as is underway, is not a good thing. The Hillary Clinton political machine will have no strong position against the FARC inasmuch as her money backers do not permit this. The leading Republican candidates, esp. Thompson and Giuliani, have made some strong anti FARC positions known already. Because Rudy actually took lobbying payments from Chavez, we do not know where he will go with all this. But none should be fooled in to thinking that Hillary will ever stand up and denounce Soros: she is bought and paid for.
 
Worse yet....who among us stands up to the deplorable Chavez...who is NOT mi hermano, as seen in the AP photo of Chavez ingratiating himself to Cubans even as he becomes their new uber-meister: 


You will want to follow the tale of Iran's weapons shipments from Iran to Caracas and to Uruguay viz UN-Haitian "peacekeeper" missions ...read it AGAIN here.  Except for possibly the wobbly Peru and Chile, and certainly Mexico, most Central American nations [with the glaring exception of Ortega's Nicaragua and possibly soon Honduras],  and of course Colombia, not one Latin military is not overtly bribed by Chavez/Iran and no Latin government is immune from these Russo-Iranian-Venezuelan criminal rackets. Latins do not need a Russo-Iranian weapons build up from Chavez. Latin American also does not need what Insulza calls "the great Statesman"- Soros. Read a preliminary review from the AMERICAN THINKER below and ask your self why Soros has commandeered at least 1/3 of all U.S. Latin funds and a whole chunk of the US Department of State. Soros lies a lot. Hugo Chavez lies a lot. Rafael Correa lies a lot. Mahmoud lies a lot. Do we need to pay money to these liars and psychopaths as we do with Chavez and Rafael Correa? Do you know what Ecuador's badly bribed, ethically sold-out military [however once deserving of praise- but not any more] is planning with the Russo-Iranian-Venezuelan troika? Ask, listen, learn and act. Demand compliance of U.S. Resolution 1747.
 
- Pedro Camargo for ECrisis
------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal
     
October 15, 2007 
THE AMERICAS  
 
Dancing With Wolves
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
October 15, 2007; Page A22

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- aka Farc -- holds some 3,000 hostages. But only one of those kidnap victims is important enough to have provoked the Colombian government to release a captured Farc leader, in the hopes that the terrorist group might reciprocate by handing over this very high-profile captive.

Mr. Uribe welcomes a new Farc go-between.

Her name is Íngrid Betancourt, a Colombian-born, naturalized French citizen who has two French-born children. When she was a presidential candidate in Colombia in 2002, Ms. Betancourt went into the jungle to confront the Farc, against the advice of the government, the military and the police. The rebels grabbed her and she hasn't been seen since. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made her case a priority for his new government, and it was he who pressured Colombian President Álvaro Uribe in June to free Farc bigwig, Rodrigo Granda, as a good-faith gesture toward Ms. Betancourt's release.

Not surprisingly, the effort produced no humanitarian response from the Farc. Instead, it murdered 11 hostages later that month. Now Mr. Uribe has agreed to allow Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a Farc ally, to mediate negotiations with the guerrillas. The hope is that the talks might free Ms. Betancourt and nearly 50 other "political" hostages -- including former senators, a former governor, members of the military and police, and three Americans who were contractors for the State Department at the time of their capture.

Olive branches for terrorists are not something Mr. Uribe keeps in his quiver, and for good reason.

Appeasement in the past has only given the Farc the upper hand. When he became president in 2002, Mr. Uribe pledged to end negotiations and fight the Farc head on.

That's why his willingness to talk with the drug-running terrorists, with Mr. Chávez in the middle playing peacemaker, is so perplexing. One explanation is that the barrage of criticism from the Betancourt family, French activists, Democrats on Capitol Hill and political enemies at home has simply worn down Mr. Uribe. In other words, that Farc propaganda is beating him. But it is also possible that the Colombian president, fully aware of the dangers he faces in dancing with these wolves, believes the risks are worth taking.

Ms. Betancourt has become a cause célèbre in Paris. Her face is plastered all over town and the mayor has pledged to fight "unceasingly" for her release. With French diplomat Daniel Parfait married to Ms. Betancourt's sister, the national government is also involved. On his first day in office, Mr. Sarkozy met with Íngrid's daughter and later phoned Mr. Uribe to lobby for the release of Granda.

Colombian public opinion favors a deal to free these hostages, some of whom have been held for 10 years. Mr. Uribe and his policies remain popular, but the nation is sensitive, too, to the plight of the victims' families, who live tortured lives of worry about their loved ones.

Given these circumstances, Mr. Chávez's offer to act as a negotiator could have easily undermined Mr. Uribe at home and abroad. The Venezuelan probably expected to be turned down, leaving Mr. Uribe looking uncooperative. Instead, Bogotá took him up on the proposal.

Colombia says that whatever can be done to win freedom for the hostages is worth pursing, including an exchange of hostages for captured Farc terrorists. But not without conditions. Off the table is the guerrilla demand for the return of rebels Simon Trinidad and Nayibe "Sonia" Rojas. Both have been extradited to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges and Mr. Uribe says they cannot be considered part of any deal.

There are other conditions. First, in any talks the three Americans must be considered part of the group. A Colombian senator who visited Ms. Rojas in a Texas jail reported that the former Farc guerrilla says that she does not want to become an obstacle to the release of the Americans and that her conditions in prison are far better then theirs in Colombia.

Second, any Farc rebels released will have to agree to put down their weapons or go to a third country. This might not go down well with the Farc leadership, but if the past is any guide, it would not be an especially high hurdle to clear. Most of the prisoners Mr. Uribe has released during his time as president have happily abandoned narcotrafficking.

Third, Mr. Uribe insists that the government will not surrender any part of the country to the Farc. That was tried during the government of Andres Pastrana (1998-2002) as a way to work toward peace, but the guerrillas used their "safe haven" to store weapons, build bombs, train recruits, hold hostages and otherwise execute their war on the Colombian people.

Mr. Chávez can hardly be considered an honest broker here. But by putting the ball back in the Chávez court, Mr. Uribe may be the more clever negotiator. It is an open secret in Colombia that if Mr. Chávez wants to succeed, he can do so because he has the power to damage the Farc. The terrorists have camps in Venezuela, which is now their main trafficking route for cocaine, and they move in and out of the country to dodge Colombian forces. If Mr. Chávez fails, his credibility and image will be again damaged internationally.

On the other hand, if the negotiations succeed, Mr. Uribe will have shown that he is attentive to the suffering of the Colombian people and is not too proud to cooperate with his Venezuelan neighbor.

Not a bad strategy. But not one without risks, the highest being the possibility that the media, with the help of the Betancourt family, will continue to paint Mr. Uribe as the villain for not being ready to give in to the Farc's demands. Yet if that happens, he won't be much worse off than he has been for the past five years. And through it all, he has improved Colombian security like no president before him.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

  URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119240961259058764.html
 

_______
 
The American Thinker

October 15, 2007
Soros the Guiltless
By James Arlandson

One of the marks of traumatic stress is a constant feeling of guilt. Some of the rescue workers at Ground Zero on 9/11 still suffer from survivor guilt today. They constantly wonder, "Why did those people die? Why not me?"

Yet guilt is what makes civilized society possible; it's what keeps us from unleashing our most selfish impulses on each other. Not everybody is capable of feeling guilt. Psychopaths do not experience it. That is a defining feature of the disorder. That is why psychopaths  can do things that would haunt most of us forever. Think of O.J. Simpson, or a repeating child abuser who never shows remorse.

Some human beings flip guilt on its head, and turn it into rage against others. That may be true for Jimmy Carter and his NSC Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky, who are constantly blaming others for the fatal blunder of bringing the nuke-mad mullahs to power in Iran in 1979. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have died as a result, but neither Carter nor Brzezinsky has ever owned up to their responsibility. They don't seem to feel guilt about the looming threat of mullahs with nukes, but they are constantly pointing the finger at others.

Which brings me to George Soros, one of the top 100 richest people in the world. Mr. Soros is one of those odd hybrids, the socialist capitalist: He has made it very big indeed, but he doesn't want others getting rich in free markets. Instead, we are told, he wants "a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest." Such as his own $8.5 billion fortune, presumably, made partly on currency speculation.    

Soros is the moneybags behind Moveon.org and Media Matters, two Leftwing fronts that constantly try to drop Black PR bombs in the media, always trying to smear the democratic Right. But they are so rage-driven, so far beyond the pale, that they risk triggering a backlash. Moveon couldn't resist smearing one of the most admirable people in America, General David Petraeus, as "General Betray-Us," in the pages of the New York Times. Media Matters tried to get away with smearing the biggest patriotic voice in the country, Rush Limbaugh.

Moveon and M-M are slander squads funded by György Schwartz, later known as György Soros (with two sh-sounds), and later George Soros, US citizen.  In his autobiograpy, modestly entitled Soros on Soros,  he described how as a teenager he helped to cart off the stolen possessions of Hungarian Jewish men, women and children after they were rounded up and transported to death camps. He claims it never bothered him a bit, and still doesn't bother him today.  He has no personal regrets about his actions. Somebody would have done it.

Normal people are haunted by harsh self-criticism after such morally toxic situations, even if they were helpless at the time. But Mr. Soros is blessedly free from any qualms, as he tells us.

From a 60 Minutes interview with Soros on December 20, 1998: 

KROFT: (You) went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

Mr. SOROS: Not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't see the connection. But it created no problem at all.
(Note: Mr. Soros was not a child in 1944. Teenagers are well aware of moral rules.)

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

Mr. SOROS: No.

KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?

Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was --- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets, that if I weren't there, of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would  be taking it away anyhow. And whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt."
George Soros absolves himself constantly. He calls himself a "spectator" when he was an active collaborator. His only reply is that, well, he could have been "on the other side" --- a victim rather than a perp. His is an instrumental morality.

Now we don't know exactly what happened sixty years ago in the life of György Schwartz during the Nazi Holocaust. According to Robert Slater, "George Soros later said that he ‘grew up in a Jewish, anti-semitic home,' and that his parents were ‘uncomfortable with their religious roots.'"   We don't know if his parents' anti-semitism influenced his willingness to cart off the property of his Jewish neighbors. But by 1944, Hitler's plans for the Jews could not be denied. Soros himself escaped persecution by being adopted as a Christian. He must have known what he was doing therefore, even as a teenager. Two years later, when Auschwitz and the other death camps made headlines all over the Western world, not even the young Soros could have denied his role in what happened. But George Soros felt free of guilt.

Soros' parents were internationalists, promoting the worldwide spread of a single language, Esperanto. Chances are they were anti-Nazi, but also anti-American. Little György grew up speaking Esperanto, the language of the Socialist Paradise to Come.   But reality intervened, and Soros became a highly successful capitalist, in some pretty dubious ways. For instance, Soros has been blamed for crashing the national currency of Malaysia in 1997. He is still hated for that by Mahathir Mohammed, the former prime minister of that country, who has emerged as a major international voice of Islamic anti-Semitism. Soros claims that somebody would have profited from speculating in Malaysian currency. He may be right. But many of us might not want to be anywhere near the crashing currency of a poor country, even if somebody else would do it anyway. We would feel ashamed to profit from disaster.  

According to Wikipedia,

"Soros is famously known for ‘breaking the Bank of England' on Black Wednesday in 1992. On Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), Soros became immediately famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency. ... He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England. ...  Soros first traded currencies during the Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945-1946."

In 2002 a French court ruled that Soros was guilty of insider trading, and fined him $2 million. Who knows? He might be innocent. But there is a repeated pattern of manipulative and destructive actions in Mr. Soros' life.

According to Byron Rork of the National Review, "the (Soros) Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart." Stewart is the "activist" lawyer who secretly passed messages for the "blind sheik" and his fellow Muslim terrorists convicted of trying to truck bomb the World Trade Towers in 1993.

Soros funded support for democracy movements in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union, but he also supported marijuana legalization in California and elsewhere, which is irresponsible, to say the least. Marijuana has been credibly linked to psychotic breaks and other mental disorders in adolescence. Marijuana smoke contains some of the same carcinogens as tobacco smoke, although no causal link has been established as yet. Proving such a link takes years and hindreds of millions of dollars.

Why would any responsible person pay for a campaign that will end up making highly potent marijuana more available to vulnerable people? If booze harms millions of alcoholics, why double the risk by legalizing yet another powerful brain drug?

Soros was also a major backer of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002, supposedly "to get money out of politics" --- whereupon he immediately funded Leftist front groups using loopholes in the same law. It was other people's money he didn't want in politics. Politicians are now collecting just as much money as before, and from some very dubious sources. (See Norman Hsu.)

In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death." He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush, "if someone guaranteed it." Soros later claimed he was joking. But he has written articles such as "The Capitalist Threat" in the Atlantic Monthly, and funded something called "Democracy Alliance: In Search Of A Permanent Democratic Majority."  It seems he wasn't joking after all.

He looks like he wants total power for the Left. And now we find Mr. Soros backing aggressive Leftist smear groups in America. 

Mr. Soros also blames Israel for the fate of the Palestinian Arabs sixty years ago. Israel was founded as a place of refuge for millions of Jews from places like Hungary, the same people Soros helped to dispossess as a teenager. As he said in his 60 Minutes interview, his Holocaust experience "helped to shape his character"  --- a double-edged comment if ever there was one.

Mr. Soros fancies himself to be a philosopher, like so many educated middle-Europeans. Well, Adam Smith was professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh; we know him as the first economist to clearly state the benefits of free trade. But Adam Smith always emphasized the importance of having a clear moral compass. Capitalism in the raw is not the same as capitalism constrained by morality and law. Soros seems to think of capitalism as a kind of piracy, and personal morality does not seem to play a conspicuous role in his life. Instead, he seems to like to be the supreme manipulator.

It makes an interesting psychological profile, doesn't it? On the one side, calm denial about his Holocaust role in Hungary, and decades later, about his part in manipulating currencies from Britain to Asia, benefiting himself but impoverishing others. On the other hand, his funding of very aggressive political mudslinging teams in the United States, openly trying to bring down a twice-elected president of the United States. Add to that his animosity toward Israel, a home for Jewish refugees from the same European Holocaust that saw him collaborating with the Nazis.

We live in a time of steady public decline in civilized values. The Left shamelessly peddles the idea that real patriotism means leaking national security secrets when our soldiers are risking their lives in combat. The national media have become so vulgarized that scapegoating GOP presidents has become the open aim of the "profession" of journalism. Opportunistic demagogues like Al Gore jump on the phony Global Warming bandwagon, and are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, thus raising his public image while debasing the Nobel Prize.

We have seen immense vulgarization in one generation, a loss of simple decency in public life. Much of that decline has been deliberately pushed by the Left and the tabloid press, which is no longer separate from the "mainstream" press. Sociopathy is flying high.

Now long-distance diagnosis is not usually a good idea, but Mr. Soros has given us a lot of personal facts to ponder. His is not the profile of a kind man. It is the mind of a narcissist, free of the pangs of conscience, yet haunted by a need to destroy the reputations of decent people for having a different point of view.    

 

Soros shows us the sense of infinite superiority of the European Left, always managing to explain away millions of victims, as long as they die somewhere out of sight. But George Soros is not a man at peace with himself, nor with a civilized life that is governed by a sense of responsibility and self-restraint. In his manipulative assaults on the Bush Administration, in peddling the legalization of harmful drugs, in pushing for "campaign reform" and then immediately driving a monster truck through the legal loopholes, George Soros may be trying to chase off his inner demons.

He fits perfectly in the company of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, of Hillary and Harry Reid, and all the self-loving, destructive narcissists of the Left.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/10/soros_the_guiltless.html