Populism – Dazed by idolatry

As the carnage in Gaza escalated in January, about the most popular foreign leader in the region was the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. We might be able to understand the Arab delight when Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador from his country (as later did his Bolivian counterpart, Juan Evo Morales), but less understandable was why so many Arabs ignored that Chavez is a populist autocrat who not long ago tried to change his country’s constitution to extend his mandate. The question might seem disingenuous. The obvious answer is that Arabs don’t much care about what Chavez does at home, as long as he stands as a symbol for those issues the peoples of the Middle East consider important: uneasiness with Western capitalism, suspicion of globalization, hostility toward the United States and Israel, and a taste for radical behavior, or at least what can be sold as such abroad. Fair enough.