thor halvorssen bak

619 bak<div>some new</div><div>=</div><div>=<div><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/using-human-rights-for-right-wing-politics/#">https://truthout.org/articles/using-human-rights-for-right-wing-politics/#</a></div><div>
</div><div>The Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) convened again this summer. For the fifth consecutive year, organizers brought together “hundreds of the world’s most influential dissidents, innovators, journalists, philanthropists and policymakers” to discuss authoritarianism in their home countries. The founders call the event a “Davos of human rights.”Many of the invited activists deserve praise and an international platform, but disturbing facts about the OFF have been revealed. This forces us to ask if this is an attempt to use human rights to advance a narrow political agenda. The story of the Oslo Freedom Forum is also a story of US right-wing sponsorship, lack of transparency and “heroes of human rights” involved in supporting serious human rights violations.From the very beginning in 2009 until this year, OFF officials and its founder, Thor Halvorssen, have invited speakers who have supported gross violations of human rights or committed such themselves. A media scandal broke in 2010 as busloads of Norwegian school kids were shipped in to hail people they had been told were “heroes of human rights” and “voices of freedom.” It turned out that three of the speakers had recently participated in or actively promoted military coups against democratically-elected governments in Latin America. One of them, Leopoldo López, <a href="https://vimeo.com/11150995" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">was a key figure</a> in the internationally condemned right-wing military coup against Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez in 2002. López demanded the ousting of all elected authorities. Followed by his own armed police force, he broke into the apartment where the minister of interior and justice was hiding and had him handcuffed and dragged out to a waiting mob that beat, kicked and spit at him before he was finally arrested. This was described by Amnesty International as one of the most serious human rights violations, among many, perpetrated during the short-lived coup d’état. López is Thor Halvorssen’s cousin.Halvorssen’s relative was accompanied to the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum by fellow coup maker Marcel Granier. He was the general director of RCTV, the most watched TV channel in Halvorssen’s native Venezuela. In 2002, Granier and RCTV were supportive of the coup. They also manipulated footage and bluntly lied to their own viewers about the events during the coup to ensure the ouster of Chávez, as shown in the Irish documentary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id%E2%80%94ZFtjR5c" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">The Revolution will not be Televised</a>. Before Chávez’s allies got the president back in power, RCTV and other private TV stations were warmly thanked by the leaders of the coup, saying that they could never have succeeded had it not been for RCTV and the rest of the private media. Granier and López were dubbed “voice of freedom” and “hero of human rights,” respectively.Another “voice of freedom,” the one-time Cuban prisoner Armando Valladares, [resigned 2009?]was one of the most vocal supporters of the military overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, for which he received the highest medal of honor from the illegal Honduran coup government.Valladares and López were presented as “heroes of human rights” and “voices of freedom” at the OFF two years in a row.In 2011, a figure from Argentina’s far-right, Victoria Villarruel, was invited to speak about “the forgotten victims of terror.” According to respected Latin America experts Benedicte Bull and Johannes Nymark, Villarruel is trying to rewrite the history of Argentina’s military dictatorship, which killed about 10 times as many dissidents as Chile’s Pinochet, and defend the military that committed the atrocities. With this in mind, it might not come as a surprise that the only Venezuelan speaker at this year’s Forum, Julio Borges, not only supported the 2002 coup, but also demanded that the democratic institutions be dissolved and the elected representatives be relieved of their duties.In its original mission statement, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), the organizer of OFF, proclaimed that it was founded to “to unite people – regardless of their political, cultural, and ideological orientations – in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy in the Americas.” One might argue that violently overthrowing democratically-elected governments is not a human right. And that supporting right-wing coups and regimes that have subjected a continent of 600 million inhabitants to violence, poverty and injustice for decades does not make you a “voice of freedom.” The organizers of the OFF, however, have refused all invitations to debate such criticism in the Norwegian broadcast media.Most of the criticism has come on the basis of the Latin American guests, but other speakers have also expressed opinions incompatible with human rights. American columnist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kirchick" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">James Kirchick</a> supported the military coup in Honduras; he has defended the torture of Guantánamo prisoners; and he marked the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion by saluting the decision to go to war in the first place.Peter Thiel, a billionaire hedge fund manager, a personal friend of Thor Halvorssen and a donor to OFF, was a speaker at the 2011 forum. Little did the audience know of Thiel’s personal ties with Halvorssen and the fact that he helped fund the Forum. I believe it’s safe to assume that the vast majority did not have knowledge of Thiel’s views on democracy either. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” The Electronic Intifada quotes him writing in his manifest. He is also concerned that extensions of women’s rights “have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”Thor Halvorssen himself is no stranger to opinions rather peculiar for a man in his position. He surprised many by approving the conspiracy theory that Russian president Vladimir Putin might be the mastermind behind the April Boston bombing. He has denounced the peace talks in Colombia between the government and the FARC guerrilla group, aligning himself with Colombia’s far right.There has been considerable controversy regarding the lack of transparency surrounding the OFF’s funding. Halvorssen has refused to give details. Max Blumenthal of The Electronic Intifada did a thorough investigation of the Human Rights Foundation. Halvorssen is the creator and director of the HRF, based in New York. While the HRF has attracted little attention, a few journalists and activists have noticed that the Foundation’s <a href="http://thehrf.org/HRFDonorList.pdf" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">funding sources</a> seem to come mostly from the right wing. These have included the conservative Sarah Scaife and Lynde and Harry Bradley foundations. Other funders that include the libertarian Atlas Economic Research Foundation; the National Christian Foundation, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/12/rendering-unto-god" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">a major bankroller</a> of US evangelical groups and conservative causes; and the right-wing <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Randolph_Foundation" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Randolph Foundation</a> and <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Shelby_Cullom_Davis_Foundation" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation</a>.Blumenthal has uncovered another source of the HRF’s funding. The HRF’s filings with the Internal Revenue Service, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Blumenthal writes</a>, “show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.” Donors Capital has been a major funder of Islamophobic groups and projects, including some that Norwegian white supremacist terrorist Anders Breivik has cited as inspiring his beliefs.So why did Halvorssen choose to support the Human Rights Foundation and other causes through Donors Capital Fund, which is tainted by its reputation as a pass-through for anonymous donors to give enormous sums to Islamophobic and anti-gay causes?Halvorssen would have us believe it is a mere coincidence that all of the HRF’s known donors are right wing and that he uses the conservative Donors Trust to contribute to his organization.Knowing these groups find HRF a worthy receiver of such favors, can we take his word that he is just an open-minded liberal who spends millions of dollars on human rights conferences without any political agenda? And why did he choose to hide this information from both the public and the invited speakers while establishing the Oslo Freedom Forum?Halvorssen began his career as a conservative student activist, perceiving conservative students such as himself as sort of a persecuted minority. He would later follow up on these ideas by producing the film Indoctrinate U, which targets feminist academics and other oppressive tyrants. He also took on the environmentalist movement, with a pro-mining movie, Mine Your Own Business, which The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19stra.html?pagewanted=all&r=0" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">New York Times dubbed</a>, “the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary,” sponsored by a powerful Canadian mining company, heavily criticized for using large amounts of cyanide to extract gold.Even more revealing are some of the HRF’s past staff and associates. Aleksander Boyd, previously <a href="http://www.thehrf.org/media/092408.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">HRF’s vice president of programs</a>, is a right-wing blogger <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/01/friendsinlowplaces" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">notorious for his writing</a> describing his fantasies of torturing pro-Chavez Venezuelans. “I wish I could decapitate [. . .] Diosdado Cabello [now the president of Venezuelas National Assembly],” and “I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel,” are some of his passages. The HRF and Boyd parted ways in 2009. Many Latin Americans, however, would not feel comfortable with an organization whose then-vice president of programs openly promoted the same kind of torture and assassination that Latin American right-wing dictatorships carried out against hundreds of thousands of leftists, trade unionists, journalists and indigenous people.At this point I’m sure no one will be flabbergasted that in this year’s OFF, with the exception of a Bahraini blogger, none of the listed speakers were there to highlight abuses in countries that are strong US allies or violations by the US government. Previous incarnations were little different. Of all the North American speakers <a href="http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/speakers.html#1" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">listed on the Forum’s website</a>, for example, none was there to primarily address the role of the US government as a human rights violator. (Julian Assange’s participation in 2010 is a notable exception, but this was before Wikileaks’ release of the State Department cables that provoked US ire.)The purported liberal views of Thor Halvorssen are at best highly doubtful, and accusations that he uses the platform he himself built to invite friends, family and ideological allies from the far right is serious. But that is far from the most pressing issue. The fact that Oslo Freedom Forum abuses the name of human rights to whitewash human rights offenders, their supporters and apologists is far worse. However, looking at the track record of these people, there should be no doubt that they were invited exactly because of their political affiliation.</div><div></div></div><div></div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/venezuela-just-threw-my-cousin-in-jail">https://www.thedailybeast.com/venezuela-just-threw-my-cousin-in-jail</a></div><div>daily beast</div><div>
</div><div><div>Venezuela Just Threw My Cousin in Jail</div><div>Leopoldo López is a prisoner of conscience—and also a threat to leftist autocrat Nicolas Maduro.</div><div>
</div><div>by Thor Halvorssen</div><div>Updated 04.14.17 9:31AM ET / Published 09.23.15 1:00AM ET </div><div>
</div><div>“They’re either going to have to kill me or imprison me because I’m not leaving and I’m not giving up.” That’s what Leopoldo López, Venezuela’s most prominent opposition leader, told me in his Caracas home after the policeman assigned to protect him, Carlos Mendoza, was shot at 12 times and killed as he waited for López in his SUV in what was a failed assassination attempt against the latter.</div><div>
</div><div>Ten years on from that conversation López has survived several attempts on his life—the Venezuelan government has typically claimed they are botched robberies. He is now in prison and last Friday was declared Amnesty International’s first official Prisoner of Conscience from Venezuela in living memory. But what the media covering López’s sham trial and sentencing have failed to appreciate is that the government’s objective is to extinguish López’s life force.</div><div>
</div><div>Leopoldo is my first cousin (he is the only son of my mother’s only sister). He was sentenced last week to the maximum sentence possible for allegedly having engaged in arson and incitement to violence. López was railroaded. According to a credible Venezuelan polling firm, López leads in Venezuelan electoral polls by 43.8 percent in a one-to-one matchup against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the successor to, and disciple of, the deceased socialist strongman Hugo Chavez.</div><div>
</div><div>Maduro is terrified of an electoral contest where Venezuela’s poor overwhelmingly vote to elect as president a man who rejects the kleptocracy and its hateful revolution. López is in prison precisely and only because he is among the few opposition leaders with an unwavering commitment to consistently denouncing the government as what it is: a dictatorship that must come to an end.</div><div>
</div><div>The prison sentence was very clear to underline that López is disqualified from running for election. If you add this new disqualification to Chavez’s previous order to bar Leopoldo (in 2005), he has been disqualified from electoral office for a total of 23 years and 9 months.</div><div>
</div><div>The government has so far failed to drive López into exile despite several sub rosa approaches including a scenario where López “escapes” from prison and is allowed to exit the country unharmed. Maduro has also tried to force him out of the country in an “exchange” whereby President Obama frees a Puerto Rican separatist in order to secure López’s freedom. López would have none of it.</div><div>
</div><div>After his recent sentencing, López was defiant and he managed to hand-write a message to his supporters promising that he will “never tire” in his struggle for a free Venezuela. The stubborn refusal of López to give up has now pushed the Venezuelan government to severe measures with regard to his confinement. The objectives of the Maduro government, now that López is sentenced to almost 14 years in prison, are revealed by the conditions of his incarceration.</div><div>
</div><div>Most egregiously, López has been forbidden to see a medical doctor since the day of his arrest 18 months ago. Despite dozens of requests by my aunt and my cousins, no blood tests have been permitted, let alone a urine test to determine if López is affected by an infection or imbalance. Leopoldo was a mountain climber and triathlete prior to his arrest, but nobody knows what physical ailment he could be suffering from at present—at 44, he is no spring chicken.</div><div>
</div><div>Viktor Yushchenko, the former Ukrainian president and leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution, sent a public letter to López in prison, expressing his admiration and support, which was echoed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (PDF), UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (PDF), UN Committee Against Torture (PDF), 33 former Ibero-American presidents and prime ministers (PDF), the European Parliament (PDF), Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and many more. Yushchenko subsequently contacted me with urgency to warn me about the possibility that López might be poisoned while in prison. Yushchenko, who was famously the target of a Russian assassination plot using dioxin, explained to me that there are multiple ways the Venezuelan regime could slowly destroy López’s physical integrity. It’s not like the Venezuelan government doesn’t have Putin’s unquestionable support. Equally problematically, Cuba’s police state (which supervises Venezuela’s security services) has perfected the art of breaking political prisoners so that, once released, they are a shadow of their former selves.</div><div>
</div><div>Beyond the worry over Leopoldo’s physical integrity there is the urgent concern about the government’s obvious plan to destroy his mental health. In violation of international treaties on the treatment of prisoners, Leopoldo is held in Ramo Verde military prison where there are two buildings—Annex A and Annex B. In Annex A there are 179 prisoners in several dozen cells. In Annex B, a four-story building with dozens of cells, there is only one prisoner: Leopoldo. He is held in a 6-foot by 6-foot holding cell containing only a bed. There is no chair in his cell. He is allowed only one book, the Holy Bible, whereas prior to the sentencing he had a library of more than 100 books. Leopoldo is not allowed any paper, no pencils, no notebooks. He is not allowed to study. A practicing Catholic, Leopoldo has been refused access to a priest for 18 months and only on three occasions has he been allowed to attend Catholic Mass.</div><div>
</div><div>In theory, solitary confinement is reserved for either prisoners who have disciplinary problems or prisoners who are extremely dangerous. In the eyes of Maduro, López lacks discipline inasmuch as he refuses to bend to the will of the revolutionary government. But López has only engaged in peaceful protests and his focus is nonviolent action and his crime is to think differently. Solitary confinement for Lopez is an egregious violation of his human rights and is aimed at destroying his mental health.</div><div>
</div><div>The isolation of being in an empty building, with no contact (not even with prison guards—Lopez is watched by 12 cameras in Annex B), nothing to read, nothing to write with, and the impossibility of having any meaningful interaction is under every conceivable psychological metric considered torture—cruel and inhuman treatment (PDF). Lights are turned off at 7:30 p.m. and Lopez isn’t even permitted a candle. He must bear the darkness until daybreak. Without reading material or human contact the brain atrophies. Without conversation the mind decays. Isolation leads to anxiety, depression, anger, hopelessness, and psychosis.</div><div>
</div><div>Nelson Mandela’s autobiography details his opinion of such conditions: “I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There was no end and no beginning; there is only one’s own mind, which can begin to play tricks… I had nothing to read, nothing to write on or with, no one to talk to. The mind begins to turn in on itself, and one desperately wants something outside oneself on which to fix one’s attention.” Another Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo, is in solitary confinement in China, where his wife, Liu Xia, has suffered terribly herself isolated under house arrest.</div><div>
</div><div>Millions of people hope that Leopoldo, who stands as an immovable oak against the winds of Venezuela’s tyranny, will survive the harsh conditions of his imprisonment in what remains of Maduro’s presidency. The alternative, that Leopoldo’s brilliant, courageous mind will decay, is a frightening prospect and underlines the need to urgently protest his false conviction and imprisonment.</div><div>
</div><div>Thor Halvorssen is president and CEO of Human Rights Foundation and founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum.</div><div>
</div></div><div></div><div> 2015</div><div>ken silverstein</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://shadowproof.com/2015/09/28/meet-thor-halvorssen-neocon-scam-artist-who-heads-bogus-human-rights-foundation/">https://shadowproof.com/2015/09/28/meet-thor-halvorssen-neocon-scam-artist-who-heads-bogus-human-rights-foundation/</a></div><div>
</div><div>[Note: This story was posted earlier today at Byline.com, but was pulled after Thor Halvorssen complained — thank you, Thor! — through his attorney. Caving to a degenerate sociopath will only embolden him, so I am disappointed that Byline.com pulled the story.  Byline.com does not pay me, I raise money from my readers at its site. You can learn more about me and support my work by clicking on <a href="https://www.byline.com/journalist/kensilverstein/biography" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">this link</a>.]</div><article class="post-191966 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-community category-community-highlights category-dissenter-featured-dissenter category-top-posts category-dissenter tag-human-rights tag-human-rights-foundation tag-neoconservativism tag-oslo-freedom-forum tag-thor-halvorssen" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 50px;"><div class="vw-post-content clearfix" style="box-sizing: border-box; overflow-wrap: break-word;">With backing from his filthy rich, right-wing Venezuelan family and help from a credulous American press corps, <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/04/26/nyheter/menneskerettigheter/fred/konferanse/utenriks/11438366/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">Thor Halvorssen</a> has become one of the best-known human rights advocates in the United States and internationally. The New York Times has said he “champions the underdog and the powerless” while Buzzfeed raves that he “possesses a burning desire to right the countless injustices of this world … and he does not care if those injustices are being committed by the ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ regimes.”In his spare time, the gallivanting Halvorssen runs the Oslo Freedom Forum, which he describes on his LinkedIn page as the “TED of freedom fighting.” (Presumably that is meant to be a good thing, though personally I’d rather watch paint dry on a horse’s ass then attend a TED event, though I deeply regret missing Sarah Silverman’s talk.) He also heads something called the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), which suggests Halvorssen has artistic talent.It’s quite a dashing reputation, but it’s all a myth. “Thor’s only interest is in self-hagiography,” one source said of Halvorrsen. “He’s a joke.”This principled champion of the downtrodden lives a life of extreme luxury and people who know him well described him to me as a “slippery little prick,” a “sociopath” and a “freak.” Halvorssen is said to take Human Growth Hormone supplements and has <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/is-this-the-face-of-a-new-global-human-rights-movement#.eregxXQQXa" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">paid in advance to have his body cryogenically frozen</a>.A regular on cable news shows, Halvorssen has residences in multiple American states, including a lavish apartment in midtown Manhattan and a palatial estate in Hollywood. Meanwhile, he trots the globe making passionate but empty pronouncements on human rights. Just last week his group, the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, issued a <a href="http://perseus-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/WPS-Report.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">report</a>, “A Call to Action on the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda.” (Which is precisely as boring and pointless as it sounds, based on skimming the first paragraph.)In regard to his moviemaking, Halvorssen, according to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1812816/bio?ref=nm_ov_bio_sm" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">this IMDb profile</a>, is a producer and actor “known” for films such as “The Singing Revolution” and “Hammer & Tickle.” But he has no artistic vision or smarts. One person in the movie industry told me that the MPI’s modus operandi was to take money from filmmakers to promote their work, but a quid pro quo was that Halvorssen be given a producer’s credit, which is a hugely valuable commodity in Hollywood.That’s a massive conflict-of-interest: Halvorssen could (and did) take money to promote bad movies and would refuse to promote good movies if the filmmakers wouldn’t buy him off with a producer’s credit. “Halvorssen uses the MPI to glorify himself and to get rich,” this person said. “If you refuse to go along he turns nasty and vindictive.”In regard to his human rights advocacy, Halvorssen is a right-wing troglodyte who generally attacks official “enemies” of the United States, or comes up with moronic campaigns — like <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thor-halvorssen/an-open-letter-to-urban-o_b_1895353.html" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">denouncing</a> Urban Outfitters for selling T-shirts with the image of Che Guevera. (Urban Outfitters caved; please visit <a href="http://www.thechestore.com/" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">thechestore.com</a>.) For example, he opposes the North Korean dictatorship — now that takes courage!!!! — by floating balloons filled with America propaganda into the country, which does absolutely zero to promote democracy in Pyongyang <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/activists-consider-suspending-the-interview-balloon-launch-into-north-korea/2607144.html" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">but gets Halvorssen into the Voice of America</a>. (For more on his fraudulent North Korea work, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/modern-warfare-korea-the-weaponization-of-human-rights/" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">see this CounterPunch </a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/modern-warfare-korea-the-weaponization-of-human-rights/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">article</a>.)All this makes Halvorssen a useful tool and idiot of the U.S. government. During the Bush years the State Department lobbied hard (but unsuccessfully) to get consultative status for his human rights group at the United Nations, according to this Wikileaked cable.Halvorssen is extremely shady about who funds his work but much of it comes from right-wing foundations. He also gets cash from his family, which is part of the rancid old oligarchy that ran Venezuela until the now deceased Hugo Chávez was democratically elected in 1999 and put an end to centuries of Spanish colonialism and white-dominated misrule. (Incidentally Halvorssen’s true last name is Halvorssen Mendoza but he is so Euro-identified that he <a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/about/board-and-international-council/thor-halvorssen" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">doesn’t even use the latter on his group’s website</a>, apparently so he can try to pass for Norwegian.)While he raises much of his money from his right-wing fellow travelers, he also preys on the vanity of dimwitted liberal billionaires in Silicon Valley, like Google founder and Obama supporter Sergey Brin. Meanwhile, he tries to hide his financial tracks — and reduce his taxes — by setting up shell companies to run businesses that can’t be traced to him, a well-placed source told me. At least one of his shell companies is registered in Florida.I’m told that for years Halvorssen was a business partner with Charles Johnson — who the Washington Post has called one of the most famous trolls in the history of the Internet — in an opposition research company. Earlier this year Johnson, an eccentric libertarian provocateur, was permanently suspended from Twitter after trying to raise money to “take out” a civil rights activist named DeRay McKesson. Johnson declined comment for this story.One of Halvorssen’s alleged specialties is falsely editing Wikipedia pages and inserting bogus charges to smear his clients’ enemies. And on top of all this, multiple sources have told me that <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/04/26/nyheter/menneskerettigheter/fred/konferanse/utenriks/11438366/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">Halvorssen</a> has been repeatedly trashed on drugs at human rights and other political events, and that he publicly brags about having sex with teenagers. (Let me emphasize, Halvorssen declined comment about these and almost all other charges made in this story.)Before going further let me happily confess that I have loved Hugo Chávez since 1993, when I traveled to Venezuela after he had been imprisoned following an unsuccessful coup d’etat the previous year. Everyone should listen to the amazing speech he gave after the coup failed, in which he took responsibility for the uprising and said that he was calling off the overthrow of the government “for now.” And to anyone dumb enough to trust American media coverage of Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, you are a serious idiot.Halvorssen is especially dishonest and delusional when it comes to Venezuela. He, not coincidentally, is a direct descendant of the country’s first president, Cristóbal Mendoza, and his family is one of the most powerful in Venezuela. The clan has historical interests that include construction, paper mills, banking and insurance.His father, Thor Halvorssen Hellum, was also a one-time CIA informant and served under Carlos Andres Perez, who was impeached for corruption. But Perez is best known for ordering in 1989 the murder of hundreds if not thousands of people who <a href="http://hiaw.org/defcon2/lam/redstarven1989.html" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">protested a sharp hike in bus fares and other neoliberal austerity measures</a> prescribed by the best and the whitest in the U.S. government and the International Monetary Fund.Halvorssen portrays his parents as “freedom fighters,” especially his now dead father, but it’s hard to trust anything he says because he is so fundamentally dishonest. It reminds me of <a href="http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/2008/08/uncivil-wars-lillian-hellman-vs-mary.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">what Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman</a>, “[E]very word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” And anyone who served under the murderous, thieving Perez, in whatever capacity, is no freedom fighter.Thor Jr.’s story is that Thor Sr. was heroically battling the Medellin Cartel. I have my doubts. (Also, apropos of cocaine trafficking, the Netflix series “Narcos” is entertaining, but it’s American propaganda and by the end of the first episode I was rooting enthusiastically for Pablo Escobar vs. the DEA.) In any case, by the time he turned thirty-four Thor Sr. was already at “the helm of telephone giant CANTV,” which was “considered one of the most prestigious political appointment in the country’s economic sector,” <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/obituaries/article1976519.html#storylink=cpy" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">according to this article</a>, and that would make him, by definition, a propaganda specialist.According to his LinkedIn profile, Halvorssen attended the <a href="http://www.bryanston.co.uk/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">Bryanston School</a>, a British prep school. He then — again, according to his LinkedIn profile — got both his B.A. and Masters at the University of Pennsylvania between 1993 and 1997, an impressive feat in the unlikely event that it’s true.Halvorssen launched the <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/company/344244?trk=ppro_cprof" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">Human Rights Foundation</a> in 2005, with the stated goal of ensuring “that freedom is both preserved and promoted.” The group, which has an address at the Empire State Building, took in about $5 million combined in 2012 and 2013, according to this <a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/uploads/HRF_Financial_Stmt_YE_12-31-13.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">non-profit filing</a> to the IRS. The filing also shows that the group invests in financial derivatives, though it doesn’t say how much.Halvorssen gets paid about $90,000, which is pretty modest though it’s not like he needs the money. And, also according to the filing, an undisclosed share of his business and residential rent is partly covered by the Human Rights Foundation.So who’s paying for Halvorssen’s sweet life? “In the spirit of transparency, we choose to <a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/uploads/HRF_Donor_List_Accurate_to_2015.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">publish the names</a> of our donors,” says the group’s website. “However, we respect any request from donors who wish to remain private and we do not publish those names.”But there’s nothing transparent about this funding. The <a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/uploads/HRF_Donor_List_Accurate_to_2015.pdf" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">list provided on the website</a> is alphabetized by the first name of the donor, which makes it difficult to figure out, and there are no amounts listed by individual donors’ names. So, for example, there’s no way to know how much Halvorssen donates from his own pocket or how much comes from the Harry Halvorssen Fund or from the Foundation for Democracy in Russia or, to take one more example, from the Thiel Foundation.Peter Thiel, who at one point was an intimate companion of Halvorssen’s, controls the latter. He’s also a hedge fund manager and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, which, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals-uses-specific-functions-and-key-clients/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">according to this article</a>, “has created a data mining system used extensively by law enforcement agencies and security companies.” There is also a single listing for “Anonymous,” which means the Human Rights Foundation might have one secret donor or it might have one hundred, there’s simply no way of knowing.  (Note: This article by Max Blumenthal reveals that the Human Rights Foundation has also taken huge sums of money from many right-wing foundations.)Several months back, in his only comment to me for this article other than a few lunatic proclamations on Facebook (before he mysteriously Unfriended me), Halvorssen admitted that he took money from Oscar Mendoza, a right-wing Venezuelan banker and relative. He also admitted that he only disclosed the names of Mendoza and other donors after the government of Norway, which funds him as well, demanded that he be more transparent.Last week, Halvorssen wrote an <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/23/venezuela-just-threw-my-cousin-in-jail.html" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">article</a> in the Daily Beast — which is basically a neo-con Pravda, but a wee bit more subtle — in which he moaned that his cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, had been unfairly thrown in jail by the Venezuelan government. Lopez probably didn’t get a fair trial — this is what Amnesty International has to say — but frankly the only reason I care is that it attracts negative attention for the Venezuelan government. Lopez is a clown so why not just let him out so he can fade into the obscurity he so richly deserves?And curiously, people who know Halvorssen have told me he never talked about Lopez and his other Venezuelan-based relatives, and that he never expressed pride in the country. His love for his homeland is apparently most clearly worn on his sleeve when he can make phony, emotional pleas about their alleged suffering that lead suckers to fund his various enterprises.Frankly, and this is a minor digression, I wish Chávez had been more like the great Union General William Sherman who during the Civil War literally torched the South, killed countless enemy soldiers and civilians, and thereby broke the back of the Confederacy. But the democratically minded Chávez was more moderate — I guess there’s a time and a place for everything — and, sadly, didn’t summarily execute senior members of Venezuela’s old white-dominated elite, who view the country’s non-white citizens in much the same way that Southern slaveholders viewed Africans as chattel.Anyway, I honestly don’t care who people sleep with or what drugs they do, but I do care if they misrepresent themselves and if they are stone-cold hypocrites. And that describes Halvorssen to a T. Halvorssen should be honest about who funds him, stop abusing his non-profits, and make it easier to keep track of his interests.He should also stop attacking people for doing the same things he does. For example, he invites his neo-con cronies to the fluff-filled Oslo Freedom Forum — and his non-profit pays the bills for at least some of them — and then they write nice things about him.But recently, the Human Rights Foundation went after the Argentine football star Lionel Messi, for going on what Halvorrsen claimed was a <a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/news/hrf-condemns-lionel-messis-hypocritical-celebration-of-gabons-dictator-00449" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">richly-remunerated junket</a> to the African nation of Gabon. Messi flatly denies it — and even though I detest Messi because he choked in the final of last year’s World Cup and in my view is a loser, and because I love Neymar and Brazilian football — I trust him more than I trust Halvorssen.Oh yeah, a final disclosure: I really and truly don’t like Halvorssen. He is, to cite multiple sources, and I am paraphrasing here, a dirty little liar.<div class="at-below-post addthis_tool" data-url="https://shadowproof.com/2015/09/28/meet-thor-halvorssen-neocon-scam-artist-who-heads-bogus-human-rights-foundation/" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="at-below-post-recommended addthis_tool" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="vw-tag-links" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 2em;"> TAGS:<a href="https://shadowproof.com/tag/human-rights/" rel="tag" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 3px; padding: 2px 8px; display: inline-block; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">HUMAN RIGHTS</a><a href="https://shadowproof.com/tag/human-rights-foundation/" rel="tag" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 3px; padding: 2px 8px; display: inline-block; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION</a><a href="https://shadowproof.com/tag/neoconservativism/" rel="tag" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 3px; padding: 2px 8px; display: inline-block; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">NEOCONSERVATIVISM</a><a href="https://shadowproof.com/tag/oslo-freedom-forum/" rel="tag" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 3px; padding: 2px 8px; display: inline-block; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">OSLO FREEDOM FORUM</a><a href="https://shadowproof.com/tag/thor-halvorssen/" rel="tag" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 3px; padding: 2px 8px; display: inline-block; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">THOR HALVORSSE</a>n</div></div></div></div></article><div></div><div>ref 1</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/modern-warfare-korea-the-weaponization-of-human-rights/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/modern-warfare-korea-the-weaponization-of-human-rights/</a></div><div>
</div><div>...The National Endowment for Democracy <a href="http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2010-annual-report/asia/north-korea" style="font-family: " source="Source" serif="serif" pro="Pro" font-size="font-size" px="px" margin="margin" padding="padding" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" color="color" rgb="rgb">heavily finances</a> those NGO’s who develop such hysteria. It is interesting that in order to obtain a NED grant, one must meet two qualifiers in their proposal – to promote religious freedom and human rights. Burk’s arguments pass the Litmus Test for government intentionality to manufacture and harness human rights hysteria, otherwise NED would give grants for cultural and educational exchanges without the two requirements — knowing that those forms of engagement spread democracy more effectively than forcing one’s own ethnocentric worldviews on ‘the cognitive other.’ The fact that human rights awareness campaigns have exponentially increased since the COI is concerning for several reasons, and worthy of explaining how the human rights network is constructed and aligned.</div><p style="margin: 0px 3px 20px 10px; padding: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; line-height: 1.5em;" source="Source" serif="serif" pro="Pro" max-width="max-width" px="px" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color">While NED is the go-to organization for financial support amongst North Korea Human Rights (NKHR) NGO’s, the Department of Defense finances a vast human rights industry. Human rights epistemological influence is rooted directly to the military, according to Perugini and Gordon, and has thereby resulted in “the proliferation of human rights appropriations.” They state; “…it is not surprising that state security institutions that hold the monopoly over legitimate violence also began invoking international humanitarian and human rights law in their work,” pointing out that according to Amnesty International, “the US government trains approximately 100,000 foreign police and soldiers from more than 150 countries in approximately 275 military schools and installations while offering 4,100 human rights courses” (p.10-11).<p style="margin: 0px 3px 20px 10px; padding: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; line-height: 1.5em;" source="Source" serif="serif" pro="Pro" max-width="max-width" px="px" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color">...<div></div><div>ref 2</div><div>
</div><div><p class="headline " style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-caps: small-caps; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.17em; font-weight: bolder; margin-top: 5px; margin-left: 9px; margin-bottom: 7px;">A HUGE OPEN WOUNDOn February 27th, a wave of demonstrations shook Venezuela, angered by a series of IMF-requested free trade reforms by President Carlos Andres Perez that vastly increased the cost of living and privatized many state industries. The bloody incident marked the start of a shift in the political scene, which saw the waning of the influence of the country's traditional parties and trade unions. The last straw was an abrupt rise in bus fares, adopted in the wake of an increase in gas prices announced just after President Carlos Andres Perez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993) took office on Feb. 2, 1989. Unable to afford the new bus fares and facing serious difficulties in making it to their jobs in the second half of the month, commuters from outlying areas around Caracas were the first to erupt in anger, followed by thousands of people in slum neighbourhoods, vandals, and even police officers themselves. The rioting and subsequent crackdown lasted a week. The clampdown on the protesters and looters was harsh after Tuesday the 28th, as the military was called out on the streets in several major cities and a curfew was set—measures that had not been used in Venezuela in several generations. With the police and National Guard unable to restore order, Perez called out the army on the night of Monday, Feb. 27, and the troops brutally cracked down on the rioters, who were acting without clear objectives or political leadership of any kind. It is true as well, as journalists witnessed at the time, that the army also attempted on a number of occasions to at least impose order among the chaos, having looters stand in organised lines that filed in and out of supermarkets and stores, and ensuring that they only took food and did not cause damages. "It was the first breakdown of the institutional pact under which democracy had functioned since 1958, a kind of collective decision to break with the prevailing state of law. But it was also a great national failure, a fight without winners, which remains a huge open wound," said sociologist Tulio Hernandez. The end result: hundreds of people killed, around 2,000 injured and more than 150 million dollars in damages to shops and businesses. On the 28th, Andres Perez suspended a number of constitutional civil liberties as the country had been effectively shut down within two days. The protests continued, and the military were sent in. Between 275 and 3,000 were killed, mostly civilians killed by the military and mercenaries.<a href="http://hiaw.org/defcon2/latinamerica.html" style="">This is an entry in a larger project for History Is A Weapon</a></div><div></div><div>2x</div><div>
</div><div>2013</div><div>
</div><div>An  Electronic Intifada investigation uncovers evidence that Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, receives significant funding from the same financiers who support the Islamophobes who inspired anti-Muslim Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik. Despite being presented with this evidence, the Norwegian government and Amnesty International are embracing Halvorssen, a long-time far-right activist and the scion of a politically-connected family tied to Venezuela’s US-backed opposition.</div>This week in <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/oslo" style="">Oslo</a>, hundreds of people from around the world are gathering for the fifth annual <a href="https://www.oslofreedomforum.com/welcome.html" style="">Oslo Freedom Forum</a>, a human rights conference billed as “a three-day summit exploring how best to challenge authoritarianism and promote free and open societies.”Produced by the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/new-york" style="">New York</a>-based Human Rights Foundation (<a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/" style="">humanrightsfoundation.org</a>), the event is <a href="http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/supporters.html" style="">sponsored</a> by, among others, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/norway" style="">Norway’s</a> Labor Party government (in the form of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the City of Oslo, and <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/amnesty-international-norway" style="">Amnesty International Norway</a>. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide is scheduled to deliver prepared remarks at the forum.Oslo is still scarred by the murderous rampage carried out by the right-wing extremist <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/anders-behring-breivik" style="">Anders Behring Breivik</a>, a Norwegian citizen who fashioned himself as a crusading knight on a mission to save Europe from the scourge of Muslim immigration.His killing spree began on 22 July 2011 with a bombing that killed eight persons and injured 209 others outside Oslo’s main government building. The violence ended some 25 miles to the north at a summer camp for the youth wing of Norway’s ruling Labor Party, where he massacred 69 persons, most of them children and youths.Breivik insisted the bloodbath was necessary to stop those he saw enabling mass Muslim immigration — those he called “cultural Marxists” and especially the Labor Party — accusing them of “contributing to a process of indirect cultural and demographical genocide.”<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Islamophobe inspirations</h2>The killer outlined his views in a 1,500-page manifesto, listing the far-right Americans who helped radicalize him. They included the most notorious purveyors of anti-Muslim resentment, such as <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/jihad-watch" style="">Jihad Watch</a> founder <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/robert-spencer" style="">Robert Spencer</a>, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/frank-gaffney" style="">Frank Gaffney</a> of the Center for Security Policy, and Middle East Forum director <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/daniel-pipes" style="">Daniel Pipes</a>, whose writings Breivik excerpted at length.Among the suggestions for “Further Study” provided by the killer were links on YouTube to the 2008 propaganda film <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/neo-cons-ex-israeli-diplomats-push-islamophobic-video/7731" style="">Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West</a>, which has been promoted as “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat” (<a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/" style="">Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America</a>, Center For American Progress, 26 August 2011, p. 16).Breivik clearly thought it was powerful too and would help explain and justify his murderous rampage.It is of public record that the Oslo Freedom Forum receives substantial financial support from the Norwegian government. But only a tiny handful of people know that one of the largest donors to the Human Rights Foundation — the producer of the Oslo Freedom Forum — are Donors Capital Fund and its affiliate Donors Trust, Inc.Donors Capital Fund is the same right-wing American foundation that spent millions of dollars to fund the distribution of millions of copies of Obsession, and which has lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on the network of professional <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/islamophobia" style="">Islamophobes</a> that Breivik cited as his inspirations.Donors Capital Fund is only one of several major funders to the Human Rights Foundation that have been among the principal donors or conduits for funding to the Islamophobic hate groups and ideologues who helped radicalize Breivik.One person who certainly knew this is <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/anti-muslim-group-leaps-defense-american-islamic-congress-after-ei-expose" style="">Thor Halvorssen</a>.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Oslo Freedom Forum’s right-wing brainchild</h2>Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is <a href="http://www.thehrf.org/staff.php" style="">listed</a> as the lone staff member. The Oslo Freedom Forum is his brainchild, a confab he has sought to brand as “a Davos for human rights.” The theme of this year’s conference is “Challenging Power.”Halvorssen is also a right-wing activist, film producer and scion of Venezuela’s moneyed elite whose years of involvement in ultra-conservative politics enabled him to corral a small coterie of mostly far-right moneymen into bankrolling his Human Rights Foundation.The Electronic Intifada has obtained Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms filed by the Human Rights Foundation that include previously undisclosed information about its donors.The forms show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Based in Northern Virginia, Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.The Electronic Intifada’s analysis of IRS filings by Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust shows that the Human Rights Foundation received $764,950 from 2005 through 2011 from Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, all but about $5,000 coming through the Donors Capital Fund.“Since the fund handles money from multiple donors and donors names aren’t disclosed, contributions made through the Donors Capital Fund are difficult to trace,” the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/center-american-progress" style="">Center for American Progress</a> noted in its 2011 landmark report “Fear, Inc.” “Potential donors are required to open a minimum $1 million account to utilize the fund’s services.”In 2009, Donors Capital Fund channeled $60 million to various conservative causes and from 2009 through 2011 a whopping $21,318,600 “to groups promoting Islamophobia,” according to the Center for American Progress.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Shadowy nonprofit funds Islamophobic film applauded by Breivik</h2>In 2008, Donors Capital donated $17,778,600 to a shadowy nonprofit called the Clarion Fund — later renamed the Clarion Project (“<a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/clarion_fund_obsession_dvds/" style="">Mystery of who funded right-wing ‘radical Islam’ campaign deepens</a>,” Salon, 16 November 2010).The donation paid for the Clarion Fund’s distribution of the film Obsession during the height of the 2008 presidential campaign — an apparent attempt to tar Democrats and then-Senator <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/barack-obama" style="">Barack Obama</a> as weak on terror.In the film, grainy clips of Nazi youth saluting Adolf Hitler blend into footage of Muslim crowds chanting in unison against Western imperialism. With commentary from a <a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/clarion_fund_obsession_dvds/" style="">who’s who</a> of anti-Muslim activists, including Daniel Pipes, the film implies that political Islam is today’s version of Nazism, and that between 10 and 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population poses an imminent, existential threat to the West.Thanks to this support, some <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/26/the-far-right-s-secret-slush-fund-to-keep-fear-alive/" style="">28 million DVDs</a> of the film were tucked into the Sunday edition of local newspapers and delivered to Americans in swing states across the country. Eventually, the film reached Breivik as well and is applauded in his manifesto.Breivik <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/07/25/278677/islamophobic-right-wing-blogger-breivi/" style="">cited Pipes at least 18 times in his manifesto</a>; in one section, he quoted the far-right scholar commenting, “Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.”Pipes’ Middle East Forum has benefited immensely from the generosity of Donors Capital Fund, reaping $2.3 million from the foundation between 2001 to 2009, according to the Center for American Progress.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Halvorssen responds</h2>In 2010, the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen investigated what it referred to as Thor Halvorssen’s “secret funding,” which it suspected was “associated with the right side of the United States.” Halvorssen told reporter Sarah Sorheim: “I receive money from a variety of different people and environments. But that does not mean I necessarily support their political views.”Sorheim asked him: “why not disclose who your sponsors are?” He deflected, explaining, “Since I got so much attention here in Norway, I’m still thinking about whether I can disclose our lists.”Prior to this investigation by The Electronic Intifada, the full extent of Halvorssen’s right-wing funding was unknown. And contrary to the claims he made to Sorheim and to The Electronic Intifada, his political views appear to align neatly with many of his key backers and with those they support.In an emailed response to The Electronic Intifada, Halvorssen stated that the $600,000 donated to the Human Rights Foundation through Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011 that is disclosed in the Human Rights Foundation’s 2011 IRS filing actually came from his own family.“The Harry Halvorssen Fund is an account I set up with Donors Capital/Donors Trust and it is the main vehicle through which my mother and I make our contributions to [the Human Rights Foundation] and other charitable pursuits ranging from ecological concerns and scholarships to inner-city children in New York, to equine rescue,” he stated.None of the money provided through the Donors Capital Fund, he said, went to support the Oslo Freedom Forum, but he and his mother donate separate funds through the Human Rights Foundation to support the Oslo Freedom Forum. “The Harry Halvorssen Fund has never made any contributions to any film called Obsession,” Halvorssen wrote.To be sure, the kinds of donor-advised services for living donors and legacies that Donors Capital Fund provides to major philanthropists are also offered by many well-established foundations, such as the Chicago Community Trust or the New York Community Trust, as well as other financial institutions.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Tainted reputation</h2>So why did Halvorssen choose to support the Human Rights Foundation and other causes through Donors Capital Fund, which is tainted by its reputation as a pass-through for anonymous donors to give enormous sums to virulently Islamophobic and anti-gay causes?“My choice of using Donors Capital Fund/Donors Trust is based on the fact that if I were to pass away unexpectedly I know they will very strictly abide to donor intent,” Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada. <a href="http://www.donorstrust.org/AboutUs/MissionPrinciples.aspx" style="">On its website</a>, Donors Trust states that it was established “to ensure the intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise” is respected even after they die.Halvorssen offered an analogy to explain his motives: “People I may disagree with may also open a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank, where I have a debit card; this doesn’t mean that Chase Manhattan Bank is responsible for their activities or that other customers are to carry some kind of collective responsibility for their banking choices.”But this analogy might not be exact; <a href="http://www.donorscapitalfund.org/home.html?x=6" style="">on its website</a>, Donors Capital Fund states that only organizations “approved by the Donors Capital Fund board of directors are eligible to receive grants from donor-advised funds administered by Donors Capital Fund.”<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Anti-Muslim support</h2>Even if Halvorssen were to be taken at his word about his relationship with Donors Capital Fund, he cannot explain why the Human Rights Foundation relies on other key members of the Islamophobia industry’s financial network.The Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the four foundations controlled by conservative financier <a href="http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Scaife_Foundations" style="">Richard Mellon Scaife,</a> donated $325,000 to Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation between 2007 and 2011, according to IRS filings.According to the Center for American Progress, Scaife’s foundations contributed a staggering $7,875,000 to the Islamophobia industry between 2001 and 2009.Among the major recipients of Scaife’s money was the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-horowitz-freedom-center" style="">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>, which received $3.4 million during the eight-year period documented in the “Fear Inc.” report.The <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-horowitz" style="">David Horowitz</a> Freedom Center happens to be the main sponsor of Robert Spencer, the Islamophobic pseudo-scholar who <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/video-robert-spencer-on-the-muslim-brotherhood-in-the-white-house/" style="">claimed in a video interview with the conservative website Politichicks</a> that the Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated deep into President Obama’s White House inner circle. Breivik referenced Spencer’s work no fewer than 162 times in his manifesto.Then there is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which contributed $145,000 to the Human Rights Foundation from 2007 through 2011, according to IRS forms. As The Electronic Intifada <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/weddadys-free-arabs-american-islamic-congress-and-pro-israel-funders-who-helped-them-rise" style="">recently reported,</a> the Bradley Foundation has helped pay the salaries of some of America’s most virulent anti-Muslim agitators. These include David Horowitz, the creator of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAFEeJoWicU" style="">“Islamofascism Awareness Week,”</a> Pipes and Frank Gaffney, publisher of conspiratorial pamphlets like his 2010 “Shariah: The Threat to America,” in which he warned that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of “sharia,” or Islamic law.Breivik cited Gaffney and Horowitz a total of nine times in his manifesto.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">False-flag conspiracy theories</h2>Gaffney, for his part, hosted Halvorssen on the <a href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/04/22/a-growing-closeness-between-the-emir-of-qatar-and-the-muslim-brotherhood" style="">22 April 2013 edition of Secure Freedom Radio show</a>, introducing him as “a remarkable man I’ve had the privilege of knowing for a long time.”Asked by Gaffney about the recent <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/boston-marathon-bombing" style="">Boston Marathon bombing</a>, allegedly perpetrated by the Chechen-American brothers Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Halvorssen suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to exploit the bombings. Putin, he said, sought to distract from “a legitimate government-in-exile” that “wants to look to the West” — a clear reference to the exiled Chechen politician Akhmed Zakayev, whom Halvorssen <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhb8y_Cu52w" style="">hosted</a> at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2009.Gaffney asked Halvorssen, “Did he [Putin] have something to do with this attack in Boston — that he was running Tamerlan Tsarnaev?”“I have questions about it, Frank,” Halvorssen stated in an emphatic tone. “I have serious questions.” With his answer, Halvorssen demonstrated a readiness to indulge wild conspiracy theories that fit his political agenda.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Halvorssen’s hard-right libertarian supporter</h2>Rounding out the small stable of major donors to Human Rights Foundation is Peter Thiel, who contributed $535,000 to Halvorssen’s group through his personal foundation from 2007 to 2011.Thiel earned his fortune as a venture capitalist, helping to found Paypal and investing in <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/facebook" style="">Facebook</a>. He is also a right-wing libertarian ideologue who declared, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/summer/the-old-man-and-the-sea" style="">as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2012</a>, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel went on to blame the extension of voting rights to women for “hav[ing] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”Besides Halvorssen’s pet human rights project, Thiel has <a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/09/acorn_videomake.php" style="">financed</a> the notorious and now-discredited ACORN video sting by right-wing filmmaker James O’Keefe.A February 2012 <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/166421/ron-paul-wants-abolish-cia-his-largest-donor-builds-toys-it" style="">profile of Thiel published by Mark Ames in The Nation</a> noted that the libertarian billionaire “co-authored an anti-affirmative action book, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus — a book that belittles ‘imaginary oppressors’ of minorities, blames homophobia on homosexuals and attacks domestic partnerships.”Halvorssen <a href="http://www.libertopia.org/2013/history/" style="">presented Thiel with an award at the 2010 libertarian film festival</a>, Libertopia, hailing him for “revolutioniz[ing] the monetary system.” The following year, he invited Thiel to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum.“I support the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum because their focus on dissidents engages the intellectual debate as well as the moral cause,” he remarked to the website The Street (“<a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/11154811/1/peter-thiel-urges-investing-in-human-rights.html" style="">Peter Thiel Urges Investing in Human Rights</a>,” 20 June 2011).<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Double standards</h2>In response to questions about the Human Rights Foundation’s acceptance of support from Scaife, Thiel and other major donors of Islamophobic and ultra-conservative causes such as the Bradley Foundation, Halvorssen gave this statement to The Electronic Intifada:<blockquote style="margin: 1.5rem 30px;">Any donation or grant accepted by HRF is done with a categorical understanding that the foundation is free to research and investigate regardless of where such investigations may lead or what conclusions HRF may reach. We encourage funding from anyone who cares about human freedom. This does not mean HRF endorses the views or opinions of its donors. In plain language: We are grateful, privileged and proud that we receive support, as this ultimately means that our mission is being endorsed. This does not, however, mean we agree [with] the views of those who support us. Likewise, some donors on this list may ultimately disagree with the decisions and public statements of HRF. Their inclusion on this list in no way implies that they agree with all of HRF’s positions or activities.</blockquote>While Halvorssen takes a relaxed view about the activities of his principal funders, he has different standards for where others should get their money.When actors Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme accepted payments to be celebrity guests at the birthday party of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Russian puppet regime in Chechnya, Halvorssen denounced them. “Hilary Swank obviously has the right to earn a living entertaining the highest bidder, but this sort of venality should be exposed,” he said. “We must remember the disgrace of Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Beyoncé and 50 Cent [who] were exposed … singing for Gaddafi’s family and earning millions of dollars for it” (“<a href="http://www.digitalspy.com/celebrity/news/a345024/hilary-swank-van-damme-slammed-for-attending-chechen-president-party.html" style="">Hilary Swank, Van Damme slammed for attending Chechen president party</a>,” Digital Spy UK, 11 October 2011).As for libertarian ideologue Thiel, Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada: “Peter Thiel is not just a donor, I consider him a personal friend. … Peter’s devotion to human rights, education and nonviolence are extraordinary. We are thrilled to have him as a donor and as a former speaker at [Oslo Freedom Forum].”This year, the Thiel Foundation is <a href="https://www.oslofreedomforum.com/supporters.html" style="">listed as a main supporter</a> of Halvorssen’s forum.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Norwegian government, Amnesty respond</h2>The Electronic Intifada shared some of the information about the Human Rights Foundation’s donors with Ragnhild Imerslund, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs communications chief and spokesperson for Foreign Minister Eide.Imerslund acknowledged that the Norwegian government has provided 800,000 Norwegian kroner ($138,000) to pay for “participation by Human Rights Defenders from the Global South to the Oslo Freedom Forum 2013,” which she called “an important arena for discussing human rights issues.”Regarding the donors to the Forum’s producer and creator, Imerslund said only, “Questions regarding sources of funding for the Human Rights Foundation should be directed to them.”Similarly, Gerald Kador Folkvord, Political Advisor to Amnesty International Norway, wrote that “To the best of our knowledge, none of the sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum (mind you, it’s the Forum we are concerned with; who might or might not support the organization Human Rights Foundation outside the Forum does not really concern us as we have no other dealings with them) has been involved in activities undermining human rights so seriously that we couldn’t be part of an event they are sponsoring.”“The Sarah Scaife Foundation is not listed among the sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum,” Amnesty’s Folkvord added. “When it comes to their support, if any, to The Human Rights Foundation, the latter would have to answer for that.”Folkvord said that Amnesty had paid for one “human rights defender” to travel to Oslo and, “with the other organizations involved, Amnesty participated in discussions around the program of the Oslo Freedom Forum and suggested issues and speakers.”The Electronic Intifada asked both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Amnesty how they thought members of the Norwegian public would respond to the fact that the Human Rights Foundation — the producer and originator of the Oslo Freedom Forum — counted among its most generous supporters the same donors that sustain the Islamophobic activists cited by Breivik as inspirations. Neither offered a reply.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">The right connections</h2>So how did Halvorssen manage to secure funding from Norwegian government sources? And why are government officials so dismissive when presented with evidence that he is simultaneously supported by rightist forces propagating religious bigotry?A 26 November 2010 report in Norway’s daily Klassekampen offers some possible answers (“<a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/58224/article/item/null" style="">Gir millioner til sine egne</a>”).According to the paper, the Oslo city council increased funding for Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum in 2010 while slashing social spending amid a worsening financial situation. Leading the effort to ramp up public funding of the human rights forum was a politician from the Liberal Party named Ola Elvestuen — the brother of Per Elvestuen.And who is Per Elvestuen? As Klassekampen revealed, he has been listed as a “coordinator” and “director” of the Oslo Freedom Forum. He is also is a board member of Ny Tid, the magazine owned by Halvorssen and a spokesman for the Halvorssen-owned Hunter Media Inc.Thanks to a tangled web of high-level connections and an apparent case of nepotism, the Oslo Freedom Forum has thrived.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Fortunate son of Venezuela’s elite</h2>Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez. His mother, Hilda Mendoza Denham, a direct descendant of Venezuela’s first two presidents, is a member of one of her country’s most influential clans.Halvorssen’s father, also named Thor Halvorssen, was a wealthy heir who gained control over Venezuela’s telecommunications monopoly. In 1989, then-President Carlos Andres Perez appointed Halvorssen Sr. as Venezuela’s “anti-drug ambassador.” That same year, President Perez’s government was responsible for committing one of the worst massacres in modern times: up to 3,000 persons were killed protesting President Perez’s harsh International Money Fund-imposed austerity program (“<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12593085" style="">Victims of Venezuela’s Caracazo clashes reburied,</a>” BBC News, 21 February 2011).Halvorssen Sr. is reported to have helped expose the secret bank accounts his longtime friend Perez used to embezzle public money, allegedly earning the wrath of the president and his inner circle.As Perez sought to fend off scrutiny and an electoral challenge, a series of bombs exploded around Caracas. Halvorssen Sr. was immediately arrested and accused of orchestrating a terrorist plot to manipulate the Venezuelan stock market. He was imprisoned under harsh conditions and only freed after 74 days thanks in part to intervention from Amnesty International.With his father cleared of all charges, Halvorssen Jr. <a href="https://tthoro.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/thor_halvorssens_response.pdf" style="">refers</a> to him today as a former “political prisoner,” describing him as the force that helped inspire his interest in human rights. But there was another side to the elder Halvorssen that was wrapped in intrigue and which remains shrouded in mystery.Besides his role as a businessman and government official, Halvorssen Sr. was a part-time spook who, according to a 19 November 1993 report by the Associated Press, “cooperated with the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/cia" style="">CIA</a>” and “was used to funnel money to Nicaraguan Contra leader Eden Pastora” (“Trafficker, Alleged Terrorist Penetrated CIA, DEA in Venezuela”).In her book Hostile Acts, journalist Martha Honey notes that Halvorssen Sr. served during the early 1980s as president of the Committee in Defense of Democracy in Nicaragua, a CIA front group “used to rally regional public opinion against the Sandinistas …” (p. 237).A 29 November 1993 article by US News and World Report describes Halvorssen Sr. as a “CIA source” and notes that he was also a US Drug Enforcement Agency informant at the time, but that the agency eventually cut him loose, citing his tendency towards “duplicity and manipulation.” According to the report, Halvorssen Sr. “had unusual ties to and knowledge of drug traffickers” (“<a href="https://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/931129/archive_016185.htm" style="">At play in the fields of the spies</a>”).Just as the father retreated from the international scene, the son began to make his name.<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, anti-Arab</h2>In a 2010 interview with Klassekampen, Halvorssen said, “Personally, I am no right-wing ideologue, as some have described me. I’m liberal. Period” “<a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/57490/article/item/null" style="">Jeg er liberalist</a>”). He described himself in the same terms to The Electronic Intifada.But a look at the early stages of Halvorssen’s career, which he spent as a conservative operative combating gay rights initiatives, feminism and multiculturalism on US college campuses, suggests otherwise.Like his father, Halvorssen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. He first gained notice in 1994, when he authored a guest commentary for The Daily Pennsylvanian demanding that prospective students be warned before applying to the school that “it may be deadly to live in West Philadelphia,” the mostly African-American area surrounding Penn’s campus.As editor of the conservative student magazine Red and Blue, Halvorssen courted controversy when the magazine ran a November 1994 column called “<a href="http://articles.philly.com/1995-03-02/news/25701981_1_haitian-students-student-magazine-student-groups" style="">One Man’s Vision of Haiti</a>” that was illustrated with a sketch of a voodoo doll. “To the best of my knowledge,” the article’s author wrote, “the only imports from Haiti we have in this country are exiled dictators and cab drivers.”The article’s publication stirred the outrage of African Americans and Haitians on campus, eventually prompting Penn administrators to temporarily withdraw school funding from Red and Blue. For Halvorssen, the incident crystallized his sense that conservatives on campus were an oppressed minority.He emerged after college as the executive director of a newfangled right-wing group called FIRE, or the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending evangelical students against charges of anti-gay discrimination and combating hate crimes legislation.FIRE has been funded by two right-wing foundations that also support Halvorssen’s human rights mini-empire: the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the <a href="https://thefire.org/article/13730.html" style="">John Templeton Foundation,</a> an evangelical outfit <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/romney-names-high-profile-supporters-religious-right-committee" style="">directed</a> by John Templeton Jr., a veteran right-wing activist who has <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/a-big-donor-goe.html" style="">donated</a> more than $1 million to ban same-sex marriage in California. In 2009, HRF <a href="http://www.thehrf.org/media/031309.html" style="">noted</a> that the Oslo Freedom Forum “was made possible in large part thanks to a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.”<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Right-wing campus operations</h2>Halvorssen also found work at the time as a program director for the <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/intercollegiate-studies" style="">Intercollegiate Studies Institute</a>, another prominent right-wing campus operation. Under his direction, the group condemned the establishment of a women’s studies program at Yale University, complaining in an 1 April 1998 press release that the program “delves into the most radical issues of militant feminism and homosexuality while completely ignoring traditional female roles.”Halvorssen’s political empire expanded with his founding of the Moving Picture Institute, a libertarian film company that produced “Mine Your Own Business.” <a href="http://www.earthworksaction.org/media/detail/opposition_surges_to_romanian_gold_project_propaganda" style="">Financed by a Canadian mining company</a>, the film was promoted as “the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary” (“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19stra.html" style="">A Maverick Mogul, Proudly Politically Incorrect</a>,” The New York Times, 19 August 2007). The Moving Picture Institute received more than $300,000 through Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust from 2005 through 2011, according to those organizations’ IRS filings.Next, Halvorssen oversaw the making of a 2007 documentary called Indoctrinate U (the entire film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA" style="">is on YouTube</a>). The film features an amateur conservative filmmaker named Evan Coyne Maloney wandering around campuses attempting to interrogate befuddled school administrators and poking fun at feminist students who had established women’s centers on their campuses.Towards the end of Indoctrinate U, Daniel Pipes and ultra-Zionist scholar <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/martin-kramer" style="">Martin Kramer</a> surface as talking heads, warning that Arab donors have been stealthily guiding the anti-American agenda of university departments.Kramer also appears on the pages of Breivik’s manifesto making remarkably similar statements: the killer quotes him attacking the Palestinian-American scholar <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/edward-said" style="">Edward Said</a> and complaining that “academics were so preoccupied with ‘Muslim Martin Luthers’ that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis of bin Laden and his indictment of America.”<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Campaign for Venezuela regime change</h2>In 2004, Venezuela’s US-backed political opposition lost a hard-fought 2004 referendum aimed at recalling Chavez, whom it considered illegitimate from the start. The voting results <a href="https://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc2023.html" style="">were certified by former US President Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center</a> as “reflect[ing] the will of the Venezuelan electorate.” According to the Carter Center, “balloting day was conducted in an environment virtually absent of any violence or intimidation.”However, at an earlier opposition protest rally demanding Chavez’s ouster, Halvorssen’s mother was shot and wounded, allegedly by a Chavez loyalist.It was then that Halvorssen claimed to realize that “defending [college] students’ rights while there were people in Venezuela being shot for disagreeing with the government” was “a little absurd” (“<a href="http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0308/feature3.html" style="">My dinner with Thor</a>,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, March-April 2008).He embarked on an international campaign for regime change in Venezuela, with his Human Rights Foundation leading the way.In 2005, Halvorssen <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/903jhsjt.asp?page=3" style="">took to the neoconservative Weekly Standard</a> to paint Chavez as an anti-Semitic dictator seeking to establish a “resistance bloc” that placed the US, Europe and Israel in grave danger. Halvorssen called for “democratic alternatives to Chavez,” describing him as a key supporter of “terrorist groups in South America and terror sponsors in the Middle East.”That same year, Halvorssen <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2005/08/24/robertson-lies-about-his-chavez-comments-claims/133707" style="">appeared as a guest</a> on the radical right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson’s television program The 700 Club. A week before hosting Halvorssen, Robertson had urged the US to “take him [Chavez] out,” declaring, “if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”When Robertson denied calling for Chavez’s assassination — an obvious falsehood — Halvorssen leaped in to defend his host. “The person who began this, who started the concept of assassination for political reasons, was in fact Hugo Chavez, and his foreign minister is a former guerrilla terrorist,” Halvorssen told Robertson. “They basically have no standing to criticize anyone who made remarks that like — you know, that were misinterpreted, like the ones you made.”Halvorssen’s obsession with overthrowing Chavez deepened after the president was re-elected. In 2008, Halvorssen railed against the actor and film producer Danny Glover in an editorial for Fox News, accusing him of “coddling Chavez” for accepting financing from the Venezuelan government for two films in development. He went on to accuse Hollywood supporters of Chavez of providing “a terrific boost” to the morale of Palestinian “terrorists.” The source for Halvorssen’s unusual claim was Aaron Klein, a writer for the far-right conspiracy site WorldNetDaily (“<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,343350,00.html" style="">Hollywood A-Listers Prove Ignorance in Supporting Hugo Chavez</a>,” 31 March 2008).<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Venezuelan terror-sympathizer hired by Human Rights Foundation</h2>Also in 2008, Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation hired Aleksander Boyd, a Venezuelan opposition representative based in London. Boyd was a notorious promoter of terrorism against Venezuela’s elected government, having written the following on his website:“I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” He later declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with Chavez” (“<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/01/friendsinlowplaces" style="">Friends in low places</a>,” The Guardian, 1 September 2007).When the Norwegian magazine Manifest criticized Halvorssen’s hiring of Boyd in a 12 May 2010 exposé, Halvorssen responded, “We knew of his comments before we hired Boyd and asked him about these comments and he stated, plainly, that it was an entry in his dream diary that was online.” He added that Boyd left the Human Rights Foundation in 2009.In 2010, Halvorssen invited his first cousin, the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Lopez, the Harvard-educated mayor of a wealthy district in Caracas, was among the politicians who signed as witnesses in the new government after Chavez was briefly ousted in the failed US-backed coup in 2002.Lopez is the son of a former oil executive — Halvorssen’s aunt — who allegedly funnelled profits from the state-run oil company into his new political party, leading to corruption charges that placed his political ambitions in peril, as the Associated Press reported in February (“<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/17/leopoldo-lopez-corruption-venezuela_n_2705862.html" style="">Leopoldo Lopez, Opponent Of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Faces Corruption Charges In Venezuela</a>”).<a href="https://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/11/09CARACAS1408.html" style="">Described</a> by the US embassy in Venezuela as “vindictive, and power-hungry” but also as “a necessity,” Lopez <a href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/weisbrot_testimony_vz_democracy.pdf" style="">received large sums of financial support</a> from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.At the 2009 Oslo Freedom Forum, Lopez was a <a href="https://vimeo.com/5232625" style="">presented as a “human rights leader,”</a> appearing at an event that had been graced by Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel and Nobel nominee Vaclav Havel. He stirred his audience with lofty rhetoric about peace, democracy and the coming wave of freedom, casting the Venezuelan opposition as “David against Goliath.” “We know that we will overcome,” Lopez proclaimed, “we know that change will come in Venezuela.”Noting that Lopez’s appearance at the Oslo Freedom Forum was covered far more heavily in Venezuelan media than in Oslo, where it was virtually ignored, Manifest accused Halvorssen of using his human rights confab for the purpose of “whitewashing Leopoldo Lopez … to establish a real contender for the Venezuelan presidency.”The magazine described the Oslo Freedom Forum as a cleverly crafted “Washing Machine.”<h2 style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">The burden of knowing</h2>Are those who gathered on stage at the human rights “Davos” being used to whitewash the ulterior political agenda of an ambitious conservative operative with ties to sectarian plutocrats and conspiratorial Islamophobes? Do they know about Halvorssen’s real history, about his funders and friends among America’s far-right? Most may not.Unfortunately for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and Amnesty International, they are not among those with the luxury of pleading ignorance.Presented with the revelations uncovered by The Electronic Intifada, they dismissed them as immaterial, and even irrelevant. In a city still scarred by Breivik’s rampage, it is hard to imagine that these facts could be so easily washed away.Ali Abunimah contributed research to this article.Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author.<h3 class="field-label field field-tag" style="line-height: 1.5rem; margin: 3.75rem 0px -3.75rem; font-weight: 400; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.28205rem; border: 0px;"><span class="fa fa-tags" style="display: inline-block; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1; text-rendering: auto; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;" /></h3><div></div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum</a></div><div>
</div><div>The  Venezuelan recall referendum of 15 August 2004 was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum" title="Referendum" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">referendum</a> to determine whether <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez" title="Hugo Chávez" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Hugo Chávez</a>, then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Venezuela" title="President of Venezuela" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">President of Venezuela</a>, should be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election" title="Recall election" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">recalled</a> from office. The recall referendum was announced on 8 June 2004 by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electoral_Council(Venezuela)" title="National Electoral Council (Venezuela)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">National Electoral Council</a> (CNE) after the Venezuelan opposition succeeded in collecting the number of signatures required by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Venezuela" title="Constitution of Venezuela" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">1999 Constitution</a> to effect a recall.</div>The result of the referendum was not to recall Chávez (58% no), but there have been allegations of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud" title="Electoral fraud" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">fraud</a>. In 2004, a report by election observers rejected the hypothesis of fraud,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-CEPRBlackSwan-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[1]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-observers-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[2]</a> but statistical evaluations released in 2006<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[3]</a> and 2011<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-specialsection-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[4]</a> disagreed. Former United States president <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter" title="Jimmy Carter" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Jimmy Carter</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_accept-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[5]</a> and his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center" title="Carter Center" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Carter Center</a>,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_report-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[6]</a> all groups which had observed the referendum,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-observers-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[2]</a> and other analyses<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_center_analysis-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[7]</a> denied fraud, saying the referendum was performed in a free and fair manner.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_accuse_opposition-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[8]</a> Some individuals have disputed the Center's endorsement of the electoral process in the referendum.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[9]</a> The Carter Center looked into the allegations and released a paper and statistical analysis reaffirming their original conclusions.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-:1-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[10]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-:1-10" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">[10]</a><div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1;"><input type="checkbox" role="button" id="toctogglecheckbox" class="toctogglecheckbox" style="direction: ltr; position: absolute; opacity: 0; z-index: -1; display: none;" /><div class="toctitle" lang="en" dir="ltr" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;">
</div><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#The_petition" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1The petition</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Constitutional_basis" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1.1Constitutional basis</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#The_signature_collection_drive" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1.2The signature collection drive</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Timing" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1.3Timing</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Campaign" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2Campaign</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Claims_of_foreign_interference" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2.1Claims of foreign interference</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Polls" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2.2Polls</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#The_ballot" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3The ballot</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-9" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#The_day_of_the_referendum" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4The day of the referendum</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-10" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Fake_recording" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4.1Fake recording</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-11" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Exit_poll" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4.2Exit poll</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-12" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Result" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">5Result</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-13" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Disputes" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6Disputes</a><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-14" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Allegations_of_electoral_fraud" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6.1Allegations of electoral fraud</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-15" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Process_endorsements" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6.2Process endorsements</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-16" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Analyses" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6.3Analyses</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-17" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#See_also" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">7See also</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-18" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#Notes" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">8Notes</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-19" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#External_links" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">9External links</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">The petition</h2>The recall mechanism was introduced into Venezuelan law in 1999 under the new Constitution drafted by the National <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_Assembly" class="mw-redirect" title="Constituent Assembly" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Constituent Assembly</a> and sanctioned by the electorate in a referendum. Under its provisions, an elected official can be subjected to a recall referendum if a petition gathers signatures from 20% of the corresponding electorate. Thus, to order a presidential recall vote in 2004, 2.4 million signatures were needed - 20% of the national electorate.<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Constitutional basis[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: Constitutional basis" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>The recall referendum is provided for in two articles of the 1999 Constitution:<dl style="margin-top: 0.2em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">Article 72: All [...] offices filled by popular vote are subject to revocation.</dd><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">Once one-half of the term of office to which an official has been elected has elapsed, a number of voters representing at least 20% of the registered voters in the affected constituency may petition for the calling of a referendum to revoke that official's mandate.</dd><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">When a number of voters equal to or greater than the number of those who elected the official vote in favour of the recall, provided that a number of voters equal to or greater than 25% of the total number of registered voters vote in the recall referendum, the official's mandate shall be deemed revoked and immediate action shall be taken to fill the permanent vacancy as provided for by this Constitution and by law.</dd></dl><dl style="margin-top: 0.2em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">Article 233: The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; [...] recall by popular vote.</dd><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">[...] When the President of the Republic becomes permanently unavailable to serve during the first four years of his constitutional term of office, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 calendar days. Pending the election and inauguration of the new President, the Executive Vice President shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.</dd><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">In the cases described above, the new President shall complete the current constitutional term of office. If the President becomes permanently unavailable to serve during the last two years of his constitutional term of office, the Executive Vice President shall take over the Presidency of the Republic until the term is completed.</dd></dl><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">The signature collection drive[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: The signature collection drive" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><div class="thumb tright" style="clear: right; float: right; margin: 0.5em 0px 1.3em 1.4em; width: auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="thumbinner" style="min-width: 100px; border: 1px solid rgb(200, 204, 209); padding: 3px; background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 252px;">
<div class="thumbcaption" style="border: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; padding: 3px; text-align: left;"><div class="magnify" style="float: right; margin-left: 3px; margin-right: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-chavez_march.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="width" height="height" viewbox="%220" e="E" cg="Cg" id="%22smallbox%22" fill="%22%23fff%22" stroke="%22%23000%22%3E" cpath="Cpath" d="%22M-1.499" h10.99v7.919h1.509z="h10.99v7.919H1.509z" h5.943v4.904h-5.943z="h5.943v4.904h-5.943z" c="C" g="g" display="display" block="block" text-indent="text-indent" px="px" white-space="white-space" nowrap="nowrap" overflow="overflow" hidden="hidden" user-select="user-select" none="none" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data" /></div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-chavez_march.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="width" height="height" viewbox="%220" e="E" cg="Cg" id="%22smallbox%22" fill="%22%23fff%22" stroke="%22%23000%22%3E" cpath="Cpath" d="%22M-1.499" h10.99v7.919h1.509z="h10.99v7.919H1.509z" h5.943v4.904h-5.943z="h5.943v4.904h-5.943z" c="C" g="g" display="display" block="block" text-indent="text-indent" px="px" white-space="white-space" nowrap="nowrap" overflow="overflow" hidden="hidden" user-select="user-select" none="none" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data">A rally in </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracas" title="Caracas" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Caracas</a> during the recall effort in 2004.</div></div></div>In August 2003, about 3.2 million signatures were presented by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BAmate" title="Súmate" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Súmate</a>, a Venezuelan volunteer civil association, founded in 2002. These signatures were rejected by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on the grounds that they had been collected prematurely; i.e., before the midpoint of the presidential term.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]In September 2003, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist" title="The Economist" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The Economist</a> reported that the government used a "rapid reaction" squad to raid the offices of CNE (the government body overseeing the petition drive), where the petitions were stored.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a>In November 2003, the opposition collected a new set of signatures, with 3.6 million names produced in four days. The CNE rejected the petition, saying that only 1.9 million were valid, while 1.1 million were dubious and 460,000 completely invalid.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">citation needed</a>] Reaction to the decision to reject the petition (for the second time) resulted in riots that led to nine dead, 339 arrested, and 1,200 injured.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]The petitioners appealed to the Electoral Chamber of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_Supreme_Tribunal_of_Justice" class="mw-redirect" title="Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Venezuelan Supreme Court</a>. The court reinstated over 800,000 of the disputed signatures, bringing the total to 2.7 million[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">citation needed</a>], above the 2.4 million needed to authorise the referendum. However, about a week later, the Constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court overturned the Electoral chamber's ruling alleging that the latter did not have jurisdiction for that ruling.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">citation needed</a>]The list of signatories was subsequently collected by the government.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-Al%C3%B3_Presidente_N%C2%B0180-12" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[12]</a>The names of petition signers were posted publicly online in what became known as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasc%C3%B3n_List" title="Tascón List" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Tascón List</a>. The president of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_Workers_Confederation" class="mw-redirect" title="Venezuelan Workers Confederation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Venezuelan Workers Confederation</a> was quoted by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press" title="Associated Press" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Associated Press</a> as claiming that the Chávez government had begun dismissing petition signers from government ministries, the state oil company, the state water company, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracas_Metro" title="Caracas Metro" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Caracas Metro</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_hospital" title="Public hospital" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">public hospitals</a> and municipal governments controlled by Chávez's party.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>] The Associated Press also quoted Venezuela's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Minister" class="mw-redirect" title="Health Minister" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Health Minister</a> as justifying petition related layoffs by saying "all those who have signed to activate the recall referendum against President Chávez should be fired from the Health Ministry". He retracted these remarks several days later by saying that they were his own personal opinions and not a matter of public policy.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]As a compromise, the CNE set aside five days in May 2004 to allow the owners of disputed signatures to confirm that they did, in fact, back the referendum call: this was known as the reparo process. At the end of that verification effort, the total number of signatures stood at 2,436,830, according to the CNE. Thus, the target had been reached and the referendum could take place. During that time, thousands of forged ID cards and equipment to create forged ID cards were confiscated by the police. Supporters of Chávez believed that the opposition used these to forge signatures. The opposition claimed that the equipment and the ID cards were planted.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[13]</a>The CNE later admitted that 15,863 signatures of those signatures that were verified in May 2004 belonged to people who had died in 2003.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Timing[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: Timing" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>The date chosen for the recall referendum was significant: had the recall vote been held on 19 August or later, Chávez would have been into the fifth year of his six-year term and had he been voted out, Vice President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Vicente_Rangel" title="José Vicente Rangel" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">José Vicente Rangel</a> would have taken over and served out the rest of Chávez's presidency (in accordance with Article 233 of the Constitution, above). With the vote called for 15 August, Chávez was not yet into the last two years of his term in office; an unfavourable result would therefore have meant the calling of fresh presidential elections within the following 30 days. Chávez had expressed his clear intention to stand in the election, had he been recalled; the opposition factions, however, maintained that he would have been disqualified from doing so.<h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Campaign</h2><table class="box-Expand_section plainlinks metadata ambox mbox-small-left ambox-content" role="presentation" style="margin: 4px 1em 4px 0px; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 10px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(162, 169, 177) rgb(162, 169, 177) rgb(162, 169, 177) rgb(242, 133, 0); border-image: initial; background-color: rgb(251, 251, 251); box-sizing: border-box; overflow: hidden; width: 238px; border-collapse: collapse; line-height: 1.25em;"><tbody><tr><td class="mbox-image" style="border: none; padding: 2px 0px 2px 0.5em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg" class="image" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><img alt="[icon]" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg/20px-Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg.png" decoding="async" width="20" height="14" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg/30px-Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg/40px-Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="44" data-file-height="31" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /></a></td><td class="mbox-text" style="border: none; padding: 0.25em 0.5em; width: 187.688px;"><div class="mbox-text-span">This section needs expansion. You can help by <a class="external text" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none !important; padding: 0px !important;">adding to it</a>. (January 2009)</div></td></tr></tbody></table>Between late May 2004, when the CNE set the referendum date, and 15 August, the date chosen, a contentious campaign took place, with both sides convinced of victory. Late on, however, with some signs that the referendum would fail, the opposition appeared to become increasingly desperate.<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Claims of foreign interference[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=6" title="Edit section: Claims of foreign interference" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BAmate" title="Súmate" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Súmate</a> (the civial association organizing the recall effort) received a US$ $31,000 grant in September 2003 from the United States <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy" title="National Endowment for Democracy" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">National Endowment for Democracy</a>, an organisation funded by the United States government. The grant, earmarked for "election education", was used to promote voter education about the constitutional recall process.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[14]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-15" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[15]</a> The Chávez government prosecuted four Súmate officials for high treason and conspiracy, for accepting funds from the U.S. Congress.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-16" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[16]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-17" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[17]</a> Chávez supporters see the Súmate NED grant as an example of the U.S. intent to overthrow him.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-18" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[18]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-20" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[20]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Polls[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=7" title="Edit section: Polls" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Although support for Chávez had been low in 2003 and early 2004, polling data showed a shift as the campaign got under way. Most polls, including those by firms linked to the opposition which had showed low support for Chávez in 2003 and early 2004, predicted a rejection of the recall in the weeks before the referendum.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-HellingerLAP328-21" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[21]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-22" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[22]</a>Numerous pre-referendum polls, both by opposition and by pro-Chávez groups, during the previous months and weeks predicted the No vote to win by a margin of between 5% and 31%. For example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenberg_Quinlan_Rosner_Research&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research</a> Inc. and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DATOS&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="DATOS (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">DATOS</a>, both commissioned by the opposition, found margins in favour of No by 5% and 12% respectively in June 2004;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-23" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[23]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-24" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[24]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datan%C3%A1lisis&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Datanálisis (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Datanálisis</a> found a margin of 14% in favour of Chávez in June.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-25" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[25]</a> On 11 August, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W.Jensen" class="mw-redirect" title="Robert W. Jensen" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Jensen</a> wrote that recent polls ranged from 8% to 31% for margins in favour of the No vote.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-26" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[26]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">The ballot[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=8" title="Edit section: The ballot" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><table class="box-Unreferenced_section plainlinks metadata ambox ambox-content ambox-Unreferenced" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 134.594px; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 10px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(162, 169, 177) rgb(162, 169, 177) rgb(162, 169, 177) rgb(242, 133, 0); border-image: initial; background-color: rgb(251, 251, 251); box-sizing: border-box;"><tbody><tr><td class="mbox-image" style="border: none; padding: 2px 0px 2px 0.5em; text-align: center;"><div style="width: 52px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Question_book-new.svg" class="image" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/99/Question_book-new.svg/50px-Question_book-new.svg.png" decoding="async" width="50" height="39" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/99/Question_book-new.svg/75px-Question_book-new.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/99/Question_book-new.svg/100px-Question_book-new.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="512" data-file-height="399" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /></a></div></td><td class="mbox-text" style="border: none; padding: 0.25em 0.5em; width: 986px;"><div class="mbox-text-span">This section does not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources" title="Wikipedia:Citing sources" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">cite</a> any <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability" title="Wikipedia:Verifiability" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">sources</a>. Please help <a class="external text" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none !important; padding: 0px !important;">improve this section</a> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_referencing_with_Wiki_Markup/1" title="Help:Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup/1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">adding citations to reliable sources</a>. Unsourced material may be challenged and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden_of_evidence" title="Wikipedia:Verifiability" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">removed</a>. (March 2010) (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Maintenance_template_removal" title="Help:Maintenance template removal" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Learn how and when to remove this template message</a>)</div></td></tr></tbody></table>The following question was put to the Venezuelan electorate:<dl style="margin-top: 0.2em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">¿Está usted de acuerdo con dejar sin efecto el mandato popular otorgado mediante elecciones democráticas legítimas al ciudadano Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías como presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela para el actual período presidencial? ¿NO o SÍ?</dd></dl>Translated into English:<dl style="margin-top: 0.2em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">Do you agree to revoke, for the current term, the popular mandate as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela conferred on citizen Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías through democratic and legitimate elections? NO or YES?</dd></dl>For the recall to be successful, there were three conditions:<ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="%225%22" height="%2213%22%3E" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="%222.5%22" cy="%229%22" r="%222.5%22" fill="%22%23222%22/%3E" c="C" e="E" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">A turnout of at least 25% of the country's 14.25 million registered voters.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">More anti-Chávez votes than the number who voted for him in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela_presidential_election,2000" class="mw-redirect" title="Venezuela presidential election, 2000" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2000 presidential election</a> (3.76 million).</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">More "yes" votes cast than "no" votes.</li></ul><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">The day of the referendum[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=9" title="Edit section: The day of the referendum" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>Polling stations opened at 6 am Venezuelan time on 15 August 2004. Later in the day, faced with a 70% turnout, lengthy queues of waiting voters, and delays exacerbated by the use of novel electronic voting equipment and fingerprint scanners, the electoral authorities agreed to extend the close of voting twice: a four-hour extension of the deadline that took it to 8 p.m., followed by an additional four hours announced later in the evening, which took it to midnight.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]A record number of voters turned out to defeat the recall attempt with a 59% "no" vote.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-27" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[27]</a> Former U.S. president <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter" title="Jimmy Carter" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jimmy Carter</a>, who was in Venezuela to observe the electoral process, said of the patiently waiting Venezuelan electors, "This is the largest turnout I have ever seen." In previous presidential elections, turnout figures were at an average 55%.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-Galeano-28" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[28]</a>All Venezuelans aged 18 and up whose names appear on the electoral roll were eligible to vote, including those residing abroad: polling stations were set up in Venezuelan embassies and consulates abroad.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Fake recording[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=10" title="Edit section: Fake recording" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>At 15h50 local time on 15 August, CNE rector Jorge Rodríguez and CNE president Francisco Carrasquero announced on national television that they had found an audio CD where a faked voice of Carrasquero declared that the opposition has won the referendum with a total of 11,436,086 "yes" votes, and that Chávez's mandate was thereby revoked. Since this was several hours before the closing of the polling booths, and since Carrasquero declared the recording to be fake, this appeared to be a case of attempted sabotage of the referendum. The attorney-general was called on to conduct a full inquiry into the incident and to locate and arrest those responsible for the spurious audio recording.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-29" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[29]</a>Journalist Fausto Malavé told the Venezuelan opposition press that the recording was an evident parody that had been circulating in city streets for at least two months, claiming that it was surprising that it was only brought to public attention then. He also expressed concern at the significance that was attributed to it by the CNE.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-30" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[30]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Exit poll[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=11" title="Edit section: Exit poll" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinadora_Democr%C3%A1tica(Venezuela)" title="Coordinadora Democrática (Venezuela)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Coordinadora Democrática</a> commissioned an exit poll from the American firm of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn,Schoen%26_Berland" class="mw-redirect" title="Penn, Schoen & Berland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Penn, Schoen & Berland</a>, which showed Chávez losing by a 60–40 margin. PSB used volunteers from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BAmate" title="Súmate" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Súmate</a>, a NGO which was the primary organizer of the recall referendum, and involved around 200 polling places<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-Barone-31" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[31]</a> out of 8500. With over 20,000 responses the exit poll produced a much larger amount of data than most opinion polls (typically around 1000 responses), leading to an extremely low <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_error" title="Sampling error" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">sampling error</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-32" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[32]</a>Publication or broadcast of exit polls was banned by electoral authorities, but results of the PSB poll went out to media outlets and opposition offices several hours before polls closed.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-33" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[33]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter" title="Jimmy Carter" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Jimmy Carter</a> said that Súmate "deliberately distributed this erroneous exit poll data in order to build up, not only the expectation of victory, but also to influence the people still standing in line".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_accuse_opposition-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Result</h2><table border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: right; clear: right; text-align: center; margin: 0em 0em 1em 1em;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez" title="Hugo Chávez" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Hugo Chávez</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Venezuela" title="Elections in Venezuela" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Election</a> Results</td></tr><tr style="background: rgb(246, 246, 255);"><th>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_recall_referendum,2004" class="mw-redirect" title="Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2004 recall referendum</a> —
Recall Hugo Chávez?
Source: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.cne.gov.ve/referendum_presidencial2004/" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="%2212%22" height="%2212%22%3E" cpath="Cpath" fill="%22%23fff%22" stroke="%22%2336c%22" d="%22M9.995" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" e="E" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" c="C" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data">CNE data</a></th></tr><tr><td><table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" style="text-align: center; margin: 1px;"><tbody><tr><th>Candidate</th><th>Votes</th><th>%</th></tr><tr><td>No:</td><td>5,800,629</td><td>59%</td></tr><tr><td>Yes:</td><td>3,989,008</td><td>41%</td></tr><tr><td>Non-voting:</td><td>4,222,269</td><td>30%</td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>The preliminary result was announced on 16 August 2004 on national television and radio after 94% of the vote had been counted.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-34" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[34]</a><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" csvg="Csvg" width="%225%22" height="%2213%22%3E" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="%222.5%22" cy="%229%22" r="%222.5%22" fill="%22%23222%22/%3E" c="C" e="E" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" xmlns="%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">No:  4,991,483 = 58%</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Yes: 3,576,517 = 42%<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-35" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[35]</a></li></ul>According to these early-morning results, the first condition (a quorum of 25% of the electorate) had been satisfied. The second condition (more votes against Chávez than he received in 2000) would probably be satisfied. However, the third condition (a simple majority: more people voting "yes" than "no") had clearly failed.<h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Disputes[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum&action=edit&section=13" title="Edit section: Disputes" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Allegations of electoral fraud</h3>After the preliminary results were broadcast, the opposition Coordinadora Democrática declared that fraud had taken place, stating that its own data (the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn,Schoen%26_Berland" class="mw-redirect" title="Penn, Schoen & Berland" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Penn, Schoen & Berland</a> exit poll, which was performed by volunteers from Sumate, the NGO which had organized the referendum) put the "Yes" vote at 59% and the "No" vote at 40%.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-eluniv983-36" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[36]</a> Their exit poll showed the opposite result to the official voting data, predicting that Chávez would lose by 20%, whereas the election results showed him to have won by 20%. A poll company representative, Schoen commented, "I think it was a massive fraud".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-Barone-31" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[31]</a>Coordinadora Democrática also told the press that no opposition representation was present when the votes were counted and that the physical ballots had not yet been taken into account.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-eluniv983-36" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[36]</a>Election observers insisted that no fraud had taken place,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-CEPRBlackSwan-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[1]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-observers-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[2]</a> but scholarly analyses published over the years to come disagreed. A statistical study by Maria M. Febres Cordero and Bernardo Márquez was published in 2006 in a peer-reviewed academic statistics journal.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-corderomarquez-37" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[37]</a> The study used <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis" title="Cluster analysis" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">cluster analysis</a> to review differences in vote patterns between voting certificates on the basis that voters were randomly assigned to certificates (each voting center had on average 2 or 3 certificates, typically for computerised and manual voting systems). It concluded: "[The] Venezuelan opposition has statistical evidence to reject the official results given by the CNE. The irregularities detected were observed consistently in numerous voting centers and the magnitude of the irregularities imply that the official results do not reflect the intention of voters with statistical confidence."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-corderomarquez-37" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[37]</a> They estimated that 56.4% had voted yes to recall Chavez, as opposed to the official result of 41%.The presence of systemic election fraud was also supported by six analyses in a special section in the November 2011 issue of Statistical Science. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raquel_Prado" title="Raquel Prado" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Raquel Prado</a> and Bruno Sansó examined the exit polls;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-38" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[38]</a> Luis Raul Pericchi and David A Torres examined the no-votes against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law" title="Benford's law" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Newcomb-Benford law</a>;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-39" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[39]</a> Isbelia Martin discovered anomalous patterns in telecommunications;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-40" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[40]</a> Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto I. Rigobón analyzed patterns related to exit polls; Raúl Jiménez examined the distribution of valid votes, null votes, and abstentions in each precinct;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-41" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[41]</a> while Gustavo Delfino and Guillermo Salas reported on the anomalous relation between signatures requesting the recall, and the yes-votes.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-42" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[42]</a> The section is introduced by an article written by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_L.Carriquiry" title="Alicia L. Carriquiry" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Alicia L. Carriquiry</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-specialsection-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[4]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-43" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[43]</a> One of the papers, by Hausmann and Rigobón, was a later version of a paper disputed by the Carter Center, and contains a response to that criticism.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-44" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[44]</a>Some individuals have disputed the Center's endorsement of the electoral process in the Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-45" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[45]</a> Fox News' <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Schoen" class="mw-redirect" title="Doug Schoen" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Doug Schoen</a> told Michael Barone at U.S. News and World Report, "Our internal sourcing tells us that there was fraud in the Venezuelan central commission. There are widespread reports of irregularities and evidence of fraud, many of them ably recorded by Mary Anastasia O'Grady in The Wall Street Journal last week. Carter is untroubled by any of this, and declares that Chavez won 'fair and square.'"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-46" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[46]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-47" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[47]</a> The Carter Center looked into the allegations and released a paper and statistical analysis reaffirming their original conclusions.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-:1-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[10]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Process endorsements</h3>The day before the polling, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter expressed confidence that the vote would proceed in a calm and orderly fashion. Carter commented that, "I might project results that will be much more satisfactory than they were in 2000 in Florida".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-48" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[48]</a>On the afternoon of 16 August 2004, Carter and OAS Secretary General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Gaviria" title="César Gaviria" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">César Gaviria</a> gave a joint press conference in which they endorsed the preliminary results announced by the CNE. The monitors' findings "coincided with the partial returns announced today by the National Elections Council" said Carter, while Gaviria added that the OAS electoral observation mission's members had "found no element of fraud in the process". Directing his remarks at opposition figures who made claims of "widespread fraud" in the voting, Carter called on all Venezuelans to "accept the results and work together for the future".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_accept-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[5]</a> The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center" title="Carter Center" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Carter Center</a>"concluded the results were accurate."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_report-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.Department_of_State" class="mw-redirect" title="U.S. Department of State" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">U.S. Department of State</a> accepted that the results of the subsequent audit were "consistent with the results announced by (Venezuela's) National Electoral Council."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-49" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[49]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-50" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[50]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maisto" title="John Maisto" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">John Maisto</a>, U.S. Permanent Representative to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_American_States" title="Organization of American States" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Organization of American States</a>, added that the results of the referendum "speak for themselves", saying that the quest for Venezuelan democracy "does not end with a single electoral process or referendum" and urging the "democratically elected government of Venezuela to address and recognize the legitimate concerns, rights, and aspirations of all of its citizens".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-51" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[51]</a> Regarding the recall effort, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, Maisto also pointed out that Carter had said that " 'expression of the citizen must be privileged over excessive technicalities' in resolving issues surrounding the tabulation of the signatures".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-52" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[52]</a>European Union observers did not oversee the elections, saying too many restrictions were put on their participation by the Chávez administration.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-53" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[53]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Analyses</h3>Economists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Hausmann" title="Ricardo Hausmann" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ricardo Hausmann</a> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University" title="Harvard University" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harvard University</a> and Roberto Rigobón of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Sloan_School_of_Management" title="MIT Sloan School of Management" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">MIT Sloan School of Management</a> performed a statistical analysis at Súmate's request, analyzing how fraud could have occurred during the referendum. They concluded that the vote samples audited by the government were not a random representation of all precincts, noting that the Chávez-backed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electoral_Council(Venezuela)" title="National Electoral Council (Venezuela)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">CNE</a> had "refused to use the random number generating program offered by the Carter Center for the 18 August audit and instead used its own program installed in its own computer and initialed with their own seed." They also noted that opposition witnesses and international observers were not allowed near the computer hub on election day.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-UniversalElectionFraud-54" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[54]</a> According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal" title="The Wall Street Journal" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">the Wall Street Journal</a>, a computer-science professor at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_University" title="Johns Hopkins University" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Johns Hopkins University</a> said, "The Hausmann/Rigobon study is more credible than many of the other allegations being thrown around."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-55" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[55]</a> The Carter Center looked into the allegations and released a paper with a statistical analysis in response; this stated that the audit sample data, in particular the statistical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation" class="mw-redirect" title="Correlation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">correlation</a> between the number of "Yes" voters and the number of petition signatories in each audited voting centre, were consistent with nationwide results, and reaffirmed the Carter Center's earlier conclusions.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-carter_center_analysis-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[7]</a>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Economic_and_Policy_Research" title="Center for Economic and Policy Research" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Center for Economic and Policy Research</a> drew on the Carter Center analysis and elaborated on the issue, criticising Hausmann and Rigobón's statistical model.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-CEPRBlackSwan-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[1]</a> Furthermore, the CEPR analysis noted that "although Hausmann and Rigobón's analysis does not require this data to be accurate, it does require that its errors be uncorrelated with those of the signatures, something that cannot be assumed without any verifiable knowledge or observation of where the data came from.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-56" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[56]</a>Javier Corrales writes in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy_Magazine" class="mw-redirect" title="Foreign Policy Magazine" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Foreign Policy Magazine</a> that the opposition was "shocked not so much by the results as by the ease with which international observers condoned the Electoral Council's flimsy audit of the results."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-HugoBoss-57" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[57]</a> The sample for the audit was selected by the government controlled National Electoral Council, and according to the opposition was not of sufficient size to be statistically reliable.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Venezuelan_recall_referendum#cite_note-58" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[58]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">See also</h2><div>...</div><div></div><div>reportedly at</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://commonwealthfoundation.com/">https://commonwealthfoundation.com/</a></div><div>=</div><div><div id="thread_lister_ctrl" style="margin: 7px 4px 8px; width: calc(100% - 17px); display: table;"><div style="display: table-cell;"><div id="thread_lister_ctrl_nav" style="line-height: 16px; margin-right: 75px;">Hugo Chávez's thugs celebrate their "victory" by shooting my mother</div></div><div id="thread_lister_opt" style="display: table-cell; text-align: right; line-height: 16px; margin-right: 5px; vertical-align: middle; width: 135px;">(</div></div><div class="post" id="post1" style="margin-bottom: -1px;"><div class="post_body parsed" style="padding: 7px 9px; outline: none 0px; overflow: hidden; position: relative; border-left: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); border-right: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); line-height: 20px; letter-spacing: 0px;">posted by pedro martori  15 years agoBY THOR L. HALVORSSEN
Thursday, August 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT</div><div class="post_body parsed" style="padding: 7px 9px; outline: none 0px; overflow: hidden; position: relative; border-left: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); border-right: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); line-height: 20px; letter-spacing: 0px;">
CARACAS, Venezuela--On Monday afternoon, dozens of people assembled in the Altamira Plaza, a public square in a residential neighborhood here that has come to symbolize nonviolent dissent in Venezuela. The crowd was there to question the accuracy of the results that announced a triumph for President Hugo Chávez in Sunday's recall referendum.</div><div class="post_body parsed" style="padding: 7px 9px; outline: none 0px; overflow: hidden; position: relative; border-left: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); border-right: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(143, 241, 255); line-height: 20px; letter-spacing: 0px;">
Within one hour of the gathering, just over 100 of Lt. Col. Chávez's supporters, many of them brandishing his trademark army parachutist beret, began moving down the main avenue towards the crowd in the square. Encouraged by their leader's victory, this bully-boy group had been marching through opposition neighborhoods all day. They were led by men on motorcycles with two-way radios. From afar they began to taunt the crowd in the square, chanting, "We own this country now," and ordering the people in the opposition crowd to return to their homes. All of this was transmitted live by the local news station. The Chávez group threw bottles and rocks at the crowd. Moments later a young woman in the square screamed for the crowd to get down as three of the men with walkie-talkies, wearing red T-shirts with the insignia of the government-funded "Bolivarian Circle," revealed their firearms. They began shooting indiscriminately into the multitude.

A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back as she ran for cover. The bullet ripped through her aorta, kidney and stomach. She later bled to death in the emergency room. An opposition congressman was shot in the shoulder and remains in critical care. Eight others suffered severe gunshot wounds. Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother.

I spoke with her minutes before the doctors cut open her wounds. She looked at me, frightened and traumatized, and sobbed: "I was sure they were going to kill me, they just kept shooting at me."

In a jarringly similar attack that took place three years ago, the killers were caught on tape and identified as government officials and employees. They were briefly detained--only to be released and later praised by Col. Chávez in his weekly radio show. Their identities are no secret and they walk the streets as free men, despite having shot unarmed civilian demonstrators in cold blood.

I was not in the square on Monday. I was preparing a complaint for the National Electoral Council regarding the fact that I had been mysteriously erased from the voter rolls and was prevented from casting a vote on Sunday. In indescribable agony I watched the television as my mother and my elderly grandparents--who were both trampled and bruised in the panic--became casualties in Venezuela's ongoing political crisis.

Col. Chávez assumed power in 1999. One need not go into great detail about the deterioration of Venezuelan life since then to understand why a recall referendum has been years in the making. Every aspect of existence has worsened. The only people who are not profoundly affected are those at the highest levels of the government party. Poverty, for instance, is at an all-time high and the country is afflicted, for the first time ever recorded, with malnutrition on a massive scale. This unprecedented suffering has occurred during the greatest oil boom in the nation's history (Venezuela has oil reserves on the scale of those in Iraq). Col. Chávez and his "revolution" have not only led a ferocious assault on civil liberties, but have also needlessly alienated one of Venezuela's closest allies, the U.S.

The recall referendum process has been obstructed and delayed at every turn. Dozens of independent polls predicted defeat for Col. Chávez, who did everything--including granting citizenship to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme and "migrating" existing voters away from their local election office--to fix the results in his favor. One opposition leader was moved to a voting center in a city seven hours away. Another man, Miguel Romero, had for years voted in his neighborhood school in a Caracas suburb. But this time the Electoral Council computer indicated that he was to vote at the Venezuelan Embassy in Stockholm. Thousands of others, like me, were wiped from the voting rolls. Ironically, in the runup to the vote, the embassy in Stockholm, like Venezuelan diplomatic posts around the world, inexplicably ran out of passports. Many Venezuelan expatriates were thus prevented from returning to their country to vote.

In the early hours of Monday, the Electoral Council's president (who had imposed a gag order on all exit polls until a full audit of the vote had been completed) issued a statement declaring that the computer votes had been tallied and that the government had won the referendum with 58% of the vote. The announcement came in a vacuum, without an audit, with no verification whatsoever from the international observers, and over the indignant protest of two of the five council members, who publicly questioned the result's transparency.

The opposition, understandably shocked and demoralized, insisted on a hand-count of all computer voting receipts as the only way of settling the dramatic disparity between exit polls that showed 58% to 41% in favor of the recall and the announced result of 58% to 41% in favor of retaining Col. Chávez. Later that morning the most important observer, former President Jimmy Carter, declared that he was shown the computer tally by government supporters and that everything seemed in order. Mr. Carter then left Venezuela, and the opposition groups that had put their faith in him to facilitate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Mr. Carter, who was vociferous and insistent about patience, transparency and hand-tallies during the Florida recount, left Venezuela to attend Mrs. Carter's birthday party.

Many in the opposition are baffled by the inverse relationship between the projected numbers and those reported by the Chávez regime. One possible clue to this remarkable phenomenon lies with the companies hired to supply the voting machines and the software. Smartmatic Corp., a Florida company that has never before supplied election machinery, is owned by two Venezuelans. The software came from Bizta Software, owned by the same two people. The Miami Herald recently revealed that the Chávez regime spent $200,000 last year to purchase 28% of Bizta and put a government official and longtime Chávez ally on the board. After the story broke, Bizta bought back the government-held shares and the official resigned from the board. But not until after the two companies were granted a significant part of the $91 million contract for the referendum. Executives at both Smartmatic and Bizta have denied any political allegiance to the Chávez regime and have issued public statements saying the contract was awarded purely on the merits.

Col. Chávez has publicly stated that the results of the referendum are irreversible and permanent and that the revolution will now intensify. He is firmly in control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government; the armed forces; electoral bodies and two-thirds of the country's economy.

In a free and decent society, it is not a crime to differ with the democratic government. The vast distance between democracy and contemporary Venezuela may be seen in the depth of Col. Chávez's disregard for Monday's bloodbath. Blithely ignoring the overwhelming video evidence that a massacre had taken place in his name, he minimized the incident's importance and suggested that the gunmen were most likely linked to opposition groups. His reactions chillingly indicate the fate that might befall the millions of Venezuelans who oppose him, and who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid political violence in registering their dissent by peaceful protest or by vote.

Mr. Halvorssen is First Amendment scholar at The Commonwealth Foundation. He lives in New York.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005494</div></div></div><div></div><div>wsj exerpt</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398">https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398</a></div><div><div>The Price of Dissent in Venezuela</div><div>By Thor L. Halvorssen</div><div>Updated Aug. 19, 2004 12:01 am ET</div></div><div>
</div><div>CARACAS, Venezuela -- On Monday afternoon, dozens of people assembled in the Altamira Plaza, a public square in a residential neighborhood here that has come to symbolize nonviolent dissent in Venezuela. The crowd was there to question the accuracy of the results that announced a triumph for President Hugo Chavez in Sunday's recall referendum....</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/">https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/</a></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>==</div><div><a href="http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0308/PG0308_feature3.pdf">http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0308/PG0308_feature3.pdf</a></div><div>
</div><div>my dinner w/ (fluff?)</div><div>
</div><div>m its space in Irvine Auditorium and

back issues were trashed—either a “deliberate and malicious attempt at sabotaging The Red & Blue,”as Halvorssen told the

DP at the time, or because the magazine

hadn’t kept up with the paperwork required

to save the space (according to the Office

of Student Life)—Halvorssen demanded a

full-scale investigation. When the Student

Activities Council rescinded recognition

and funding for the publication over its

general rightward political slant and one

particularly controversial article about

Haiti, Halvorssen led the fight for its

restoration. (He also put out an issue

without SAC funding, paid for, he said

at the time, by “lovers of liberty.”) The

controversy would help lead to a change

in SAC rules banning funding decisions

based on a student group’s politics.

In time, Halvorseen says, The Red &

Blue “went from being a magazine that

nobody wanted to read to being the

most popular magazine on campus.

When the head of the gay and lesbian

association came out as a Republican,

he wrote his essay in our magazine.

Talk about diversity: Whereas Penn

had a wonderful diversity of color and

sexuality and race and nationalities, it

was kind of lacking in diversity of

opinion—and we provided it...</div><div>
</div><div>alvorssen’s first post-graduation

job, on Wall Street, lasted exactly three

days. “I realized … that this was not

what I want to do with my life,” he says.

Halvorssen recalls that the idea for FIRE,

which would defend civil liberties at

universities, developed over a bottle of

wine with Dr. Alan Charles Kors, now

the George H. Walker Endowed Term

Professor of History at Penn and the

co-author, with Harvey A. Silverglate, of

The Shadow University: The Betrayal of

Liberty on America’s Campuses (1998).

As FIRE’s executive director, Halvorssen

lived in Washington Square—“my commute

was 60 seconds”—and used to pass the

square’s Revolutionary War Tomb of the

Unknown Soldier on the way to the office.

Behind the statue of George Washington,

he says, was an inscription reading:

“Freedom is a light for which many men

have died in darkness,” reminding him

daily of the struggle waged “against tyranny, so that we could be free.”

Now, he says, “I have the extraordinary

luxury of fighting for freedom in a country where you’re not going to get arrested

or taken away in the middle of the night

for standing up for human freedom. And

that’s really remarkable. People say,

‘Faculty members who do this are so courageous, or students.’ No, no, students in

Tiananmen Square—they’re courageous.

Students in Venezuela marching against

Chávez—they’re courageous. Students in

Cuba are courageous … Standing up and

fighting for freedom in the United States

does not take courage. What surprises me

is that more people aren’t doing it.”

Over time, Halvorssen came to see

“defending [college] students’ rights while

there were people in Venezuela being sh</div><div>...</div><div>irected, and produced by Amy Serrano.

It details the collusion of sugar planters and the Dominican government in

trafficking Haitian sugarcane workers

and the desperate poverty in which the

workers live. The film, which has been

the subject of protests and alleged

bribery attempts by the Dominican

government, is being shown at film

festivals, and Serrano says that she is

“very grateful” for the Human Rights

Foundation’s financial support.

Even as he was getting the foundation

off the ground, Halvorssen was creating

the Moving Picture Institute because “I

didn’t want someone else to build MPI

before I did.” </div><div>
</div><div>While he has no official position at the institute, he has been a producer on several MPI films. Hammer &

Tickle uses animation to detail the history

of humor under Communism. The Singing

Revolution is a moving depiction of how

music helped the Estonians launch their

democratic revolution, while Freedom’s

Fury (whose producers also include

Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu) focuses

on the bloody Olympic battle between the

Soviet and Hungarian water polo teams

after the failed Hungarian Revolution,

For Indoctrinate U, Halvorssen matched

Maloney with an editor, Chandler Tuttle,

who added professional polish. “He’s the

guy who understood not only what we

were looking for, but knew exactly the

right person to provide it,” Maloney says.

And MPI has been instrumental in promoting the film, the director adds. A

website (www.indoctrinate-u.com) invites

potential viewers to vote for a screening

in their city of choice.

Halvorssen spent much of the fall overseeing a short narrative film, Harrison

Bergeron, based on a Kurt Vonnegut story

and directed by Tuttle —his toughest project yet, he says. “It’s about a future in which

if you are good at anything, you have to be

handicapped,” he explains. Only Harrison

Bergeron—“a true Adonis, a genius”—resists

and “delivers a speech about excellence

and achievement, and most importantly

about individualism.” The story attracted

him with its tale of “the danger posed by a

rogue state, and the willingness that heroes

have to die for what they believe in.”

While the privately funded Human

Rights Foundation and MPI are separate entities, Halvorssen is their point

of convergence. So it’s not surprisin...</div><div>[olso conf templeton $]</div><div>
</div><div>y now, we’ve finished the truffled

risotto, the lobster, the exquisite bass

fillets and chicken and our different

chocolate desserts. To our horror, the

waiter wheels out a cart loaded with

chocolate truffles, meringues, and other

candies, clearly too much of a good

thing. We fill our plates.

After Penn, “I was expecting to go

back home,” Halvorssen says. “Things

didn’t turn out that way. I fell in love

with the American experiment. I love,

love, love this country: what it means

and what it represents. It has flaws. The

remarkable thing about this country is

that it recognizes its flaws. This country

is a beacon. This is not some racist, sexist nation. There’s a reason why people

get into leaky boats and come here, and

not the other way around.”◆

Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in

Philadelphia, writes for The New York Times, Wall

Street Journal, Mother Jones, Chronicle of Higher

Education, and other publications. </div><div></div><div>
</div><div>HildaMargarita de la Coromoto Denham (born Mendoza Coburn 1917</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAAQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFSgAMAZ6BAgAEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><a href="https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%2520goiticoa&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAGegQIABAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><a href="https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%2520goiticoa&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAGegQIABAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"></a><a href="https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%2520goiticoa&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAGegQIABAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%2520goiticoa&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAGegQIABAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%2520goiticoa&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAGegQIABAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%2520goiticoa&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAGegQIABAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">Hilda Mendoza Goiticoa - Historical records and family trees ...</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://www.myheritage.com/names/hilda_mendoza%20goiticoa</cite></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;">Explore historical records and family tree profiles about Hilda Mendoza ... They had 2 children: HildaMargarita de la Coromoto Denham (born Mendoza Coburn) ...</div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAMQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFSgAMAd6BAgDEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"></a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAHegQIAxAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">Thor Halvorssen (human rights activist) - Wikipedia</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)</cite></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=hilda+mendoza+denham&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi47YqNsJTjAhUSV80KHdJRBDcQ1QIoBHoECAsQBQ&biw=1588&bih=740#" id="am-b7" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0Q7B0wB3oECAMQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; background-image: none; border: 0px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 0px; filter: none; width: 13px; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block;"><span class="mn-dwn-arw" style="border-color: rgb(0, 102, 33) transparent; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px 4px 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; margin-left: 3px; top: 7.5px; margin-top: -4px; position: absolute; left: 0px;" /></a><div class="action-menu-panel ab_dropdown" role="menu" tabindex="-1" jsaction="keydown:m.hdke;mouseover:m.hdhne;mouseout:m.hdhue" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QqR8wB3oECAMQAw" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; white-space: nowrap; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s ease 0s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OaF4ZnJ25j4J:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OaF4ZnJ25j4J:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)%2B%26cd%3D8%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAHegQIAxAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;" /></li><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?biw=1588&bih=740&q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+hilda+mendoza+denham&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QHzAHegQIAxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;" /></li></ol></div></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?biw=1588&bih=740&q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+hilda+mendoza+denham&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QHzAHegQIAxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"></a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?biw=1588&bih=740&q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+hilda+mendoza+denham&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QHzAHegQIAxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"></a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?biw=1588&bih=740&q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+hilda+mendoza+denham&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QHzAHegQIAxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"></a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?biw=1588&bih=740&q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+hilda+mendoza+denham&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QHzAHegQIAxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">Thor Leonardo Halvorssen Mendoza (born 1976)—commonly known as Thor Halvorssen —is ... Halvorssen was born in Venezuela to Hilda Mendoza, a descendant and a relative, respectively, of Venezuela's first ... recall referendum of 2004, Halvorssen's mother, Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject, was shot.</a><div class="osl" style="margin-top: 0px;"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?biw=1588&bih=740&q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)+hilda+mendoza+denham&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QHzAHegQIAxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">‎</a><a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)#Background" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)%23Background&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0Q0gIoADAHegQIAxAH" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; line-height: 1.54;">Background</a> · ‎<a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)#Mother's_shooting" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)%23Mother%27s_shooting&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0Q0gIoATAHegQIAxAI" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; line-height: 1.54;">Mother's shooting</a> · ‎<a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)#Activism" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)%23Activism&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0Q0gIoAjAHegQIAxAJ" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; line-height: 1.54;">Activism</a> · ‎<a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)#Film" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Halvorssen(human_rights_activist)%23Film&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0Q0gIoAzAHegQIAxAK" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; line-height: 1.54;">Film</a></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAEQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFSgAMAh6BAgBEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"></a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"></a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAIegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">The Price of Dissent in Venezuela - WSJ</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109287081358495398</cite></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;">Aug 19, 2004 - Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from ...</div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAQQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFSgAMAl6BAgEEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"></a><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" /><a href="https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QFjAJegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">Chavez goons shoot Thor Halvorssen's mother - The Locker Room ...</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/.../chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-moth...</cite></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=hilda+mendoza+denham&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi47YqNsJTjAhUSV80KHdJRBDcQ1QIoBHoECAsQBQ&biw=1588&bih=740#" id="am-b9" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0Q7B0wCXoECAQQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; 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cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"></a><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/%2B%26cd%3D10%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAJegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">Aug 19, 2004 - Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from ...</a></div></div></div></div></div><div><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/%2B%26cd%3D10%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAJegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"></a><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/%2B%26cd%3D10%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAJegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">BAK</a><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/%2B%26cd%3D10%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAJegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">
</a><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/%2B%26cd%3D10%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAJegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">=</a><div style=""><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:OwBHmNly1_sJ:https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2004/08/19/chavez-goons-shoot-thor-halvorssens-mother/%2B%26cd%3D10%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwim28uasJTjAhUULs0KHR37AW0QIDAJegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">619 bak</a></div><div style="">mom shot?
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<div style="">see weekly std puff simon bolivar</div><div style=""></div><div style="">https://electronicintifada.net/content/neo-cons-ex-israeli-diplomats-push-islamophobic-video/7731</div><div style=""><h1 class="pagetitle title balance-text" id="page-title" style="line-height: 1; margin: 1.5rem 0px; font-weight: normal;">Neo-cons, ex-Israeli diplomats push Islamophobic video</h1><div class="sumud-region-main"><article class="node-7731 node node-story view-mode-full node-is-page image-portrait" about="/content/neo-cons-ex-israeli-diplomats-push-islamophobic-video/7731" typeof="sioc:Item foaf:Document"><header class="nodeheader"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-gharib" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Ali Gharib</a> and <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/eli-clifton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Eli Clifton</a> <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/electronic-intifada" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none;">The Electronic Intifada</a> 24 September 2008</header>WASHINGTON (IPS) - A group of hard-line United States neo-conservatives and former Israeli diplomats, among others, are behind the mass distribution, ahead of the November US presidential election, of a controversial DVD that critics have denounced as Islamophobic.The group, the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), is working with another organization called the Clarion Fund, which produced the 60-minute video and is itself tied closely to an Israeli organization called Aish Hatorah.The Fund is currently distributing some 28 million copies of the DVD through newspaper inserts in key electoral “swing” states — states like Michigan, Ohio, and Florida that, according to recent polling, could go either way in November’s presidential election.According to Delaware incorporation papers, the Clarion Fund is based at the same New York address as Aish Hatorah, a self-described “apolitical” group dedicated to educating Jews about their heritage.The Clarion Fund’s street address as listed on the group’s website and a DVD mailer for the film is apparently not a physical address, but rather a “virtual address” that goes to a post office box in New York City.Critics allege that the movie Obsession is “hate propaganda” which paints Muslims as violent extremists and, among other things, explicitly compares the threat posed by radical Islam to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.At least two major metropolitan newspapers solicited to insert the paid advertisement into their product have refused to do so because of a perceived bias in the film.“Despite the perilous state of American newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch advertising department took an ethical stand and refused to distribute the DVD of a film that for two years has troubled American Muslims,” wrote Tim Townsend, a reporter at Missouri’s most influential newspaper earlier this month after it rejected the ad.While the initial press reports about the mass distribution focused on the Clarion Fund’s financing role, it was EMET that organized and oversaw the distribution, EMET’s spokesman, Ari Morgenstern, told IPS. Morgenstern, a former press officer for the Israeli embassy here, said he contacted IPS at the Clarion Fund’s request.EMET, according to a recent press release, is “a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to policy research and analysis on democracy and the Middle East.”According to filings made in compliance with the organization’s tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, “the organization hosts seminars, debates and educational films featuring Middle East experts in order to educate policy makers and the public at large on the common threats facing Israel and the United States.”Morgenstern told IPS that EMET was “partnered with the Clarion Fund” on what he called the “Obsession Project” which he identified as “an initiative of EMET.” He declined to name the Project’s donors. A spokesman for the Clarion Fund, Gregory Ross, has also refused to name the Fund’s donors, whose identity remains a mystery.Morgenstern also declined to specify the cost of the DVD distribution, but did say, “it costs a great deal — it’s a multi-million-dollar effort.” Outside experts have estimated the cost of the operation, including reproduction and distribution, at between $15 million and $50 million.Like hard-line neo-conservatives, EMET opposes any land concessions to Palestinians and takes other hard-line positions identified with Israel’s right-wing Likud Party and the “Settler Lobby” there. EMET’s website says, “We regard ourselves as ‘intellectual revolutionaries.’”The group’s acronym, EMET, mirrors the name of a predecessor to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which was called Emet. The word means “truth” in Hebrew.Two weeks ago, EMET sponsored a seminar series on Capitol Hill named for the controversial multi-billionaire casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major donor to right-wing Zionist organizations in the US; the far-right lobby group, Freedom’s Watch; and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), whose efforts to persuade Jewish voters that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is aligned with radical anti-Israel forces in the Islamic world have drawn strong criticism from the mainstream Jewish press here.EMET’s board of advisers includes a list of familiar neo-conservative figures, as well as three former Israeli diplomats, including a former deputy chief of mission in Israel’s Washington embassy.The group is headed by Sarah Stern, who began her activism on Israeli issues in opposition to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestinians. She made a career out of her activism in the far-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) as its national policy coordinator from 1998 through 2004.Notable members of the advisory board include prominent hard-line neo-conservatives, including former American Ambassador to the UN the late Jeane Kirkpatrick; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; and the Hudson Institute’s Meyrav Wurmser, the Israeli-born spouse of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top Middle East adviser, David Wurmser.Other prominent neo-conservative members of the board include Center for Security Policy (CSP) president Frank Gaffney; former CIA chief James Woolsey; and Heritage Foundation fellows Ariel Cohen and Nina Shea, who has also served for years on the quasi-governmental US Commission for International Religious Freedom.The US-born and -educated hard-line deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post and senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at Gaffney’s CSP, Caroline Glick, is also an adviser.Glick, Pipes, and Walid Shoebat, a “reformed” terrorist and EMET adviser, are all featured as experts in Obsession.Also among the top names of listed advisers to EMET are three Israeli diplomats. Two of them, Ambassadors Yossi Ben Aharon and Yoram Ettinger, were among the three Israeli ambassadors whom then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin referred to as “the Three Musketeers” when they lobbied Washington in opposition to the Oslo accords. Indeed, Stern began her career at the behest of three unnamed Israeli diplomats who were based in Washington under Rabin’s predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, according to EMET’s website.Ettinger was at one time the chairman of special projects and is still listed as a contributing expert at the Ariel Centre for Policy Research, a hard-line Likudist Israeli think tank that opposes the peace process.Ben Aharon was the director general — effectively the chief of staff — of Shamir’s office.The third Israeli ambassador, Lenny Ben-David, was appointed by Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to serve as the deputy chief of mission — second in command — at the Israeli embassy in Washington from 1997 until 2000. Ben-David had also held senior positions at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for 25 years and is now a consultant and lobbyist.But EMET is not the only group involved in the Obsession controversy to have direct ties to Israel.The Clarion Fund has also been criticized for initially denying its ties to the Israel’s Aish Hatorah, which were <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6757.shtml" target="blank">first disclosed publicly by an IPS investigation last year</a>.Honestreporting.com, an organization set up by Aish Hatorah and also a client of Ben-David, admitted to IPS that it had aided the production of the film.The Clarion Fund and Aish Hatorah are headed by twin Israeli-Canadian brothers Raphael and Ephraim Shore, respectively. The two groups appear to be connected as Clarion is incorporated in Delaware to the New York offices of Aish Hatorah.“It seems that the Clarion Fund, from what we can tell, is just a virtual organization that is a front for Aish Hatorah,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told IPS. “They don’t have staff, they don’t have a physical address. Nothing.”Little is known about the shadowy Clarion Fund, which is listed with the New York Secretary of State’s office as a “foreign not-for-profit foundation.” The group has rejected requests for information about its donors.IPS has, however, uncovered one donor to the Clarion Fund, the Mamiye Foundation, which gave it 25,000 dollars in August of 2007, according to tax filings. Four Mamiyes, Charles M., Charles D., Hyman and Abraham, are listed as trustees on the forms.According to filings with the New York Secretary of State, a contact listed for a Mamiye company is also the same man listed as a contact and counsel for the Clarion Fund — Eli D. Greenberg of the law firm Wolf, Haldenstein, Adler, Freeman and Herz.Foreign nationals and companies, and domestic tax-exempt 501(c)3 non-profits are prohibited by federal election law from attempting to sway US elections at any level through either contributions to campaigns or advocacy.Morgenstern, EMET’s spokesman, said that the DVD distribution only went to “swing states” because media attention is focused there, and EMET is hoping to spark a public debate about the threats posed by” radical Islam.”But CAIR has filed a complaint asking the Federal Election Commission to review the actions of the Clarion Fund both as a foreign entity and as a non-profit.The complaint by Nadhira Al-Khalili, CAIR’s legal counsel, asked that both charges be investigated.</article></div></div><div style="">=
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</div><div style=""><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451">https://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451</a></div><div style="">
</div><div style="">An Electronic Intifada investigation uncovers evidence that Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, receives significant funding from the same financiers who support the Islamophobes who inspired anti-Muslim Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik. Despite being presented with this evidence, the Norwegian government and Amnesty International are embracing Halvorssen, a long-time far-right activist and the scion of a politically-connected family tied to Venezuela’s US-backed opposition.This week in <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/oslo">Oslo</a>, hundreds of people from around the world are gathering for the fifth annual <a href="https://www.oslofreedomforum.com/welcome.html">Oslo Freedom Forum</a>, a human rights conference billed as “a three-day summit exploring how best to challenge authoritarianism and promote free and open societies.”Produced by the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/new-york">New York</a>-based Human Rights Foundation (<a href="http://humanrightsfoundation.org/">humanrightsfoundation.org</a>), the event is <a href="http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/supporters.html">sponsored</a> by, among others, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/norway">Norway’s</a> Labor Party government(in the form of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the City of Oslo, and <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/amnesty-international-norway">Amnesty International Norway</a>. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide is scheduled to deliver prepared remarks at the forum.Oslo is still scarred by the murderous rampage carried out by the right-wing extremist <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/anders-behring-breivik">Anders Behring Breivik</a>, a Norwegian citizen who fashioned himself as a crusading knight on a mission to save Europe from the scourge of Muslim immigration.His killing spree began on 22 July 2011 with a bombing that killed eight persons and injured 209 others outside Oslo’s main government building. The violence ended some 25 miles to the north at a summer camp for the youth wing of Norway’s ruling Labor Party, where he massacred 69 persons, most of them children and youths.Breivik insisted the bloodbath was necessary to stop those he saw enabling mass Muslim immigration — those he called “cultural Marxists” and especially the Labor Party — accusing them of “contributing to a process of indirect cultural and demographical genocide.”<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Islamophobe inspirations</h2>The killer outlined his views in a 1,500-page manifesto, listing the far-right Americans who helped radicalize him. They included the most notorious purveyors of anti-Muslim resentment, such as <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/jihad-watch">Jihad Watch</a> founder <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/robert-spencer">Robert Spencer</a>, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/frank-gaffney">Frank Gaffney</a> of the Center for Security Policy, and Middle East Forum director <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/daniel-pipes">Daniel Pipes</a>, whose writings Breivik excerpted at length.Among the suggestions for “Further Study” provided by the killer were links on YouTube to the 2008 propaganda film <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/neo-cons-ex-israeli-diplomats-push-islamophobic-video/7731">Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West</a>, which has been promoted as “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat” (<a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/">Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America</a>, Center For American Progress, 26 August 2011, p. 16).Breivik clearly thought it was powerful too and would help explain and justify his murderous rampage.It is of public record that the Oslo Freedom Forum receives substantial financial support from the Norwegian government. But only a tiny handful of people know that one of the largest donors to the Human Rights Foundation — the producer of the Oslo Freedom Forum — are Donors Capital Fund and its affiliate Donors Trust, Inc.Donors Capital Fund is the same right-wing American foundation that spent millions of dollars to fund the distribution of millions of copies of Obsession, and which has lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on the network of professional <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/islamophobia">Islamophobes</a> that Breivik cited as his inspirations.Donors Capital Fund is only one of several major funders to the Human Rights Foundation that have been among the principal donors or conduits for funding to the Islamophobic hate groups and ideologues who helped radicalize Breivik.One person who certainly knew this is <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/anti-muslim-group-leaps-defense-american-islamic-congress-after-ei-expose">Thor Halvorssen</a>.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Oslo Freedom Forum’s right-wing brainchild</h2>Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is <a href="http://www.thehrf.org/staff.php">listed</a> as the lone staff member. The Oslo Freedom Forum is his brainchild, a confab he has sought to brand as “a Davos for human rights.” The theme of this year’s conference is “Challenging Power.”Halvorssen is also a right-wing activist, film producer and scion of Venezuela’s moneyed elite whose years of involvement in ultra-conservative politics enabled him to corral a small coterie of mostly far-right moneymen into bankrolling his Human Rights Foundation.The Electronic Intifada has obtained Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms filed by the Human Rights Foundation that include previously undisclosed information about its donors.The forms show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Based in Northern Virginia, Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.The Electronic Intifada’s analysis of IRS filings by Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust shows that the Human Rights Foundation received $764,950 from 2005 through 2011 from Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, all but about $5,000 coming through the Donors Capital Fund.“Since the fund handles money from multiple donors and donors names aren’t disclosed, contributions made through the Donors Capital Fund are difficult to trace,” the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/center-american-progress">Center for American Progress</a> noted in its 2011 landmark report “Fear, Inc.” “Potential donors are required to open a minimum $1 million account to utilize the fund’s services.”In 2009, Donors Capital Fund channeled $60 million to various conservative causes and from 2009 through 2011 a whopping $21,318,600 “to groups promoting Islamophobia,” according to the Center for American Progress.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Shadowy nonprofit funds Islamophobic film applauded by Breivik</h2>In 2008, Donors Capital donated $17,778,600 to a shadowy nonprofit called the Clarion Fund — later renamed the Clarion Project (“<a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/clarion_fund_obsession_dvds/">Mystery of who funded right-wing ‘radical Islam’ campaign deepens</a>,” Salon, 16 November 2010).The donation paid for the Clarion Fund’s distribution of the film Obsession during the height of the 2008 presidential campaign — an apparent attempt to tar Democrats and then-Senator <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/barack-obama">Barack Obama</a> as weak on terror.In the film, grainy clips of Nazi youth saluting Adolf Hitler blend into footage of Muslim crowds chanting in unison against Western imperialism. With commentary from a <a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/clarion_fund_obsession_dvds/">who’s who</a> of anti-Muslim activists, including Daniel Pipes, the film implies that political Islam is today’s version of Nazism, and that between 10 and 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population poses an imminent, existential threat to the West.Thanks to this support, some <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/26/the-far-right-s-secret-slush-fund-to-keep-fear-alive/">28 million DVDs</a> of the film were tucked into the Sunday edition of local newspapers and delivered to Americans in swing states across the country. Eventually, the film reached Breivik as well and is applauded in his manifesto.Breivik <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/07/25/278677/islamophobic-right-wing-blogger-breivi/">cited Pipes at least 18 times in his manifesto</a>; in one section, he quoted the far-right scholar commenting, “Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.”Pipes’ Middle East Forum has benefited immensely from the generosity of Donors Capital Fund, reaping $2.3 million from the foundation between 2001 to 2009, according to the Center for American Progress.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Halvorssen responds</h2>In 2010, the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen investigated what it referred to as Thor Halvorssen’s “secret funding,” which it suspected was “associated with the right side of the United States.” Halvorssen told reporter Sarah Sorheim: “I receive money from a variety of different people and environments. But that does not mean I necessarily support their political views.”Sorheim asked him: “why not disclose who your sponsors are?” He deflected, explaining, “Since I got so much attention here in Norway, I’m still thinking about whether I can disclose our lists.”Prior to this investigation by The Electronic Intifada, the full extent of Halvorssen’s right-wing funding was unknown. And contrary to the claims he made to Sorheim and to The Electronic Intifada, his political views appear to align neatly with many of his key backers and with those they support.In an emailed response to The Electronic Intifada, Halvorssen stated that the $600,000 donated to the Human Rights Foundation through Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011 that is disclosed in the Human Rights Foundation’s 2011 IRS filing actually came from his own family.“The Harry Halvorssen Fund is an account I set up with Donors Capital/Donors Trust and it is the main vehicle through which my mother and I make our contributions to [the Human Rights Foundation] and other charitable pursuits ranging from ecological concerns and scholarships to inner-city children in New York, to equine rescue,” he stated.None of the money provided through the Donors Capital Fund, he said, went to support the Oslo Freedom Forum, but he and his mother donate separate funds through the Human Rights Foundation to support the Oslo Freedom Forum. “The Harry Halvorssen Fund has never made any contributions to any film called Obsession,” Halvorssen wrote.To be sure, the kinds of donor-advised services for living donors and legacies that Donors Capital Fund provides to major philanthropists are also offered by many well-established foundations, such as the Chicago Community Trust or the New York Community Trust, as well as other financial institutions.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Tainted reputation</h2>So why did Halvorssen choose to support the Human Rights Foundation and other causes through Donors Capital Fund, which is tainted by its reputation as a pass-through for anonymous donors to give enormous sums to virulently Islamophobic and anti-gay causes?“My choice of using Donors Capital Fund/Donors Trust is based on the fact that if I were to pass away unexpectedly I know they will very strictly abide to donor intent,” Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada.<a href="http://www.donorstrust.org/AboutUs/MissionPrinciples.aspx">On its website</a>, Donors Trust states that it was established “to ensure the intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise” is respected even after they die.Halvorssen offered an analogy to explain his motives: “People I may disagree with may also open a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank, where I have a debit card; this doesn’t mean that Chase Manhattan Bank is responsible for their activities or that other customers are to carry some kind of collective responsibility for their banking choices.”But this analogy might not be exact; <a href="http://www.donorscapitalfund.org/home.html?x=6">on its website</a>, Donors Capital Fund states that only organizations “approved by the Donors Capital Fund board of directors are eligible to receive grants from donor-advised funds administered by Donors Capital Fund.”<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Anti-Muslim support</h2>Even if Halvorssen were to be taken at his word about his relationship with Donors Capital Fund, he cannot explain why the Human Rights Foundation relies on other key members of the Islamophobia industry’s financial network.The Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the four foundations controlled by conservative financier <a href="http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Scaife_Foundations">Richard Mellon Scaife,</a> donated $325,000 to Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation between 2007 and 2011, according to IRS filings.According to the Center for American Progress, Scaife’s foundations contributed a staggering $7,875,000 to the Islamophobia industry between 2001 and 2009.Among the major recipients of Scaife’s money was the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-horowitz-freedom-center">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>, which received $3.4 million during the eight-year period documented in the “Fear Inc.” report.The <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-horowitz">David Horowitz</a> Freedom Center happens to be the main sponsor of Robert Spencer, the Islamophobic pseudo-scholar who <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/video-robert-spencer-on-the-muslim-brotherhood-in-the-white-house/">claimed in a video interview with the conservative website Politichicks</a> that the Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated deep into President Obama’s White House inner circle. Breivik referenced Spencer’s work no fewer than 162 times in his manifesto.Then there is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which contributed $145,000 to the Human Rights Foundation from 2007 through 2011, according to IRS forms. As The Electronic Intifada <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/weddadys-free-arabs-american-islamic-congress-and-pro-israel-funders-who-helped-them-rise">recently reported,</a> the Bradley Foundation has helped pay the salaries of some of America’s most virulent anti-Muslim agitators. These include David Horowitz, the creator of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAFEeJoWicU">“Islamofascism Awareness Week,”</a> Pipes and Frank Gaffney, publisher of conspiratorial pamphlets like his 2010 “Shariah: The Threat to America,” in which he warned that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of “sharia,” or Islamic law.Breivik cited Gaffney and Horowitz a total of nine times in his manifesto.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">False-flag conspiracy theories</h2>Gaffney, for his part, hosted Halvorssen on the <a href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/04/22/a-growing-closeness-between-the-emir-of-qatar-and-the-muslim-brotherhood">22 April 2013 edition of Secure Freedom Radio show</a>, introducing him as “a remarkable man I’ve had the privilege of knowing for a long time.”Asked by Gaffney about the recent <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/boston-marathon-bombing">Boston Marathon bombing</a>, allegedly perpetrated by the Chechen-American brothers Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Halvorssen suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to exploit the bombings. Putin, he said, sought to distract from “a legitimate government-in-exile” that “wants to look to the West” — a clear reference to the exiled Chechen politician Akhmed Zakayev, whom Halvorssen<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhb8y_Cu52w">hosted</a> at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2009.Gaffney asked Halvorssen, “Did he [Putin] have something to do with this attack in Boston — that he was running Tamerlan Tsarnaev?”“I have questions about it, Frank,” Halvorssen stated in an emphatic tone. “I have serious questions.” With his answer, Halvorssen demonstrated a readiness to indulge wild conspiracy theories that fit his political agenda.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Halvorssen’s hard-right libertarian supporter</h2>Rounding out the small stable of major donors to Human Rights Foundation is Peter Thiel, who contributed $535,000 to Halvorssen’s group through his personal foundation from 2007 to 2011.Thiel earned his fortune as a venture capitalist, helping to found Paypal and investing in <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/facebook">Facebook</a>. He is also a right-wing libertarian ideologue who declared, <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/summer/the-old-man-and-the-sea">as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2012</a>, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel went on to blame the extension of voting rights to women for “hav[ing] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”Besides Halvorssen’s pet human rights project, Thiel has <a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/09/acorn_videomake.php">financed</a> the notorious and now-discredited ACORN video sting by right-wing filmmaker James O’Keefe.A February 2012 <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/166421/ron-paul-wants-abolish-cia-his-largest-donor-builds-toys-it">profile of Thiel published by Mark Ames in The Nation</a> noted that the libertarian billionaire “co-authored an anti-affirmative action book, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus — a book that belittles ‘imaginary oppressors’ of minorities, blames homophobia on homosexuals and attacks domestic partnerships.”Halvorssen <a href="http://www.libertopia.org/2013/history/">presented Thiel with an award at the 2010 libertarian film festival</a>, Libertopia, hailing him for “revolutioniz[ing] the monetary system.” The following year, he invited Thiel to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum.“I support the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum because their focus on dissidents engages the intellectual debate as well as the moral cause,” he remarked to the website The Street (“<a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/11154811/1/peter-thiel-urges-investing-in-human-rights.html">Peter Thiel Urges Investing in Human Rights</a>,” 20 June 2011).<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Double standards</h2>In response to questions about the Human Rights Foundation’s acceptance of support from Scaife, Thiel and other major donors of Islamophobic and ultra-conservative causes such as the Bradley Foundation, Halvorssen gave this statement to The Electronic Intifada:<blockquote style="margin: 1.5rem 30px; line-height: 24px;">Any donation or grant accepted by HRF is done with a categorical understanding that the foundation is free to research and investigate regardless of where such investigations may lead or what conclusions HRF may reach. We encourage funding from anyone who cares about human freedom. This does not mean HRF endorses the views or opinions of its donors. In plain language: We are grateful, privileged and proud that we receive support, as this ultimately means that our mission is being endorsed. This does not, however, mean we agree [with] the views of those who support us. Likewise, some donors on this list may ultimately disagree with the decisions and public statements of HRF. Their inclusion on this list in no way implies that they agree with all of HRF’s positions or activities.</blockquote>While Halvorssen takes a relaxed view about the activities of his principal funders, he has different standards for where others should get their money.When actors Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme accepted payments to be celebrity guests at the birthday party of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Russian puppet regime in Chechnya, Halvorssen denounced them. “Hilary Swank obviously has the right to earn a living entertaining the highest bidder, but this sort of venality should be exposed,” he said. “We must remember the disgrace of Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Beyoncé and 50 Cent [who] were exposed … singing for Gaddafi’s family and earning millions of dollars for it” (“<a href="http://www.digitalspy.com/celebrity/news/a345024/hilary-swank-van-damme-slammed-for-attending-chechen-president-party.html">Hilary Swank, Van Damme slammed for attending Chechen president party</a>,” Digital Spy UK, 11 October 2011).As for libertarian ideologue Thiel, Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada: “Peter Thiel is not just a donor, I consider him a personal friend. … Peter’s devotion to human rights, education and nonviolence are extraordinary. We are thrilled to have him as a donor and as a former speaker at [Oslo Freedom Forum].”This year, the Thiel Foundation is <a href="https://www.oslofreedomforum.com/supporters.html">listed as a main supporter</a> of Halvorssen’s forum.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Norwegian government, Amnesty respond</h2>The Electronic Intifada shared some of the information about the Human Rights Foundation’s donors with Ragnhild Imerslund, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs communications chief and spokesperson for Foreign Minister Eide.Imerslund acknowledged that the Norwegian government has provided 800,000 Norwegian kroner ($138,000) to pay for “participation by Human Rights Defenders from the Global South to the Oslo Freedom Forum 2013,” which she called “an important arena for discussing human rights issues.”Regarding the donors to the Forum’s producer and creator, Imerslund said only, “Questions regarding sources of funding for the Human Rights Foundation should be directed to them.”Similarly, Gerald Kador Folkvord, Political Advisor to Amnesty International Norway, wrote that “To the best of our knowledge, none of the sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum (mind you, it’s the Forum we are concerned with; who might or might not support the organization Human Rights Foundation outside the Forum does not really concern us as we have no other dealings with them) has been involved in activities undermining human rights so seriously that we couldn’t be part of an event they are sponsoring.”“The Sarah Scaife Foundation is not listed among the sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum,” Amnesty’s Folkvord added. “When it comes to their support, if any, to The Human Rights Foundation, the latter would have to answer for that.”Folkvord said that Amnesty had paid for one “human rights defender” to travel to Oslo and, “with the other organizations involved, Amnesty participated in discussions around the program of the Oslo Freedom Forum and suggested issues and speakers.”The Electronic Intifada asked both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Amnesty how they thought members of the Norwegian public would respond to the fact that the Human Rights Foundation — the producer and originator of the Oslo Freedom Forum — counted among its most generous supporters the same donors that sustain the Islamophobic activists cited by Breivik as inspirations. Neither offered a reply.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">The right connections</h2>So how did Halvorssen manage to secure funding from Norwegian government sources? And why are government officials so dismissive when presented with evidence that he is simultaneously supported by rightist forces propagating religious bigotry?A 26 November 2010 report in Norway’s daily Klassekampen offers some possible answers (“<a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/58224/article/item/null">Gir millioner til sine egne</a>”).According to the paper, the Oslo city council increased funding for Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum in 2010 while slashing social spending amid a worsening financial situation. Leading the effort to ramp up public funding of the human rights forum was a politician from the Liberal Party named Ola Elvestuen — the brother of Per Elvestuen.And who is Per Elvestuen? As Klassekampen revealed, he has been listed as a “coordinator” and “director” of the Oslo Freedom Forum. He is also is a board member of Ny Tid, the magazine owned by Halvorssen and a spokesman for the Halvorssen-owned Hunter Media Inc.Thanks to a tangled web of high-level connections and an apparent case of nepotism, the Oslo Freedom Forum has thrived.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Fortunate son of Venezuela’s elite</h2>Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez. His mother, Hilda Mendoza Denham, a direct descendant of Venezuela’s first two presidents, is a member of one of her country’s most influential clans.Halvorssen’s father, also named Thor Halvorssen, was a wealthy heir who gained control over Venezuela’s telecommunications monopoly. In 1989, then-President Carlos Andres Perez appointed Halvorssen Sr. as Venezuela’s “anti-drug ambassador.” That same year, President Perez’s government was responsible for committing one of the worst massacres in modern times: up to 3,000 persons were killed protesting President Perez’s harsh International Money Fund-imposed austerity program (“<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12593085">Victims of Venezuela’s Caracazo clashes reburied,</a>” BBC News, 21 February 2011).Halvorssen Sr. is reported to have helped expose the secret bank accounts his longtime friend Perez used to embezzle public money, allegedly earning the wrath of the president and his inner circle.As Perez sought to fend off scrutiny and an electoral challenge, a series of bombs exploded around Caracas. Halvorssen Sr. was immediately arrested and accused of orchestrating a terrorist plot to manipulate the Venezuelan stock market. He was imprisoned under harsh conditions and only freed after 74 days thanks in part to intervention from Amnesty International.With his father cleared of all charges, Halvorssen Jr. <a href="http://tthoro.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/thor_halvorssens_response.pdf">refers</a> to him today as a former “political prisoner,” describing him as the force that helped inspire his interest in human rights. But there was another side to the elder Halvorssen that was wrapped in intrigue and which remains shrouded in mystery.Besides his role as a businessman and government official, Halvorssen Sr. was a part-time spook who, according to a 19 November 1993 report by the Associated Press, “cooperated with the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/cia">CIA</a>” and “was used to funnel money to Nicaraguan Contra leader Eden Pastora” (“Trafficker, Alleged Terrorist Penetrated CIA, DEA in Venezuela”).In her book Hostile Acts, journalist Martha Honey notes that Halvorssen Sr. served during the early 1980s as president of the Committee in Defense of Democracy in Nicaragua, a CIA front group “used to rally regional public opinion against the Sandinistas …” (p. 237).A 29 November 1993 article by US News and World Report describes Halvorssen Sr. as a “CIA source” and notes that he was also a US Drug Enforcement Agency informant at the time, but that the agency eventually cut him loose, citing his tendency towards “duplicity and manipulation.” According to the report, Halvorssen Sr. “had unusual ties to and knowledge of drug traffickers” (“<a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/931129/archive_016185.htm">At play in the fields of the spies</a>”).Just as the father retreated from the international scene, the son began to make his name.<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, anti-Arab</h2>In a 2010 interview with Klassekampen, Halvorssen said, “Personally, I am no right-wing ideologue, as some have described me. I’m liberal. Period” “<a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/57490/article/item/null">Jeg er liberalist</a>”). He described himself in the same terms to The Electronic Intifada.But a look at the early stages of Halvorssen’s career, which he spent as a conservative operative combating gay rights initiatives, feminism and multiculturalism on US college campuses, suggests otherwise.Like his father, Halvorssen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. He first gained notice in 1994, when he authored a guest commentary for The Daily Pennsylvanian demanding that prospective students be warned before applying to the school that “it may be deadly to live in West Philadelphia,” the mostly African-American area surrounding Penn’s campus.As editor of the conservative student magazine Red and Blue, Halvorssen courted controversy when the magazine ran a November 1994 column called “<a href="http://articles.philly.com/1995-03-02/news/25701981_1_haitian-students-student-magazine-student-groups">One Man’s Vision of Haiti</a>” that was illustrated with a sketch of a voodoo doll. “To the best of my knowledge,” the article’s author wrote, “the only imports from Haiti we have in this country are exiled dictators and cab drivers.”The article’s publication stirred the outrage of African Americans and Haitians on campus, eventually prompting Penn administrators to temporarily withdraw school funding from Red and Blue. For Halvorssen, the incident crystallized his sense that conservatives on campus were an oppressed minority.He emerged after college as the executive director of a newfangled right-wing group called FIRE, or the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending evangelical students against charges of anti-gay discrimination and combating hate crimes legislation.FIRE has been funded by two right-wing foundations that also support Halvorssen’s human rights mini-empire: the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the <a href="http://thefire.org/article/13730.html">John Templeton Foundation,</a> an evangelical outfit <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/romney-names-high-profile-supporters-religious-right-committee">directed</a> by John Templeton Jr., a veteran right-wing activist who has <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/a-big-donor-goe.html">donated</a> more than $1 million to ban same-sex marriage in California. In 2009, HRF <a href="http://www.thehrf.org/media/031309.html">noted</a> that the Oslo Freedom Forum “was made possible in large part thanks to a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.”<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Right-wing campus operations</h2>Halvorssen also found work at the time as a program director for the <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/intercollegiate-studies">Intercollegiate Studies Institute</a>, another prominent right-wing campus operation. Under his direction, the group condemned the establishment of a women’s studies program at Yale University, complaining in an 1 April 1998 press release that the program “delves into the most radical issues of militant feminism and homosexuality while completely ignoring traditional female roles.”Halvorssen’s political empire expanded with his founding of the Moving Picture Institute, a libertarian film company that produced “Mine Your Own Business.” <a href="http://www.earthworksaction.org/media/detail/opposition_surges_to_romanian_gold_project_propaganda">Financed by a Canadian mining company</a>, the film was promoted as “the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary” (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19stra.html">A Maverick Mogul, Proudly Politically Incorrect</a>,” The New York Times, 19 August 2007). The Moving Picture Institute received more than $300,000 through Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust from 2005 through 2011, according to those organizations’ IRS filings.Next, Halvorssen oversaw the making of a 2007 documentary called Indoctrinate U (the entire film <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA">is on YouTube</a>). The film features an amateur conservative filmmaker named Evan Coyne Maloney wandering around campuses attempting to interrogate befuddled school administrators and poking fun at feminist students who had established women’s centers on their campuses.Towards the end of Indoctrinate U, Daniel Pipes and ultra-Zionist scholar <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/martin-kramer">Martin Kramer</a> surface as talking heads, warning that Arab donors have been stealthily guiding the anti-American agenda of university departments.Kramer also appears on the pages of Breivik’s manifesto making remarkably similar statements: the killer quotes him attacking the Palestinian-American scholar <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/edward-said">Edward Said</a> and complaining that “academics were so preoccupied with ‘Muslim Martin Luthers’ that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis of bin Laden and his indictment of America.”<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Campaign for Venezuela regime change</h2>In 2004, Venezuela’s US-backed political opposition lost a hard-fought 2004 referendum aimed at recalling Chavez, whom it considered illegitimate from the start. The voting results <a href="http://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc2023.html">were certified by former US President Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center</a> as “reflect[ing] the will of the Venezuelan electorate.” According to the Carter Center, “balloting day was conducted in an environment virtually absent of any violence or intimidation.”However, at an earlier opposition protest rally demanding Chavez’s ouster, Halvorssen’s mother was shot and wounded, allegedly by a Chavez loyalist.It was then that Halvorssen claimed to realize that “defending [college] students’ rights while there were people in Venezuela being shot for disagreeing with the government” was “a little absurd” (“<a href="http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0308/feature3.html">My dinner with Thor</a>,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, March-April 2008).He embarked on an international campaign for regime change in Venezuela, with his Human Rights Foundation leading the way.In 2005, Halvorssen <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/903jhsjt.asp?page=3">took to the neoconservative Weekly Standard</a> to paint Chavez as an anti-Semitic dictator seeking to establish a “resistance bloc” that placed the US, Europe and Israel in grave danger. Halvorssen called for “democratic alternatives to Chavez,” describing him as a key supporter of “terrorist groups in South America and terror sponsors in the Middle East.”That same year, Halvorssen <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2005/08/24/robertson-lies-about-his-chavez-comments-claims/133707">appeared as a guest</a> on the radical right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson’s television program The 700 Club. A week before hosting Halvorssen, Robertson had urged the US to “take him [Chavez] out,” declaring, “if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”When Robertson denied calling for Chavez’s assassination — an obvious falsehood — Halvorssen leaped in to defend his host. “The person who began this, who started the concept of assassination for political reasons, was in fact Hugo Chavez, and his foreign minister is a former guerrilla terrorist,” Halvorssen told Robertson. “They basically have no standing to criticize anyone who made remarks that like — you know, that were misinterpreted, like the ones you made.”Halvorssen’s obsession with overthrowing Chavez deepened after the president was re-elected. In 2008, Halvorssen railed against the actor and film producer Danny Glover in an editorial for Fox News, accusing him of “coddling Chavez” for accepting financing from the Venezuelan government for two films in development. He went on to accuse Hollywood supporters of Chavez of providing “a terrific boost” to the morale of Palestinian “terrorists.” The source for Halvorssen’s unusual claim was Aaron Klein, a writer for the far-right conspiracy site WorldNetDaily (“<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,343350,00.html">Hollywood A-Listers Prove Ignorance in Supporting Hugo Chavez</a>,” 31 March 2008).<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">Venezuelan terror-sympathizer hired by Human Rights Foundation</h2>Also in 2008, Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation hired Aleksander Boyd, a Venezuelan opposition representative based in London. Boyd was a notorious promoter of terrorism against Venezuela’s elected government, having written the following on his website:“I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” He later declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with Chavez” (“<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/01/friendsinlowplaces">Friends in low places</a>,” The Guardian, 1 September 2007).When the Norwegian magazine Manifest criticized Halvorssen’s hiring of Boyd in a 12 May 2010 exposé, Halvorssen responded, “We knew of his comments before we hired Boyd and asked him about these comments and he stated, plainly, that it was an entry in his dream diary that was online.” He added that Boyd left the Human Rights Foundation in 2009.In 2010, Halvorssen invited his first cousin, the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Lopez, the Harvard-educated mayor of a wealthy district in Caracas, was among the politicians who signed as witnesses in the new government after Chavez was briefly ousted in the failed US-backed coup in 2002.Lopez is the son of a former oil executive — Halvorssen’s aunt — who allegedly funnelled profits from the state-run oil company into his new political party, leading tocorruption charges that placed his political ambitions in peril, as the Associated Press reported in February (“<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/17/leopoldo-lopez-corruption-venezuela_n_2705862.html">Leopoldo Lopez, Opponent Of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Faces Corruption Charges In Venezuela</a>”).<a href="http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/11/09CARACAS1408.html">Described</a> by the US embassy in Venezuela as “vindictive, and power-hungry” but also as “a necessity,” Lopez <a href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/weisbrot_testimony_vz_democracy.pdf">received large sums of financial support</a> from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.At the 2009 Oslo Freedom Forum, Lopez was a <a href="http://vimeo.com/5232625">presented as a “human rights leader,”</a> appearing at an event that had been graced by Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel and Nobel nominee Vaclav Havel. He stirred his audience with lofty rhetoric about peace, democracy and the coming wave of freedom, casting the Venezuelan opposition as “David against Goliath.” “We know that we will overcome,” Lopez proclaimed, “we know that change will come in Venezuela.”Noting that Lopez’s appearance at the Oslo Freedom Forum was covered far more heavily in Venezuelan media than in Oslo, where it was virtually ignored, Manifest accused Halvorssen of using his human rights confab for the purpose of “whitewashing Leopoldo Lopez … to establish a real contender for the Venezuelan presidency.”The magazine described the Oslo Freedom Forum as a cleverly crafted “Washing Machine.”<h2 style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0px; font-weight: normal; padding-top: 0.75rem; padding-bottom: 0.75rem;">The burden of knowing</h2>Are those who gathered on stage at the human rights “Davos” being used to whitewash the ulterior political agenda of an ambitious conservative operative with ties to sectarian plutocrats and conspiratorial Islamophobes? Do they know about Halvorssen’s real history, about his funders and friends among America’s far-right? Most may not.Unfortunately for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and Amnesty International, they are not among those with the luxury of pleading ignorance.Presented with the revelations uncovered by The Electronic Intifada, they dismissed them as immaterial, and even irrelevant. In a city still scarred by Breivik’s rampage, it is hard to imagine that these facts could be so easily washed away.Ali Abunimah contributed research to this article.Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author.<h3 class="field-label field field-tag" style="line-height: 24px; margin: 3.75rem 0px -3.75rem; font-weight: normal; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.28205rem; border: 0px;"></h3><ul class="field field-tag" style="margin: 1.5rem 0px; padding: 0.75rem 1.5rem; overflow: hidden; text-indent: 30px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(221, 223, 224);"><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/oslo-freedom-forum" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Oslo Freedom Forum</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/thor-halvorssen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Thor Halvorssen</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/anders-behring-breivik" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Anders Behring Breivik</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/islamophobia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Islamophobia</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/amnesty-international-norway" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Amnesty International Norway</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/human-rights-foundation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Human Rights Foundation</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/norway" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Norway</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/jihad-watch" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Jihad Watch</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/robert-spencer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Robert Spencer</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/frank-gaffney" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Frank Gaffney</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/daniel-pipes" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Daniel Pipes</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/donors-capital-fund" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Donors Capital Fund</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/clarion-project" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Clarion Project</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/center-american-progress" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Center for American Progress</a></li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/klassekampen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Klassekampen</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sarah-scaife-foundation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Sarah Scaife Foundation</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-horowitz-freedom-center" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-horowitz" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">David Horowitz</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/lynde-and-harry-bradley-foundation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/thor-halvorssen-senior" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Thor Halvorssen senior</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/peter-thiel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Peter Thiel</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/venezuela" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Venezuela</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/moving-picture-institute" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Moving Picture Institute</a></li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/pat-robertson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Pat Robertson</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/aleksander-boyd" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Aleksander Boyd</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/manifest-magazine" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Manifest magazine</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/raghnild-imerslund" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Raghnild Imerslund</a> </li><li style="display: inline; margin-right: 1ex;"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/espen-barth-eide" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Espen Barth Eide</a></li></ul><div style="">
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</div><div style="">=</div><div style=""><div class="itemFullText" style="line-height: 20px;">Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) convened again this summer. For the fifth consecutive year, organizers brought together "hundreds of the world's most influential dissidents, innovators, journalists, philanthropists and policymakers" to discuss authoritarianism in their home countries. The founders call the event a "Davos of human rights."Many of the invited activists deserve praise and an international platform, but disturbing facts about the OFF have been revealed. This forces us to ask if this is an attempt to use human rights to advance a narrow political agenda. The story of the Oslo Freedom Forum is also a story of US right-wing sponsorship, lack of transparency and "heroes of human rights" involved in supporting serious human rights violations.From the very beginning in 2009 until this year, OFF officials and its founder, Thor Halvorssen, have invited speakers who have supported gross violations of human rights or committed such themselves. A media scandal broke in 2010 as busloads of Norwegian school kids were shipped in to hail people they had been told were "heroes of human rights" and "voices of freedom." It turned out that three of the speakers had recently participated in or actively promoted military coups against democratically-elected governments in Latin America. One of them, Leopoldo López, <a href="http://vimeo.com/11150995" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">was a key figure</a> in the internationally condemned right-wing military coup against Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez in 2002. López demanded the ousting of all elected authorities. Followed by his own armed police force, he broke into the apartment where the minister of interior and justice was hiding and had him handcuffed and dragged out to a waiting mob that beat, kicked and spit at him before he was finally arrested. This was described by Amnesty International as one of the most serious human rights violations, among many, perpetrated during the short-lived coup d'état. López is Thor Halvorssen's cousin.Halvorssen's relative was accompanied to the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum by fellow coup maker Marcel Granier. He was the general director of RCTV, the most watched TV channel in Halvorssen's native Venezuela. In 2002, Granier and RCTV were supportive of the coup. They also manipulated footage and bluntly lied to their own viewers about the events during the coup to ensure the ouster of Chávez, as shown in the Irish documentary <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id--ZFtjR5c" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">The Revolution will not be Televised</a>. Before Chávez's allies got the president back in power, RCTV and other private TV stations were warmly thanked by the leaders of the coup, saying that they could never have succeeded had it not been for RCTV and the rest of the private media. Granier and López were dubbed "voice of freedom" and "hero of human rights," respectively.Another "voice of freedom," the one-time Cuban prisoner Armando Valladares, was one of the most vocal supporters of the military overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, for which he received the highest medal of honor from the illegal Honduran coup government. Valladares and López were presented as "heroes of human rights" and "voices of freedom" at the OFF two years in a row.In 2011, a figure from Argentina's far-right, Victoria Villarruel, was invited to speak about "the forgotten victims of terror." According to respected Latin America experts Benedicte Bull and Johannes Nymark, [Dirty War?] Villarruel is trying to rewrite the history of Argentina's military dictatorship, which killed about 10 times as many dissidents as Chile's Pinochet, and defend the military that committed the atrocities. With this in mind, it might not come as a surprise that the only Venezuelan speaker at this year's Forum, Julio Borges, not only supported the 2002 coup, but also demanded that the democratic institutions be dissolved and the elected representatives be relieved of their duties.In its original mission statement, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), the organizer of OFF, proclaimed that it was founded to "to unite people - regardless of their political, cultural, and ideological orientations - in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy in the Americas." One might argue that violently overthrowing democratically-elected governments is not a human right. And that supporting right-wing coups and regimes that have subjected a continent of 600 million inhabitants to violence, poverty and injustice for decades does not make you a "voice of freedom." The organizers of the OFF, however, have refused all invitations to debate such criticism in the Norwegian broadcast media. Most of the criticism has come on the basis of the Latin American guests, but other speakers have also expressed opinions incompatible with human rights. American columnist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kirchick" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">James Kirchick</a> supported the military coup in Honduras; he has defended the torture of Guantánamo prisoners; and he marked the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion by saluting the decision to go to war in the first place.Peter Thiel, a billionaire hedge fund manager, a personal friend of Thor Halvorssen and a donor to OFF, was a speaker at the 2011 forum. Little did the audience know of Thiel's personal ties with Halvorssen and the fact that he helped fund the Forum. I believe it's safe to assume that the vast majority did not have knowledge of Thiel's views on democracy either. "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," The Electronic Intifada quotes him writing in his manifest. He is also concerned that extensions of women's rights "have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."Thor Halvorssen himself is no stranger to opinions rather peculiar for a man in his position. He surprised many by approving the conspiracy theory that Russian president Vladimir Putin might be the mastermind behind the April Boston bombing. He has denounced the peace talks in Colombia between the government and the FARC guerrilla group, aligning himself with Colombia's far right.There has been considerable controversy regarding the lack of transparency surrounding the OFF's funding. Halvorssen has refused to give details. Max Blumenthal of The Electronic Intifada did a thorough investigation of the Human Rights Foundation. Halvorssen is the creator and director of the HRF, based in New York. While the HRF has attracted little attention, a few journalists and activists have noticed that the Foundation's <a href="http://thehrf.org/HRFDonorList.pdf" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">funding sources</a> seem to come mostly from the right wing. These have included the conservative Sarah Scaife and Lynde and Harry Bradley foundations. Other funders that include the libertarian Atlas Economic Research Foundation; the National Christian Foundation, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/12/rendering-unto-god" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">a major bankroller</a> of US evangelical groups and conservative causes; and the right-wing <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Randolph_Foundation" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Randolph Foundation</a> and <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Shelby_Cullom_Davis_Foundation" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation</a>.Blumenthal has uncovered another source of the HRF's funding. The HRF's filings with the Internal Revenue Service, <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Blumenthal writes</a>, "show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement." Donors Capital has been a major funder of Islamophobic groups and projects, including some that Norwegian white supremacist terrorist Anders Breivik has cited as inspiring his beliefs.So why did Halvorssen choose to support the Human Rights Foundation and other causes through Donors Capital Fund, which is tainted by its reputation as a pass-through for anonymous donors to give enormous sums to Islamophobic and anti-gay causes?Halvorssen would have us believe it is a mere coincidence that all of the HRF's known donors are right wing and that he uses the conservative Donors Trust to contribute to his organization.Knowing these groups find HRF a worthy receiver of such favors, can we take his word that he is just an open-minded liberal who spends millions of dollars on human rights conferences without any political agenda? And why did he choose to hide this information from both the public and the invited speakers while establishing the Oslo Freedom Forum?Halvorssen began his career as a conservative student activist, perceiving conservative students such as himself as sort of a persecuted minority. He would later follow up on these ideas by producing the film Indoctrinate U, which targets feminist academics and other oppressive tyrants. He also took on the environmentalist movement, with a pro-mining movie, Mine Your Own Business, which The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19stra.html?pagewanted=all&r=0" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">New York Times dubbed</a>, "the world's first anti-environmentalist documentary," sponsored by a powerful Canadian mining company, heavily criticized for using large amounts of cyanide to extract gold.Even more revealing are some of the HRF's past staff and associates. Aleksander Boyd, previously <a href="http://www.thehrf.org/media/092408.html" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">HRF's vice president of programs</a>, is a right-wing blogger <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/01/friendsinlowplaces" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">notorious for his writing</a> describing his fantasies of torturing pro-Chavez Venezuelans. "I wish I could decapitate [. . .] Diosdado Cabello [now the president of Venezuelas National Assembly]," and "I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel," are some of his passages. The HRF and Boyd parted ways in 2009. Many Latin Americans, however, would not feel comfortable with an organization whose then-vice president of programs openly promoted the same kind of torture and assassination that Latin American right-wing dictatorships carried out against hundreds of thousands of leftists, trade unionists, journalists and indigenous people.At this point I'm sure no one will be flabbergasted that in this year's OFF, with the exception of a Bahraini blogger, none of the listed speakers were there to highlight abuses in countries that are strong US allies or violations by the US government. Previous incarnations were little different. Of all the North American speakers <a href="http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/speakers.html#1" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">listed on the Forum's website</a>, for example, none was there to primarily address the role of the US government as a human rights violator. (Julian Assange's participation in 2010 is a notable exception, but this was before Wikileaks' release of the State Department cables that provoked US ire.)The purported liberal views of Thor Halvorssen are at best highly doubtful, and accusations that he uses the platform he himself built to invite friends, family and ideological allies from the far right is serious. But that is far from the most pressing issue. The fact that Oslo Freedom Forum abuses the name of human rights to whitewash human rights offenders, their supporters and apologists is far worse. However, looking at the track record of these people, there should be no doubt that they were invited exactly because of their political affiliation.</div>Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without <a href="mailto:editor@truthout.org" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">permission</a>.<div class="clr" style="clear: both; height: 0px; line-height: 0; float: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border: none;"><div id="email-a-friend" style="line-height: 20px;"></div><div class="itemExtraFields" style="margin: 16px 0px 0px; padding: 8px 0px 0px; border-top: 1px dotted rgb(221, 221, 221); line-height: 20px;"><div><h2 style="margin: 10px 0px; line-height: 40px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; text-transform: uppercase; padding-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/48634" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">JOAKIM MOLLERSEN</a></h2><div>Joakim Møllersen is a Norwegian economist and journalist with economics, war and peace, and Latin America as fields of special interest. He is currently part of the editorial board of the new independent and progressive news site <a href="http://radikalportal.no/%20" target="blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Radikal Portal</a>.</div></div><div class="relart" style="border-top: 1px dotted rgb(221, 221, 221);"><h3 style="margin: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; padding: 0px 0px 8px; line-height: normal !important; text-transform: uppercase !important;">RELATED STORIES</h3><a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/2321-rightwing-pundits-jumped-to-blame-muslims-and-jihadists-for-norway-attacks" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; margin-bottom: 0px !important; padding-bottom: 0px !important; font-style: italic !important;">Right-Wing Pundits Jumped to Blame Muslims and "Jihadists" for Norway Attacks</a><div class="itemAuthor" style="padding-bottom: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding-top: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; font-style: italic !important;">By Ali Gharib, Travis Waldron, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/07/23/277310/wapos-jen-rubin-wsj-right-wing-pundits-jumped-to-blame-muslims-and-jihadists-for-norway-attacks/" target="_blank" style="outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; margin-bottom: 0px !important; padding-bottom: 0px !important;">ThinkProgress</a> | Op-Ed</div><div class="itemAuthor" style="padding-bottom: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding-top: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; font-style: italic !important;"></div><div class="itemAuthor" style="padding-bottom: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding-top: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important;">foe</div><div class="itemAuthor" style="padding-bottom: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding-top: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important;">Alburnus Maior * EARTHWORKS * Friends of the Earth Greenpeace in Romania * MiningWatch Canada80 organizations across Europe and North America sign statement in support of Rosia Montana community, in advance of film screening at National GeographicJanuary 23: Eighty organizations across Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Canada, and the United States released a statement today highlighting the local, national, and international opposition to the Rosia Montana cyanide open pit gold mine project in Romania, refuting accusations of "exaggerations and misleading claims" in a recent film entitled "Mine Your Own Business." The film was financed by Gabriel Resources, the Toronto-based mining company that wants to build the Rosia Montana mine.Contrary to the film's portrayal, local opposition to the project is strong and organized. The statement urges the public to read a message sent by Eugen David, president of Alburnus Maior, a local association based in Rosia Montana which represents families that oppose the mine and refuse to sell their lands to Gabriel Resources. Eugen David was not interviewed by the makers of "Mine of Your Own Business" despite them being well aware of the association's existence.If constructed, Rosia Montana would be Europe's largest gold mine and transform the Rosia Montana valley into four open-pit mines, and the neighboring Corna valley into a tailings dam to hold the mine's toxic waste. Both valleys are densely inhabited, and the project would require 2,000 people to move out of their homes and also lead to the destruction of churches, cemeteries, farm lands, and unique cultural and archaeological treasures in the area."Mine Your Own Business doesn't talk about any of this but instead is a propaganda film paid for by Gabriel Resources which wants to make a lot of money from all this destruction," wrote Eugen David in his message from Rosia Montana. "If anything, this film is reminiscent of times that are long over and does not portray the situation as it is at Rosia Montana."Within Romania, Rosia Montana has become an issue of national significance, with over 96 percent of Romanians opposing the project. The widespread opinion is that the political decision-making about the project is riddled with corruption. The European Parliament has also cautioned against the environmental threat the Rosia Montana project poses not just to Romania but to the whole region, and Romania's neighbor Hungary, whose eastern rivers face the risk of pollution stemming from the mine, has pointed to serious flaws in the project's environmental impact assessment and officially asked for the environmental permit not to be granted."It's important for the public to get the facts about the Rosia Montana project," said Radhika Sarin, international campaign coordinator of Earthworks. "Not only are the environmental risks high, but property owners, including churches and local families, such as those of Eugen David, are facing the threat of expropriation. This is a serious human rights issue.""In order to justify its risky venture, Gabriel Resources touts local employment, but the mine is expected to create a few hundred jobs, and it is unclear if local people will have the necessary qualifications to fill these positions," said Joan Kuyek, national coordinator of MiningWatch Canada.The upcoming screening of the film on Wednesday at the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC has prompted strong criticism from environmental organizations, particularly in Romania and Hungary, and from Stephanie Roth, a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, a prestigious award known popularly as the Nobel prize for the environment. Roth accepted the prize at the National Geographic Society in 2005 for her ongoing work to prevent the destruction of Rosia Montana."It is sad and outrageous that such a renowned center of environmental research has agreed to screen this anti-environmental film. It aims to manipulate the public and does not reflect the values of the National Geographic Society," said Roth. "Gabriel Resources has chosen the National Geographic Society to greenwash its spoilt image and brainwash those it needs to impress. In 2005, the National Geographic Channel cancelled Gabriel Resources's television ads after the Romanian public protested. I hope the National Geographic Society will follow by putting values such as integrity and responsibility above money."- See more at: https://www.earthworksaction.org/media/detail/opposition_surges_to_romanian_gold_project_propaganda#.V2smNfkrKM8</div><div class="itemAuthor" style="padding-bottom: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding-top: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; font-style: italic !important;"></div></div></div></div><div style="">==</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>