The poor aren’t stupid.

Hugo Chavez is finally beginning to understand that. His hard lesson learned is also a great one for my part of world, the Middle East, where our dictators regularly make outrageous statements such as “the people aren’t ready for democracy” – codeword for, “the poor are stupid”.

Thank you, Venezuelans! Thank you for showing that you weren’t fooled by “incentives” - social security for informal workers and popular participation in government. Thank you for showing that whether poor or rich, and despite those “incentives”, voters pay attention when a leader wants to start dismantling democracy by scrapping presidential term limits and consolidating his control over a country even further.

If being a leftist means assuming the poor are stupid, then Venezuelans and Latin Americans in general are well to be rid of that kind of leftist thought.

The term leftist is long overdue for a redefinition anyway.

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The Middle East is a much safer place if Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. And I’m not just talking about Israel.

Forget Israel for a moment and you’ll see that the region is far from being united on the Iranian nuclear issue. Don’t believe for a second the hype over the “Muslim bomb.” It has nothing to do with “Muslim” and everything to do with “Arab” and “Persian,” and more to the point, “Sunni” and “Shi’ite”.

Various Arab leaders have made their disdain for Iran clear over the past few years - from Jordan’s King Abdullah’s warning of the “Shi’ite Crescent” to Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak who claimed last year that Shi’ite Muslims citizen of Arab countries were more loyal to Iran than to their home countries.

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The Question: The producers of the movie "The Kite Runner" had to evacuate three boy actors from Afghanistan because they were involved in a scene portraying homosexual rape. Who's at fault here: the movie producers who exposed the boys to danger, or the Afghan culture that threatens them?

It’s easy to say, “A plague on both your houses,” to The Kite Runner’s producers for exposing the Afghan child actors to danger and to the Afghans who are threatening those boys.

Naive doesn’t even begin to describe The Kite Runner’s filmmakers. Yes, it was commendable for the novel’s author Khaled Hosseini to smash a taboo like male rape in his novel. But by recruiting Afghan child actors who actually live in the country to carry out that taboo-smashing, the filmmakers left it to children to absorb the anger of those who hate self-criticism of any kind.

We are talking about a country where the Taliban are resurgent in some areas, but more importantly where their brand of ultra-orthodox zealotry is shared by many and cuts across sects and ethnic groups.

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In 1988, when Hilary Clinton was still just the wife of the governor of Arkansas, Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister in the Muslim world. She was just 35. Her election victory could not have come at a better time for this Muslim woman.

I was 21, returning home to my country of birth, Egypt, a newly minted feminist after six difficult years in Saudi Arabia where women couldn’t drive – let alone contemplate a career in politics.

How great it was to see a Muslim woman ruling a country. There was Bhutto making redundant all those arguments our clerics love to have over women – our bodies, our minds, our lives. Could a woman lead a country? Hell, yes, Bhutto’s victory yelled!

After Bhutto, we got Tansu Ciller in Turkey, Beghum Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh and President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia. But Bhutto was the first.

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