Chavez is NOT an Anti-Semite

John Murney is upset that Hugo Chavez apparently made an Anti-Semitic remark in his Christmas Speech to the homeless in Venezuela.

As hard as I could try, I could only find right wing Anti-Chavez references to the supposed Anti-Semitic remarks that Hugo Chavez, President Elect of Venezuela was said to have made in his Christmas Speech about Christ the Socialist/ Christ the Rebel.

The source referred to on Johns Blog was a biased or very least self interested Zionist Canadian web site called Judeoscope which made the assertion that Chavez said this (highlighted part). However the actual quote is;

"...that is why I say that today more than ever and in 2005 years we need Jesus the Christ, because the world, the world, the daily world is ending, each day, the wealth of the world, because God, nature is wise, the world has sufficient water for all of us to have water, the world has sufficient wealth, sufficient land to produce food for all of the world population, the world has enough rocks and minerals for all of the constructions, so that nobody would be without a home. The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendents of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendents of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia. A minority has taken possession all of the wealth of the world, a minority has taken ownership of all of the gold of the planet, of the silver, of the minerals, the waters, the good lands, oil, of the wealth then and have concentrated the wealth in a few hands: less than 10% of the population of the world owns more than half of the wealth of the world and ...more than the population of the planet is poor and each day there are more poor people in the whole world. We are decided, decided to change history and each day we are accompanied and will be accompanied by more Chiefs of state..."

Now the edited version of this speech was originally posted on John’s blog by one of the little rightwhingnutbars that attacks John regularly; goes by the pen name of Tommy Douglas, funny right. Anyways in a posted comment on an unrelated topic TD says Chavez made anti-Semitic remarks and links to Judeoscope.

Isn't it neat when the very rightwhingnutbars that have historically been linked to anti-Semitism use this as an attack on the left. Of course they are deliberately confusing Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism in most cases.

I respect John, I like his blog, and as a result of the attack on him by TD he has moderated his comments section. Good. But he also took this story at face value, and gave credence to the Judeoscope story by publishing this on his blog.

Now as a longtime boradcast journalist I would expect better of him in this regard. And I would have thought he would do some research on this quote and those who are supposedly the source of this news story.

What I have found is that it is a story circulating around on Anti-Chavez sites which should immediately give us all pause and question the sources and the context of what they are purporting what Chavez said or meant.

And the comment is open to interpretation. Their spurious attempts to link Chavez with Iran, rather than with the recent election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in his Christmas remarks makes this all the more suspect as a propaganda campaign from the right. As Bill Weinberg writes;

Ironically, an account of his speech in FrontPageMag, FreeRepublic and the conservative Hispanic Center for Economic Research (HACER) ("A Perilous Hanukkah with Hugo—Venezuela's socialist strongman demonizes the Jews," Dec. 28) indicates that he likely meant the spiritual descendants of the christ-killers, i.e. the capitalists, not the Jews:

Celebrating on December 24, Chavez said ‘Christmas is a rebellious, revolutionary, socialist Christ [sic] …the descendants of those who crucified Christ have taken ownership of the riches of the world, and they have concentrated it in a small number of hands.” Chavez said he was “decided” to change history, and he said that every day, he is joined by a “greater quantity of Chiefs of State and leaders in that struggle.” Among those are Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with whom Chavez recently met. On December 14, Ahmadinejad described the Holocaust as "a myth," months after he suggested that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

It is also likely that the other chief of state Chavez had foremost in mind was Bolivia's newly-elected Evo Morales, not the buffoonish Ahmadinejad (who HACER, of course, prominently features in a photo with the Venezuelan leader). We also question the accuracy of both JTA's and FrontPageMag's translations, as they don't quite match and the latter seems awkward at best.

I also found this article on Chavez and his supposed Anti-Semitism, equating the Chavez revolution in Venezuela with National Socialism in Germany (its that old canard of the right; Hitler wasn't one of us he was a 'socialist'). It was published in the Weekly Standard, the voice of all that is Right in the Republican Party in the USA, last summer.

Under Chavez, more than one million Venezuelans have voted with their feet in the largest political exodus in Latin America since the Cuban migrations of the 1960s. Venezuela's Jewish community has been halved over the past six years. Many of the children and grandchildren of those who arrived on the Koenigstein and Caribia have now left the country. Fortunately, there are no exit restrictions--yet.

It has been combined in the news stories above with the supposed Christmas remarks to inflame readers to believe there is a pogrom against Venezuelan Jews. As Tim Bartholomew at Salon Blogs notes:

This comes several weeks after a raid on the Colegio Hebraica, a private Jewish school in Caracas. The reason given for this was purported Mossad involvement in the assassination of State Prosecutor Danilo Anderson.

Gee the Weekly Standard Story ran August 8^th while Chavez made his remarks on December 24 that is longer than a ‘couple of weeks’. But when there is little real evidence of a pogrom or an Anti-Semitic campaign in Venezuela fabrication of evidence by spurious linking is all these guys have.

It is clearly a propaganda campaign, one that began with the Weekly Standard story this summer and continued into the fall.

The Grand Rabbi of Sao Paulo, the American Henri Sobel, told President George W. Bush on Sunday in Brasilia about the ”precarious” situation of the Jews in Venezuela, accusing Hugo Chávez of being an ”anti-Semite”.

Speaking over the phone with AFP, the president of the rabbinate of the Congregation of Jews in the Brasilian metropole said that ”even though there is no discrimination in Venezuela officially, Hugo Chávez does everything he can to spread hatred against the minorities”.

"Chávez is a demagogue, a radical, an anti-Semite in a country where there is a lot of social injustice”, said Mr. Sobel, reporting what he had said to the American President George W. Bush, during a private meeting, in which the president of the Jewish Congress, Israel Singer, also participated.

”Under these circumstances it is tempting to look for a scapegoat”, emphasized Rabbi Sobel, adding that ”the masses have a tendency to listen to false messiahs”.

”This mixture of political unrest and social turbulence creates an environment conducive to anti-Semitism and that is why the situation is precarious”, not only for the Jews, but for all the minorities in Venezuela.

While the Rabbi of Brazil was speaking on behalf of the Jews of Venezuela this is what they had to say for themselves.

Jews Dismiss Charges of Anti-Semitism in Venezuela
El Universal
November 9, 2005

In Venezuela there is no anti-Semitism, and nor have there been any attacks on the Jewish community by the State, said David Bachenheimer, Secretary General of the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela (CAIV).

Henri Sobel, leader of a Jewish congregation in Sao Paulo, declared that the Venezuelan Jewish community was living in a precarious situation due to anti-Semitic positions taken by the government of president Hugo Chavez during a meeting last week with U.S. president George W. Bush.

Bachenheimer explained that the CAIV was surprised by Rabbi Sobel’s statement as he had never asked the Venezuelan Jewish community whether or not it had been victimized or persecuted.

Bachenheimer went on to say that in Venezuela there have been no problems of anti-Semitic or racist attacks and the government has always acted quickly when isolated incidents of racial or religious intolerance occur. He added that the Jewish community has never been the target of policies or campaigns against it.

Now did Chavez really mean Jews when he spoke out at Christmas? What did the Jews have to do with the killing of Bolivar asks Normblog.

Good question. Could Chavez not only be referring to the rich and the capitalists (the 10% who own all the wealth) but also be referring to the Romans, who actually crucified the historical Jesus, and the later Roman Catholic Church which having resumed power in Spain under the Carlists continued to fight against the National Liberation struggle of Bolivar?

Hmmm its pretty open ended that. And I know its a semantic argument at best but before launching into a tirade accusing of Chavez of Anti-Semitism, that is largely a deliberate and calculated smear of the rightwhingnutbars who equate him with National Socialism, this has as much validity as saying he was speaking of Jews.

And hey after all Venezuela is a Catholic country and the Church under the last pope was virulently anti-liberation theology and pro-right wing. And after Pat Robertson called for Chavez's assisnation, the Venezuelan government can be forgiven for being cautious about the intentions of Born Again Evangelical Protestants too.

..Florida-based New Tribes Mission today is appealing its ordered expulsion from Venezuelan tribal areas to that nation's Supreme Court. New Tribes spokeswoman Nita Zelenak is asking people to pray that Venezuela's high court will take the case and suspend the order, or at least let the missionaries continue their Bible translation and evangelism while the case is considered. President Hugo Chavez announced the expulsion nearly two months ago, accusing New Tribes missionaries of spying for the CIA, a charge they vigorously deny. Zelenak says New Tribes missionaries are rushing to complete as much work as possible in the few weeks left before their mandatory departure. [AP]

But these attacks on Chavez and his apparent Anti-Semitism, that is equating his Bolivarian revolution, a peaceful nationalist democratic electoral process, with National Socialism have been around since he was first elected and the CIA attempted to oust him with a coup.

They are spurious at best, even the Jewish Human Rights monitoring organization the Stephen Roth Institute says that Venezuela has been a rather benign country when it comes to overt Anti-Semitism, even more so than Canada! However let us be clear that what the Institute and other Zionist organizations call Anti-Semitism is not only overt attacks on Jews but ANY criticism of Israel and Zionism;

In the pro-government newspaper Vea, Guillermo Garcia Ponce, an ideologue of the Chavez Bolivarian Revolution, wrote several pro-Palestinian articles which included classical antisemitic statements

Back in 2001 this excellent article, from a Libertarian Perspective, said this about Chavez and his revolution.

The Republican policy wonks who believe that Chavez is a Fidelista retread, a mad leftist who would spread socialist subversion throughout the region and revive the Third International ignore the essentially rightist thrust of his politics. The New York Times, in its "new" reporting, has all but accused Chavez of being a fascist sympathetic to anti-Semitism, a latinized version of Austria's Haider.

Steve Ellner, author of three books on Venezuelan politics and history, and a professor of economic history at the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela since 1977, puts it this way:

"Chávez embraces a homegrown style of nationalism underpinned by Venezuelan heroes. His discourse resembles Sandinismo which also developed a national doctrine while breaking with imported models of Marxism-Leninism. Chávez berates historians for practically writing off the nation´s history between the death of Simón Bolívar in 1830 and the modern era, dismissing a whole century of political leaders as ¨caudillos," or strong-men. In a book of interviews with Chávez entitled The Commander Speaks, he states: ¨Caudillos may have been necessary for the incorporation of our people in historical struggles. I believe we have been sold an imported bourgeois democratic model – that of the elimination of our leaders."

But let’s leave the last word to Larry Derfner ,columnist in the Jerusalem Post, who as the comments to his column show, was roundly berated for his critical comments on Jews and his positive comments of Chavez and the revolution of the poor now occurring in Latin America.

As an American-born Jew who grew up in an East European immigrant, Left-liberal household, I'm very happy to say that democratic socialism has become the rising tide in South America.

It's basically a peasants' revolt, only peaceful, electoral. The poor people want to take back the ownership of their countries' natural resources from the foreign corporations. They also want New Deal-type economic policies, not the tight-fisted, bank-capitalist approach demanded by their creditors at the International Monetary Fund, which only made them poorer.

This week Bolivians voted Evo Morales into power, joining the leftward trend that's spread through Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Peru. The movement's leader is Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who is loathed by the Bush administration and even wishfully marked for death by evangelist Pat Robertson, but who keeps winning elections because he spends his country's oil profits to help the poor.

There was a time, up to about 30 years ago, when I would have been part of a worldwide Jewish rooting section for the South American socialist upheaval. What's more, the assumption would have been that South American Jews were heavily involved in the movement, and Jews all over would have been worried for their safety at the hands of the continent's old, wealthy, fascistic elite.

But world Jewry has changed, in Israel and everywhere else. Today its voice is the voice of wealth and power. The strongest Jewish reaction to what's happening in South America - to the extent that influential Jews know what's happening there - is alarm. Fear. Fear that this poor people's movement could spread to other parts of the world, and endanger the wealth and power of all the Jews whose attitude toward the poor is more or less the same as the Bush administration's.

I know - 70% of American Jews vote Democrat. But they don't offer much dissent anymore on the subject of poverty. When Jews were struggling immigrants in America, their economics was socialism. For their children and grandchildren, it was liberalism. Today, for the immigrants' great-grandchildren, it's conservative, businessman's capitalism.

Tags

Latin America
Chavez
Venezeula
Anti-Semitism
Bolivar