Chavez's Alleged Anti-Semitism

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet. Posted March 15, 2006.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has likened him to Hitler and Pat Robertson has called for his assassination -- twice now. Sean Hannity, the moderate of the group, conceded that while Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is, "not up to the level of Hitler," he is, nevertheless, "a threat."

Adding to this downright loony rhetoric from the right wing is the flap over Hugo Chavez's alleged anti-Semitic remarks.

During his Christmas Eve address to the nation, Chavez touched off a controversy when he said (in translation):

"The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendants 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 of all 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, and have concentrated the wealth in a few hands: Less than 10 percent 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."

A few days after the speech, on Dec. 30, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ran a "breaking news" item, cherry-picking "'the descendants of those who crucified Christ' own the riches of the world" from the address.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the famous Austrian Jewish Nazi hunter, hopped on board less than a week later. The Center echoed the anti-Semitism charge, demanding an apology and urging other Latin American states to "freeze the process of incorporation of Venezuela" into Mercosur, a South American trade agreement.

A week after that, the charge was scooped up by right-wing media outlets like the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, both of which took the opportunity to tar and feather the democratically elected leader and to associate his left-leaning policies with his alleged anti-Semitism.

Witness the teaser to Aaron Mannes' Weekly Standard piece for this guilt-by-association rap: "Hugo Chavez veers into anti-Semitism while explaining how to create a workers' paradise."

Calling Chavez a "tyrant," the Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote that Chavez "has made it clear that it backs Iran's nuclear ambitions and embraces the mullahs' hateful anti-Semitism."

Pundits and rabbis

Even before Chavez's Christmas remarks, the American-born "Grand Rabbi" of Sao Paulo, Henri Sobel, who has enough influence to pull on Bush's ear, told the president about the "'precarious' situation of the Jews in Venezuela, accusing Hugo Chavez of being an 'anti-Semite'," according to the Agence France-Presse. He later conceded to AFP that "even though there is no discrimination in Venezuela officially, Hugo Chavez does everything he can to spread hatred against the minorities."

Venezuela's Jewish community doesn't agree. The Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela (CAIV) responded to the Wiesenthal accusations with a letter from CAIV president Fred Pressner that said, "You have acted on your own, without consulting us, on issues that you don't know or understand," and that, "We believe the president was not talking about Jews and that the Jewish world must learn to work together …"

This was not the first Chavez criticism to come from the Wiesenthal Center. In the spring of 2005, the Center demanded an apology from Chavez for attempting to "banalize the Holocaust" by comparing former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to Hitler. This is, of course, a ridiculous comparison, but there were no similar demands for apologies from Rick Santorum, Robert Byrd, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, John Glenn or any other of the dozens of high-profile Hitler comparers from the past couple of years.

Evan Derkacz is AlterNet's associate editor and writer of Peek, the blog of blogs.

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