United By Hate
The uses of anti-Semitism in Chávez’s VenezuelaOn January 30, 2009 fifteen heavily armed men stormed the Tiferet Israel synagogue in the Mariperez neighborhood of Caracas. They held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple, throwing the Torah and other religious paraphernalia to the floor and painting graffiti on the walls: “Out, Death to All”; “Damned Israel, Death”; “666” with a drawing of the devil; “Out Jews”; “We don’t want you, assassins”; a star of David, an equal sign, and a swastika.
The event, though shocking, was neither isolated nor unprecedented. Over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself: “The World has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolívar from here and in their own way crucified him. . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.”
In late 2004 the police stormed Hebraica, a Jewish social, educational, and sports center, ostensibly to search for guns and explosives. No weapons were found. But finding them may never have been the purpose of the raid: it coincided with the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s official visit to Tehran. Thus, Sammy Eppel, director of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan B’nai B’rith, poignantly interpreted the event: “Chávez was showing Iran: ‘This is how I deal with my Jews.’”
According to the World Conference against Anti-Semitism that took place in London in February 2009, the Chavista media became noticeably more aggressive between October and December of last year. Aporrea, the principal Chavista online journal, published 136 anti-Jewish texts; and since the start of the year, the Conference counted an average of 45 pieces per month. In the 30 days between December 28, 2008 and January 27, 2009, coinciding with the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the number of pieces increased to an average of more than five per day.
This kind of tally may blur the distinction between criticisms of Israeli policies and sheer anti-Semitism, but the prominence of classically anti-Semitic themes, tones, and sentiments is nonetheless staggering and undeniable. Indeed, since the 2006 war in Lebanon, anti-Semitic comments have become commonplace not only in Aporrea, but also in other media outlets either controlled by or ideologically close to the government—such as Vea and Cadena Venezolana de Televisión, especially its program La Hojilla—and publicly and community-owned radio stations. Mario Silva, the anchor of La Hojilla—the main television outlet of Chávez’s ideology, known as Chavismo—declared on November 28, 2007, at a time when a student movement against Chávez was consolidating, that the Cohen family, owners of the Sambil chain of malls
are financing all that is happening. I have said for a long time that those Jewish businessmen who are not in the conspiracy should publicly come forth. . . . And many of those in the student movement that is currently activated have a lot to do with that group.
Another egregious and symptomatic example is a January 20, 2009 article by Emilio Silva in Aporrea, titled “How to Support Palestine against the Artificial State of Israel,” in which Silva calls for measures to isolate the Jewish population inside Venezuela as well as its supposed allies, ultimately the Venezuelan opposition tout court. It also calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, and associates Judaism with “Euro-Gringo” imperial interests in such disparate places as Afghanistan, Congo, and Colombia.
Beyond the specifics of Emilio Silva’s political program, the idiom of the critique is baldly that of modern anti-Semitism. Thus, Silva characterizes the enemy as “those Zionist Hebrews [who] care more for their pocket-books than for anything else, including Jehova” and calls on his readers to “publicly demand that any Jew in any street, mall, square, etc., take a position [with respect to Israel] by yelling slogans in favor of Palestine and against the miscarried and disfigured state (estado-aborto) of Israel.”
Chávez himself has been at the forefront of an effort to equate Israel with Hitler, and then to retroject Jewish conspiracy onto the Venezuelan opposition. On August 25, 2006, while on a state visit to China, Chávez declared: “Israel criticizes Hitler a lot. So do we. But they have done something similar to what Hitler did, possibly worse, against half the world.” As recently as January 10 of this year, in the days leading up to the plebiscite to validate Chávez’s permanent reelection, the Venezuelan leader conflated the Jews, the empire (by which he mostly means the United States), and his internal opposition: “The owners of Israel, in other words, the Empire, are the owners of the opposition.”
The rhetoric crystallizes under the figure of the Jew, the internal and external enemy of Chavismo. Chávez may dislike Venezuela’s 12,000 or so Jews, but what is really at stake in his mobilization of anti-Semitic rhetoric is the characterization of his entire opposition as anti-national.
• • •
Anti-Semitism is close to the intellectual heart of Chavismo, best synthesized in the writings of Argentine ultra-nationalist and Holocaust-denier Norberto Ceresole.1 Ceresole, who died in 2003, had close links with nationalist and populist military elements throughout Latin America, most notably the Peruvian President Luis Velasco Alvarado, to whom he served as adviser, and the putschist faction of the Argentine army known as the carapintadas. Through the latter group, Chávez met Ceresole, who first appeared on the Venezuelan scene in 1994 as Chávez’s adviser. Ceresole was expelled from the country in June 1995 by Venezuelan intelligence as a propagandist for Chávez’s failed 1992 coup against then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez. He reappeared after Chávez came into power in 1999, and he enjoyed close relations with senior members of the government.
In 1999 Ceresole published Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo: La Venezuela del Comandante Chávez (Caudillo, Army, People: The Venezuela of Commander Chávez), a book that matches Chávez’s political ideas and strategies much more closely than the writings of the Libertador, Simón Bolívar, whom commentators routinely cite as Chávez’s main intellectual influence. Chávez has repeatedly defended Ceresole, despite Ceresole’s controversial position within the Chavista movement, particularly among the more moderate wing, which rejects Ceresole not least on account of his anti-Semitism. On his weekly radio and TV program Aló Presidente in May 2006, Chávez referred to Ceresole as a “great friend” and an “intellectual deserving great respect.” Beyond such statements of deference, the imprint of Ceresole’s ideas can be found everywhere in Chávez’s policies, statements, and strategies.
Ceresole’s blueprint for Chavismo privileges a direct relationship between the leader and the people. Thus, Ceresole describes Chávez’s electoral triumph in the following terms: “The order that the people of Venezuela emitted on December 6, 1998 is clear and final. A physical person, and not an abstract idea or a generic party, was ‘delegated’ by that very people to exercise Power.” Ceresole differentiates Chavismo from fascism—which he disingenuously refers to as “the European nationalisms of the post-WWI period”—on the grounds that the former has no predominant party structure. Yet, in Chavismo the immediate relationship between the leader and the people has singular importance, with all other political structures serving merely as channels of transmission between them. Not surprisingly, Human Rights Watch recently declared:
[a] defining feature of the Chávez presidency has been an open disregard for the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the 1999 Constitution—and, specifically, the notion that an independent judiciary is indispensable for protecting fundamental rights.
In the Chavista corporealization of politics, any alternative becomes alien and monstrous, and must be expelled from the body of the nation and annihilated. The figure of the Jew comes in handy in this scheme, and indeed Ceresole indulges in traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, attributing, for example, the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish Center, which killed 85 people, mostly Jews, to Jews themselves. It is no coincidence that the first heading in the introduction of Ceresole’s book on Chávez is “The Jewish Question and the State of Israel,” and Ceresole explains why clearly enough:
The first time that I perceived the ‘Jewish problem’ was when I discovered, empirically, that the so-called ‘terrorist attacks of Buenos Aires’ (1992 and 1994) . . . . corresponded with an internal crisis of the State of Israel and not with the action of a supposed ‘Islamic terrorism.’ From that time onward, the Jews erupted in my life. I suddenly discovered them not as I had known them until then, that is as individuals distinct from one another, but rather as elements for whom individuation is impossible, a group united by hatred, and, to use a term that they like, by ire.
Thus, in Ceresole’s view, “the Jews” act only as a conspiratorial body.
Chávez’s immediate reaction to the looting of the Tiferet Israel Synagogue reflects the same kind of conspiratorial outlook—he declared it an attack perpetrated by the opposition against his regime. Before beginning a formal inquest, Venezuela’s president had a theory about the identity of the culprits: “Like any police investigator, you have to ask yourself: who benefits from these violent acts? Not the government, not the people, not the Revolution. . . . It is they themselves who did it! This is what I say to the nation.” Just who “they” are is ambiguous—it may refer to the amorphous “oligarchy” that Chávez regularly decries, or the Jews themselves, or both. Similarly, Chávez has embraced the idea that the Bush government orchestrated the attacks of September 11 in order to blame Islamic militants and thereby justify the invasion of Iraq.
More generally, despite the romance between Chávez and a string of international leftist superstars (from the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri to the filmmaker Oliver Stone), Chavismo is less a coherent ideology than the sum of its leader and chief evangelist’s robust gestures and gesticulations. Chávez’s performances on Aló Presidente and his risky-but-calculated threats, insults, and other dramatic gestures keep the spotlight on him. In this regard, his media persona is consistent with the fascist strategy: casting aside all forms of protocol and substituting them with the excessive antics of the clown. Chávez is Venezuela’s Ubu Roi, constantly shifting the rules of the game to disorient his opponents. Ceresole himself wrote:
The Venezuelan model is not a theoretical construction—it springs directly from reality. It is the result of a convergence of factors that we could define as ‘physical,’ therefore, that have not been conceived beforehand (in opposition to the so-called ‘ideological’ factors).
Following Ceresole’s blueprint, a decade of Chavista rule has undermined Venezuela’s democratic institutions, a process amply documented by Human Rights Watch, which reports, among many other things:
in 2004 Chávez signed legislation that made it possible for his supporters in the National Assembly to both pack and purge the Supreme Court. . . . Since this takeover occurred, the court’s response to government measures that threaten fundamental rights has typically been one of passivity and acquiescence.
Discrimination against opposition members in government hiring practices and use of government agencies as bases for political operations are rampant.
• • •
Instead of political parties, representative institutions, and, above all, ideologies, Chavismo manifests as a physical relationship between the people and Chávez, with, as Chávez himself describes, love as the potent glue connecting them.Thus during the recent campaign for the referendum to abolish presidential term limits, the widespread slogan, “Amor con amor se paga” (“love must with love be repaid”), which captures the notion that Chávez’s love for the people comes with a corresponding obligation.
The problem with substituting rights with a language of love is that dissent suggests lack of love, or ingratitude, or a sign of allegiance to a foreign enemy: capitalism, the “Euro-Gringo imperialism,” or even, for Chávez, Zionist-Fascist-Euro-Gringo Imperialism.
In Chavismo, politics and political life both represent a kind of hand-to-hand combat between the “people,” united by “love,” and its enemies, united by hatred—the “ire” that Ceresole imputes to Jews.
While Chávez’s political vocabulary often portrays Jews as inordinately influential and manipulative, he does not restrict himself to the trope of the Jew as master conspirator. Instead, he enacts the classic double move in anti-Semitism, used from the time of the Dreyfus Affair to Nazism and beyond: the powerful, exploitative Jew who is also inherently weak and contemptible. Chávez thus refers to his opponents as “escuálidos” (squalids), a Spanish term that connotes not only dirtiness and abjection, but also flimsiness, wimpiness, and scrawniness. Not surprisingly, figures conventionally associated with degradation are important in the imagery. Homophobia is a key element in that repertoire; although unlike Cuba (Castro is Chávez’s admired “father”), which bans homosexuality and persecutes homosexuals, Chavismo relies on homophobia as invective rather than state policy.
Most commonly, homophobic sentiments and images are mobilized around the figure of the escuálido. For instance, the Chavista theme in the so-called Battle of Santa Inés—the response to the opposition’s 2004 campaign to revoke Chávez’s mandate—was “Florentino y el Diablo,” a story about a handsome Creole cowboy who wins a duel with the devil. Florentino, Chávez’s stand-in, appeared in a series of posters, a masculine rider on a tall horse, lance in hand, threatening a squeamish, stereotypically gay devil—an escuálido. Florentino’s lance points to the devil’s bottom in a gesture of penetration that Chávez has himself enacted verbally. On La Hojilla sodomy was Chávez’s metaphor for dominating the opposition—vamos a jugar el juego del rojo . . . . tu te agachas y yo te cojo; a non-rhyming translation is “let’s play the game of red . . . . ‚ you bend down and I fuck you.” The game does not jeopardize Chávez’s gender identity; in much of Latin America the male sodomizer is not regarded as a homosexual.
Perhaps the worst and saddest example of official homophobic censure occurred after a skirmish with the Catholic Church, one of the main institutional opponents of the regime. After a prominent priest was murdered in a Caracas hotel room, Venezuela’s Attorney General sought to dispel criticisms of the government’s incapacity to combat crime by claiming that the priest “had participated in his own death” because “we found excrement and also injuries in his anus.” In another telling case, Mario Silva, after calling a gay social columnist who criticized the bad taste of a military parade “pato” (“queer”), jabbed:
You would probably want our armed forces to dress in pink or wear silk uniforms. I can picture you leading the parade all wrapped in feathers. I’m not homophobic, by the way. But each of us should accept his true nature. You have no right to talk about the army, the army is very foreign to what you are. You have to show respect.
Pronouncements such as these are often followed by proclamations of alleged love for gays, and a tender commitment to multiculturalism.
What Chavista opponents—be they escuálidos, patos, or Gringo-Zionist-Imperialists—have in common is shit. Chávez routinely calls his opponents “plastas” (“lumps of shit”). Thus, in an aggressive speech the day after a key 2007 referendum, Chávez, dressed in military garb and surrounded by the highest- ranking of his armed forces, referred to the opposition’s victory as a “victory of shit.” The army, described by Ceresole as the third point on the Chavista triangle of fundamental direct relationships, were publicly incarnated as the force of containment: the military brass were present at the speech to warn the opposition against getting overly enthusiastic about its victory of shit. The metaphor is perhaps symptomatic of Chavista hysteria with regard to the opposition. It is not easy to keep shit in its place.
As hard as Chávez tries to reduce all opposition to an internal oligarchy backed by imperialism, his “enemies” proliferate: workers’ unions, the student movement, the church, civil society organizations.
• • •
The sacking of the Tiferet Israel synagogue produced an outcry from the local and the international press. As criticism turned louder, Chávez’s initial position became untenable. Given his tendency to conflate opposition, imperialism, and the Jews, the possibility of a Jewish plot suggested itself. But, under pressure, Chávez backed away from that theory and instructed his minister to find the culprits, which he did within a week. The offenders were prosecuted, and Chávez insisted that freedom of religion was and would continue to be respected in Venezuela.
Reducing anti-Semitism to a form of religious intolerance, however, is a subterfuge. Chávez’s focus on religious pluralism drew attention away from his unrepentant attacks on Jews, and his regime’s use of the figure of the Jew as the supreme incarnation of abjection, a stand-in for any opposition. These are his real targets. Whether the perpetrators of the synagogue attack were following instructions from above or were merely vandals hiding behind the government’s anti-Semitic rhetoric is to a large degree irrelevant. As such gangs thrive, the state itself is increasingly responsible.
From the time of the Dreyfus Affair, modern anti-Semitism has been connected to anxieties related to national integrity—not to religious pluralism per se. Indeed, in Venezuela freedom of religion has never been an issue; there are too many Protestants, too many Catholics, and even enough Jews and Muslims to ensure that abolishing freedom of religion is politically inviable.
However, neither can it be said that religion is unimportant. In the war between “the people of love” and “the people of shit,” religious symbolism comes in handy. Consider this: to express solidarity with Palestinians during the recent war in Gaza, Venezuela’s foreign minister led an official delegation, all members donning a keffiyeh, to a Caracas mosque. Venezuelan leftist opposition leader and editor Teodoro Petkoff pointed out that Chávez has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a war of religion. Chávez identified the Palestinian cause with the cause of Islam (implicitly siding with Hamas over the Palestinian Authority), and identified the Venezuelan nation with Islam, just as he has identified Judaism with the Empire. Chavista graffiti ties the Star of David to the Swastika; it also proclaims that “Islam is our Patrimony.” Chávez’s anti-Semitism is about war, a religious war of sorts. This posture poisons the discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli question, inhibiting a just and productive argument from the left.
For Venezuela’s Jews, Bolivarian anti-Semitism casts doubt on their national belonging. After the synagogue attack, the Jewish community got the message, and protesters marched, showing their national identity cards. In recent years, the Jewish community in Venezuela has shrunk some 20 percent.
Presidential indulgence in a politics of denigration also erodes the promise of the Venezuelan progressive movement by making open discussion of the class and race issues that divide the country impossible. Like its distant cousin, Peronism, Chavismo’s reliance on confrontation and brinkmanship extinguishes the possibility of open dialogue on practically any delicate issue. Indeed, the costs of Bolivarian anti-Semitism are at least as heavy for the broader society as they are for the Jewish community; all oppositional discourse is banished to the terrain of the foreign and the treasonous.
Chavista anti-Semitism is a symptom of the weakness of the regime itself. From its inception, Chávez’s government has been unable either to bend the inherited state apparatus fully to its will, or to abolish it and replace it with its own revolutionary design. The “Bolivarian Revolution” has thus developed within the constraints of certain democratic practices, where the entitlements of consumers, labor unions, government bureaucracies, community organizations, and property owners must be taken into account, if not necessarily respected.
In classic Leninist theory, old regime structures and emerging revolutionary institutions were to coexist for a brief transitional period. In Chávez’s Venezuela, on the contrary, the duality has become endemic, compromising state accountability. Paramilitary groups, drug mafias, high crime rates, death squads, and corruption thrive.
This dual structure is the context that frames and explains Chávez’s politics of distraction—his verbal antics and his reliance on unpredictable and spectacular policy innovations. The direct connection that Chávez has tried to forge with (some of) the people further undermines structures of administrative mediation. Opposition and dissatisfaction are therefore constant threats to the presidency itself. In such a scenario, a rhetoric that reduces all political friction to a single cause, to a single common enemy, is useful indeed. However, if history is any guide, ideologies of this sort have an elective affinity with dictatorship rather than democracy. When a regime relies on populism, military uniforms, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, it is time to worry.
Update on this article: Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez, A Necessary Critique
Comments
1) For Ceresole's Holocaust denial, see Caudillo, ejército, pueblo: la Venezuela del Comandante Chávez, Madrid, Estudios hispanos-árabes, 2000: 14-27.
About the Author
Claudio Lomnitz, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, is author of Death and the Idea of Mexico and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism.
Rafael Sánchez teaches in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. His forthcoming book is Dancing Jacobins: A Genealogy of Latin American Populism.
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Boston Review’s intern blog
This is why not only Jews but everyone who can possibly leave Venezuela is leaving Venezuela. One meets these emigres everywhere with poignant tales to tell.
Really? As far as I know more people leave pretty much every other Latin American country in much higher numbers than Venezuela.
This article is utter rubbish. From repeating the already debunked claim that Chavez and Chavismo are antisemitic (see http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2805 and http://www.forward.com/articles/1874/) to accusing Chavistas of homophobia without even mentioning the fact that Venezuelan society is and has always been mildly homophobic (the quotes mentioned, although vulgar, are very commonly uttered by Venezuelans of all social groups and ethnicities) or the fact that Chavez's government is arguably the one that has done the most for gays and other minorities in the history of Venezuela. Makes me wonder if all these out of context quotes and half-truths are there to muddle the fact that what Chavez is doing is openly opposing the criminal policies of the state of Israel in Palestine.
And of course, no mention that Ceresole himself was the only one who was expelled from Venezuela in 1999 and publicly disavowed by Chavez himself.
Of course, no subtleties are allowed. The echoes of the commonly and callously uttered
"Kill a black guy and live a Pepsi day" by pretty much everyone from the Caracas middle class don't even register in the author as possibly written by somebody else than Chavistas is just an example of a 'conspiratorial outlook'. Does the author really think that people who buy at Mercal are actually advocating the killing of Zionists? The grafitti seems to have been placed there precisely to smear the government. Especially if you are acquainted with that kind of 'dark humor' so prevalent in Venezuelan society.
Of course, no subtleties are allowed. That the echoes of the commonly and callously uttered "Kill a black guy and live a Pepsi day" by pretty much everyone from the Caracas middle class don't even ring a bell in the authors and the automatic dismissal of the idea that this was possibly written by somebody else than Chavistas as just an example of a 'conspiratorial outlook' belie their ignorance. Does the author really think that people who buy at Mercal are actually advocating the killing of Zionists? The grafitti seems to have been placed there precisely to smear the government. Especially if you are acquainted with that kind of 'dark humor' so prevalent in Venezuelan society.
After the attack on the synagogue, Chavez himself talked live on TV to Elias Farache, president of one of Venezuela's main Jewish associations and gave him his word that he was not going to tolerate antisemitic attacks in his country and that he was going to protect the Jewish community, that is'as part of this country as any other'.
Farache himself denied the government’s supposed culpability in the attack, saying, 'We do not accuse the government. It would not be logical for us to be attacked by a government that is liberal, … that has above all always been in favor of minorities"
"The world has an offer for everybody but it turned out that a few minorities--the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia--they took possession of the riches of the world, a minority took possession of the planet’s gold, the silver, the minerals, the water, the good lands, the oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few; less than 10 percent of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world."
This quote shows directly that he was referring to the 10% of the population who own half the riches of the world, not to the Jewish community. Why has the most important part of this speech been left out? Also, I don't seem to remember any Jews expelling Bolivar from Venezuela.
Are the authors even aware that Latin American liberation theology (of which Chavez is an avowed fan) routinely identifies the elites and the powerful as "Christ Killers", with no mention of the Jews at all?
How much were these shills paid to throw this sh*t masquerading as journalism?
Boston Review just got wiped off my bookmarks. Bye Bye.
Por favor no hables tanta paja, si? Me imagino que tus fantasias son acentuadas todos los dias por globovision y Noticiero Digital, pero hasta eso tiene un limite.
The hypocrisy of silent support for his attempted ouster doesn't mean that legitimate criticism of his autocratic actions isn't warranted. Rowan and hindfleet, I'm lookin' at you.
As I wrote over at 3qd, Chavez is a thug that embarrasses anyone who wants to be called a leftist. Chavez is the enemy of everything a liberal holds dear-- individual rights, freedom of speech and association, and democratic government.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3148
http://thejewishchronicle.net/printer_friendly/2663898
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1673
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45200
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4448
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-chavez-administration-at-10-years:-the-economy-and-social-indicators/
Since you don't know me, please engage the evidence I cite rather than another ad hominem attack.
If you still don't know the difference between a leftist and a liberal, then you didn't read my comment, Stangy.
Simply because Chavez is a leftist doesn't mean that he gets a pass for inflicting degradations on his opponents, real or perceived, which the Venezuelan right would be happily to impose on their enemies. Just because US leaders (and remember that the recent Bush was, after all, imposed in a fixed election) have waged unjust wars in the name of minority rights doesn't mean that critics living in the US can't point out obvious and glaring rights violations in other countries.
When you say "liberal," Rowan, you're talking about the thuggish autocrats who have always controlled American policy in Latin America. These are the thugs who only want to see "democracy" when it benefits them, and are quick to silence dissent when it goes against their interests. When elections don't go their way, they're happy to step in with an authoritarian solution and frustrate the will of the public, scapegoating their "enemies" as a political tool.
As a leftist, I oppose the subordination of the people to autocracy. As a liberal, I oppose the use of thuggery in all its forms. Chavez, for all that he is a leftist, is also a thug, and I oppose him.
---
I think this comparison holds true up until the genocide began. As Arno Mayer points out in "Why the Heavens did not Darken", German Jews were treated no worse than Blacks in the American South for most of the 1930s. It was only with the collapse on the Russian front that things turned grave. If Chavez qualified his statement by saying that Israel treats Palestinians like Hitler treated Jews in the 1930s, he'd be 100 percent right. Of course, a more accurate comparison is with apartheid South Africa--a point made by that notorious anti-Semite Jimmy Carter.
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.4/lomnitz_sanchez2.php
An average of 45 anti-Jewish texts a month? Five per day? Come on, where do you get these figures? What constitutes an "anti-Jewish" text? Criticizing Israel? This reminds me of those reports that claim hate groups are on the rise because three idiots in robes formed a new KKK group in Alabama or someone launched a new white power website.
Most of your bogus claims and malicious associations have been debunked above. You do a disservice to anyone fighting genuine anti-Semitism by indulging in this paranoia and criticizing someone who could be targeted for genuine faults, not blatant lies.
You have no idea what we went through in Germany before the war. WE were innocent people whose lives were destroyed because of our religion. The Arabs have launched one genocidal war against Israel after another, and are still treated far better than they deserve.
Compared to our lives in Germany the Arabs have it very, very easy, even in Gaza. They have a FUNCTIONING ZOO, for pity's sake. They have well-stocked grocery stores, cars, and gas to run them, not to mention schools, trips to the beach, and GOD knows what all else. When you see the pictures of the people, they are well dressed and well nourished.
My parents had to keep me home our last two years there except for going to school because the Germans were snatching Jewish children off the street and doing no one knows what with them. My best friend from elementary school disappeared that way.
Defend anti-Semitism if you wish, but at least don't peddle lies about real tragedies.
The man appears to be another dictator albeit one singing from the the populist songbook.
Foul stuff really.
You know nothing about apartheid and former South Africa. All you think is that you are scoring debate "points" by comparing Israel to South Africa without any idea of what you are talking about. You are part of the "mob" who go along with another myth without having to do any thinking. Well done.
what a strange world it is. I will say this: those who use unprovable conspiracy theories to explain away everything and to deflect blame from themselves are prima facie unreliable- could they not at least preface their theories with a disclaimer along the lines of : " I know this is seemingly ridiculous ( for instance, that jews would bomb their own daycare centers) and that i have no proof, but it is perhaps interesting to entertain the notion of what benefit certain people might derive from this situation- though of course I do not consider this possibility anything other than a possibility rather than fact."
or something, but please do these conspiracists have no regard for their own credibility? and for all those encouraging this way of thinking, please, do not "pay forward" these ideas- a theory which can neither be proved nor disproved is essentially mythology and should be ignored.
Thus, to be clear, in my mind, Chavez has no credibility- and by the way any reference to "those who crucified christ" is bound to be understood as a reference to the jews- if one is referring to some obscure south american version of such a phrase it is clearly incumbent upon the user of said phrase to make it clear that they are not referring to the jews.
the bottom line here is please stop insulting everyone's intelligence.
i think i would be happier if chavez just came right out and acted like a tyrant- get it over with- we all know where Chavez is headed. stop the lies and the double talk.
peace and love to all
mike from toronto
It's the ultimate military regime, with all the futile propaganda and tv channels, the era of civil liberties decadency.
You simply don't have any moral to export, nowadays. Good night and good luck ;P
I mean, seriously, what literate Jew above the age of six could be fooled
by the deceptive rubbish of apologists for despots like Jose del Solar?
I got news for Hugo: there's a certain percentage of Jews in the world who - while definitely not controlling vast amounts of the world's wealth as he slurs - indeed DO hit back very, very hard.
Them Shoah fun-in-the-sun days are done, Mr. C.
@27 "In a funny way, Chavez is quite right: The U.S. is to blame for the sad situation in Venezuela. If we'd just managed to take this jackass out in '99, the country could be ahead of Chile and Brazil by now as a top economy in Latin America."
Hark! the authentic voice of the Right.
The authors do the best they can with available evidence, and I find the case largely convincing. But the conflation of anti-Semitism with opposition to Israeli policy is a gross miscalculation. Increased criticism of Israeli policy during the December/January rape of Gaza, in particular, is hardly indicative of anti-Semitism.
I also don't understand the "Islam is our patrimony" point. What does that even mean? It's obvious that the majority of Venezuelans are not Muslims, nor descended from them. More context is required. Furthermore, Islam is not inherently anti-Semitic, which makes the context of the statement even more important.
The worst thing we can do in combating anti-Semitism is suggest that Israel is a stand-in for Jews. I am Jewish (though not religious), and I have no problem stating what I believe to be true about Israel: It is an apartheid state built on the land and blood of non-Jews (Jewish blood, too). It is primarily responsible for the continued suffering the Palestinians, a people who are also the victims of their own leaders and the cynicism of fellow Arabs. Israeli responses to Palestinian violence are, historically and currently, vastly disproportionate. Israel has no moral standing vis-à-vis its Arab neighbors and the two million or so prisoners it has behind walls and checkpoints. There is no faction in mainstream Israeli politics that wants peace; no faction that is serious about eliminating settlements; no faction that views a Palestinian life as equal to an Israeli one. Messianic Jewish extremism is the governing principle in Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Israeli state culture glorifies violence, recasts aggression as victimhood, and uses war as a method of social control.
I don't think that saying any of the above makes me an anti-Semite, nor even "anti-Israel." It makes me critical of a state, much as I am deeply critical of other states (all states, really), including Venezuela (a cultish despotism), Iran (a noxious theocracy), China (a paragon of consumption-driven social control), Britain (the world's most advanced police and nanny state), Japan (the most racist, anti-immigrant population on the planet), France (no one knows state-enforced culture and patriotism like the French), and the United States (the world's primary aggressor, and the state that taught Israel how to use war to enforce social discipline).