Posted on 01/23/2024 5:17:07 AM PST by MtnClimber
Chile is now essentially a first-world country. Say what you like about General Augusto Pinochet bringing in the “Chicago Boys,” a group of free-market economists. Good or bad, the general left Chile with a major world-class economy. And Chile ranks as an extraordinarily free nation, ranking freer than the USA.
So one would think that Chile would take a standard western line on core issues, for example, the present war in Gaza, but you would be wrong.
Chile has a bizarre profile when it comes to the Mideast.
Starting in the late 19th century, Christians in the Holy Land started fleeing to Chile. They were afraid of their sons being drafted into a Muslim-led Ottoman army, to be used as cannon fodder. They primarily came from Beit Safafa in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahur, where Christians predominated at the time. This is no longer so.
What these Palestinian Christians found was a country with a magnificent Mediterranean climate for thousands of miles, only the tropical far north and the Antarctic far south excepted. It was about thirty times the size of the Holy Land, with the Mediterranean districts alone being ten times larger. Moreover, it was incredibly underpopulated for its size.
If these Palestinians had lost the Holy Land, they had acquired something vastly superior.
No thanks to Chile’s Spanish history, with its Iberian traditions of elites and peons, there was a need for a vibrant mercantile class, and the Palestinian Christians (soon to be called Chilestinos/Chilestinians) prospered. They became Chile’s economic powerhouse. They soon controlled the business district, the Patronato, in the capital.
And these Chilestinos used that power. In 1947, a mere two generations after their initial arrivals, the Chilean government originally wanted to vote yes to partition the Holy Land in order to create...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Maybe we need more Pinochets (and less communists).
open borders and diversity will be the tools that communists use to destroy it.
Giving communists room to operate is national prostitution.
Pinochet had one neat trick for getting rid of Commies......
well, I learned from this article some stuff I didn’t know.
I never knew Chilestinians existed, much less how they came to be. Remarkable. And they call them Christians. I’d love to see some evidence of that from them.
A lot of Arab-Christians (perhaps better described as ethnic Christians) similarly settled in Ecuador in the early part of the 20th century.
And similarly they support the Muslims. They have forgotten why they had to flee the Middle East themselves.
As an aside, I remember Ted Cruz during his 2016 campaign, was invited to speak to an organization of American Arab Christians. As soon as he started speaking favorably about Israel, they started booing him. He stood silently for a couple of minutes while they booed, then said “if you will not stand with Israel, I will not stand with you”. And left the stage.
For some reason Arab Christians seem to see themselves as Arab first and Christian second, or that’s the way it looks to me.
mmmmmm. red/green chiles! mmmmm
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