Chavez And The Jews: A Sorry Tale

Like one of those telenovelas that are so popular on Latin American television stations, the slow yet inexorable deterioration of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, was soaked in drama and cloying sentimentality.

Chavez died March 5 following a two-year fight with cancer. For most of that time, he claimed – falsely – to have been cured. But less than two months after winning a fourth term in last October’s election, Chavez was spirited back to Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s doctors treated him.

Now, Chavez’s death affords the opportunity for a critical reassessment of his tenure. In his fourteen years in power, Chavez turned Venezuela into the Latin American hub of a global network of anti-American, authoritarian rogue states. There is scarcely a fellow dictator he didn’t befriend. Some, like the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, are no longer with us. Others – among them Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe – remain alive and in power.

The closest relationship of all was the one forged with the Castro brothers in Cuba, Fidel and Raul, whose ailing economy is kept afloat by heavily subsidized oil from Venezuela, Latin America’s biggest producer.

With allies like these, it should come as no surprise that Chavez became an arch-foe of Israel. In one of the last foreign policy statements he made before returning to the hospital in Cuba in December, Chavez denounced what he called the “savage” Israeli attack on Gaza. In 2009, on the previous occasion Israel responded militarily to Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza, Chavez told the French newspaper Le Figaro that Israel had launched a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Such incendiary statements won Chavez the admiration of the Arab street. In 2006, during the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera praised Chavez for beating Arab leaders to the punch when he became the first head of state to condemn Israel’s actions. Similar words of admiration greeted his decision to expel the Israeli ambassador to Caracas in 2009.

In attacking Israel, though, Chavez inadvertently undermined the arguments of those who say anti-Zionism is one thing, anti-Semitism something else entirely. In many ways, Chavez’s attitude to Israel mirrored that of the Soviet Union. Just as the USSR marked its own Jews out as a fifth column during its decades-long propaganda campaign against Zionism, so did Chavez.

Before Chavez came to power there were 30,000 Jews in Venezuela. The community has now dwindled to fewer than 9,000. The Chavez years ushered in a set of new and frightening experiences for Venezuela’s Jews, from cartoons in the press that could have been lifted from the notorious Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer to the vandalism of the main synagogue in Caracas in 2009.

As a depressing summary by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism noted last September, “Recent years have witnessed a rise in anti-Semitic manifestations, including vandalism, media attacks, caricatures, and physical attacks on Venezuelan Jewish institutions.”

Members of the Venezuelan opposition I’ve spoken with over the past year have all remarked on the virulence of Chavez’s anti-Semitism. In 2012, Israel was temporarily displaced by the emergence of a domestic Jewish target in the form of the rival presidential candidate to Chavez – the youthful and energetic Henrique Capriles. While Capriles is a practicing Catholic, his mother’s family, the Radonskis, arrived in Venezuela after surviving the Holocaust in Poland. Other members of the family perished in the Nazi concentration camps.

In their attacks on Capriles, Chavez and his press lackeys referred to him with an array of derogatory terms – “gringo,” “bourgeois,” “imperialist,” and, above all, “Zionist.” There was no doubt that by “Zionist” the regime meant “Jew.”

Why did anti-Semitism become such a potent force in a country that eschewed it for so long? Some analysts regard it as the inevitable outcome of Chavez’s alliance with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah.

Yet there is another factor. The main ideological influence on Chavez was a relatively obscure Argentinian sociologist, Norberto Ceresole. A Holocaust denier and all-round conspiracy theorist, Ceresole’s theories became the basis for what Venezuelans know as chavismo, the matrix of social institutions and values created by the Chavez regime. The first chapter of a book in which Ceresole extolled the virtues of such a system, under which the relationship between the “leader” and the “people” is privileged, was titled “The Jewish Problem.”

There are few reasons to believe antagonism toward Jews will disappear in post-Chavez Venezuela. Nicolas Maduro is an orthodox Chavista who, as foreign minister, has enthusiastically pushed for even closer relations with Israel’s enemies. Maduro’s main rival, the National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, is viewed as less ideologically motivated, yet he too is unlikely to mend fences with Israel and the U.S.

Moreover, Chavez’s figure will loom large in the political life of Venezuela. Should Henrique Capriles follow through on his stated intention to challenge Chavez’s successor, it is probable, according to Sammy Eppel, director of the Human Rights Commission of B’nai B’rith Venezuela, that the anti-Semitic caricatures used against him last year will emerge again.

As for Chavez himself, Eppel does not hold back: “Chavez will probably be remembered as the one who made Venezuelan Jews feel that for the first time they were not welcome…a chilling reminder of past tragedies.”

For the Venezuelan people, who face economic chaos and political meltdown, the tragedy continues.

It's good that this article refers to the obscure Norberto Ceresole, who was indeed a vile anti-Semite.

But it does not go into further details - namely that Ceresole came up with "Bolivarian" concept, that he was expelled from Venezuela as an anti-constitution agitator by Chavez' predecessor, that he was reinvited to Venezuela after Chavez was "elected" the first time, that he was asked to leave again by one of Chavez' right hand men because they thought he was too extreme (imagine that), that he returned to Argentina where he became the chief counselor to President Adolfo Saa, and he died while trying to engineer a new candidacy for Saa.

Saa considers himself a Palestinian because his ancestors originally came from Turkish Palestine.

A socialist tyrant who turned out to be antisemitic - who would have guessed at that outcome? Granted, fascist, national socialist, and soviet socialist tyrants in the past have all been rabidly antisemitic (Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, Barack Obama, and every single socialist tyrant in history, without exception), but it is so unexpected that socialist tyrant Hugo Chavez would use his absolute power to harm God's chosen people!

For the Venezuelan people, who face economic chaos and political meltdown, the tragedy continues.

That is very good. The Venezuelan people deserve every bit of what they get for putting and keeping a bastard such as this in power.

Likewise the United States. The seeds that the sons of bitches so gleefully sowed in electing and reelecting a son of a bitch like obama in 2008 and 2012 continue to germinate, sprout, take root, and mature for harvest. And when harvest time comes, the harvest will be plentiful, bontiful, and bitter for the sowers. It has already been bitter for the non sowers, but soon the sowers will reap the fruits of their labor. Then there will be weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth due to pain.

A socialist tyrant who turned out to be antisemitic.

We currently have one occupying the WhiteHouse. One that was returned there by the votes of idiots, parasites, fools,self hating Whites,and last but not least, the Jewish vote.

We currently have one occupying the WhiteHouse. One that was returned there by the votes of idiots, parasites, fools,self hating Whites,and last but not least, the Jewish vote.

That seems as unlikely as blacks voting overwhelmingly for a Klan leader like Robert Byrd for five consecutive decades. I don't understand those who vote for their enemies simply because someone once said that "socialists are good, socialist care about the little people".

I know. I never thought that I would see the things that I have seen in the last 5 years happening in the United States of America. But, the proof is in the pudding.

Here in Colombia Ive not noticed any...or it hasnt appeared before my eyes. There are Jews in the Senate and the House. Large population in Medellin and Bogota. To be honest never a word is said one way or the other.

Good ol Venezuela is a dif matter. Land and property was confiscated from the Jews by Chavez..currency restrictions were placed on Jews above others. Certainly money transfers were halted. Jews in Venezuela overwelmingly supported Chavez at first....sound familiar?

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