Nelson Castellano Hernández, EL UNIVERSAL
President Hugo Chávez has accustomed us with his extreme verbal diatribes, in which he blames the priesthood, the opposition, a foreign government or the Jews, and the day after he makes opposite claims, in an attempt to make his audiences believe that he actually did not say what he actually said. He thus implements Lenin’s old principle: “To advance while retreating”.
The president denies that he’s promoting actions against Jews, but he, along with government members and also certain press figures, sympathizers of the regime, have made antisemitic comments and statements.
The mixture he made between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, between Zionists, Jews and the State of Israel, has enabled him to promote the project of his friend, the Iranian president, and the projects of certain radical Islamic groups as well.
The authorities have demagogically insisted till now that the desecration of the Synagogue, or the graffiti inscriptions in front of the Israeli embassy, were acts of vandalism perpetrated by unknown perpetrators, but in reality, no investigation has brought about results that could determine those responsible for those acts.
In any case, the motivation for those actions can be found in the presidential and governmental discourse and speeches and in those of “Bolivarian Project” activists. For instance:
- Chavez’s speech which he delivered in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, in which he compares Israel with the Nazis.
- The cruel treatment towards the Jewish school of Caracas, an armed police raid, in two occasions.
- The raid against the Synagogue of Caracas and the destruction of ritual objects.
- Announcements against the Jewish state made by the Venezuelan foreign minister wearing Arabic garments, during an organized event that took place within a mosque. Those statements got the support and approval of President Chavez himself, who in his turn called for the prosecution of the President of the State of Israel.
In the same day, the alternative Aporrea news web portal, openly called for the publication of the full names of figures who are members of important Jewish organizations and who live in Venezuela, to question and interrogate them publicly everywhere they go, and they even called for the nationalization and confiscation of the assets of “Zionist Jews”.
God forbid, the current situation reminds us of situations experienced in the past.
Not long afterwards, the Venezuelan ambassador to Russia, Alexis Navarro, and a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Adel El Zabayar, have both blamed the Israeli intelligence services and the CIA of an assumed attempt to overthrow Chavez’s regime.
Certain people, who make their best to be more “Chavists” than Chavez himself, go even further. During the TV show “La Hojilla”, both the host of the show and two guests declared that the president of the Confederation of Jewish Organizations of Venezuela should be brought to trial.
The Aporrea online news portal, which is ideologically close to the government, frequently posts in its website antisemitic articles that are eventually deleted a few days later. Below are a few sufficiently explicit article titles, from which one can understand their contents:
- “Chavists, we are not German Jews”, Eduardo Rothe, 10/8/2008.
- “Attack the synagogue”, 2/1/2009, Miguel Jaimes.
- “In the hunt for Jews”, Evaristo Marcano Marín, 1/9/2009.
- “Zionists, Fascists, murderers, you have failed”, Javier Monagas Maita, 1/15/2008.
- “Israel, the complaining vassal”, Julio César Trujillo, 3/8/2009.
- There are inconceivably so many other articles. I will just quote the concluding sentence of the last article I mentioned. “A real and palpable genocide, worse than the one allegedly perpetrated against Jews by Hitler’s Nazism, which enjoyed your complicity and which you assisted, while exposing Jews, lest they share their bloody wills, the cravings of a satanic sect, a mercantilist religion, blood sucking fleas”.
Words alone do not suffice in order to respond to the horror, Venezuelan Jews need our solidarity. As far as they are concerned, a new exodus has begun, and their numbers have diminished by half during the last decade. It’s an anti-historical reality in the midst of the second decade of the 21st century.
During the blessings delivered by Pope Benedict XVI to the people of Venezuela on May 10th, the pope reiterated his rejection of all forms of antisemitism.
We, the Venezuelan people, Jews and non-Jews alike, should escape this nightmare together, lest the entire region tends towards radical and extreme stances and lest the conflicts of the Middle East are imported into Latin American territory.
Formerly, the Venezuelan Consul in Paris
President of Venezuela-Futura, France
