[Marxism] FAIR on Chavez, false antisemitism allegations

[Anna Fierling <anna_fierling@xxxxxxxxx>]

Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur

Some outlets spread spurious charges of anti-Semitism

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2805

*Media Advisory*

FAIR - Fairness & accuracy in reporting

1/23/06

It began with a bulletin from the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Los Angeles (1/4/06) accusing Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez of invoking an old anti-Semitic
slur. In a Christmas Eve speech, the Center said,
Chavez declared that "the world has wealth for all, but
some minorities, the descendants of the same people
that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth
of the world."

The Voice of America (1/5/06) covered the charge
immediately. Then opinion journals on the right took up
the issue. "On Christmas Eve, Venezuela's President
Hugo Chavez's Christian-socialist cant drifted into
anti-Semitism," wrote the Daily Standard, the Weekly
Standard's Web-only edition. The American Spectator
(1/6/06) was so excited about the quote, which it
called "the standard populist hatemongering of Latin
America's new left leaders," that it presented it as
coming from two different speeches:

"Venezuela's Chavez in his 2005 Christmas address
couldn't resist commenting that 'the descendants of
those who crucified Christ' own the riches of the
world. And on a Dec. 24 visit to the Venezuelan
countryside, Chavez stirred up the peasants by claiming
that 'the world offers riches to all. However,
minorities such as the descendants of those who
crucified Christ' have become 'the owners of the riches
of the world.'"

Then more mainstream outlets began to pick up the
story. "Chavez lambasted Jews (in a televised Christmas
Eve speech, no less) as 'descendants of those who
crucified Christ' and 'a minority [who] took the
world's riches for themselves,'" the New York Daily
News' Lloyd Grove reported (1/13/06). A column in the
Los Angeles Times (1/14/06) used the quote to label
Chavez "a jerk and a friend of tyranny." The Wall
Street Journal's "Americas" columnist, Mary Anastasia
O'Grady (1/16/06), called Chavez's words "an ugly
anti-Semitic swipe."

One can see why the words attributed to Chavez provoked
outrage. After all, descriptions of the Jews as a
wealthy minority that "crucified Christ" have been an
anti-Semitic stock in trade for centuries. But the
criticisms of Chavez almost uniformly used selective,
even deceptive editing to remove material that put his
words in a different context.

Here's a translation of the full passage from Chavez's
speech (VoltaireNet, 1/18/06):

"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."

The biggest problem with depicting Chavez's speech as
an anti-Semitic attack is that Chavez clearly suggested
that "the descendants of those who crucified Christ"
are the same people as "the descendants of those who
expelled Bolivar from here." As American Rabbi Arthur
Waskow, who questioned the charge, told the Associated
Press (1/5/06), "I know of no one who accuses the Jews
of fighting against Bolivar." Bolivar, in fact, fought
against the government of King Ferdinand VII of Spain,
who reinstituted the anti-Semitic Spanish Inquisition
when he took power in 1813. According to the Jewish
Virtual Library, a Jewish sympathizer in Curacao
provided refuge to Bolivar and his family when he fled
from Venezuela.

Most of the accounts attacking Chavez (the Daily
Standard was an exception) left the reference to
Bolivar out entirely; the Wiesenthal Center deleted
that clause from the speech without even offering an
ellipses, which is tantamount to fabrication.

As Waskow further pointed out, in the Gospel accounts,
"it was the Roman Empire, and Roman soldiers, who
crucified Jesus." While it's true that anti-Semites
often accuse Jews of killing Jesus, it's not fair to
assert that anyone who refers to the crucifixion of
Jesus is attacking the Jewish people.

That Chavez's comments were part of some anti-Semitic
campaign is directly contradicted by a letter sent by
the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela
to the Wiesenthal Center (AP, 1/14/06). "We believe the
president was not talking about Jews," the letter
stated, complaining that "you have acted on your own,
without consulting us, on issues that you don't know or
understand." The American Jewish Committee and the
American Jewish Congress agreed with the Venezuelan
group's view that Chavez was not referring to Jews in
his speech (Inter Press Service, 1/13/06).

In context, the Chavez speech seems to be an attempt by
Chavez to link the attacks on his populist government
to the attacks on his two oft-cited heroes, Jesus and
Bolivar; the "minority" that would link the two would
be the rich and powerful minority of society. The
reference to "less than 10 percent of the world
population" owning half the wealth also makes the idea
that Chavez was talking about Jews far-fetched; 10
percent of 6 billion would be 600 million people.
(According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, there are
approximately 15 million Jewish people in the world.)

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service (1/13/06) pointed out
the irony of conservative outlets like the Wall Street
Journal and the Daily Standard, edited by William
Kristol, promoting dubious accusations of anti-Semitism
in Latin America:

"Kristol's father, Irving Kristol, and the Journal's
editorial page to which he contributed, led a public
campaign to discredit Argentine publisher Jacobo
Timerman when he emerged in 1980 from two-and-a-half
years of imprisonment in secret prisons in Argentina
claiming that Jews like himself had been systematically
singled out for the worst treatment and torture by a
military regime whose ideology was as close to Nazism
as any since World War II."

Lobe pointed out the difference between Chavez's
Venezuela and Argentina under military dictatorship:
"Unlike Venezuela today, Argentina was then seen by the
incoming Ronald Reagan administration (1981-1989) and
its neo-conservative backers as a vital Cold-War ally."
Surely anti-Semitism is a problem that deserves to be
treated seriously, and not used as a pretense to bash
official enemies.



Anna Fierling
Otto-Suhr-Institut
FU-Berlin

"Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden."
                
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