[News] Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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

Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur
Some outlets spread spurious charges of anti-Semitism

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 Chávez'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.


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