Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Hugo Chávez's Jewish Problem

Hugo Chávez's Jewish Problem
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/printarticle.cfm/special-preview-br--hugo-ch-vez-s-jewish-problem-11455
Travis Pantin
In December 1998, preaching a gospel of socialist revolution that had
gone blessedly unvoiced in the decade following the fall of the Berlin
Wall, Hugo Chávez won a landslide election for the presidency of
Venezuela. At the time, his governing philosophy, dubbed “Chávismo,”
seemed unlikely to amount to more than a historical and geographical
anomaly—a temporary reversal in a region that appeared to have
decisively rejected Marxist nostrums.
Nearly another decade has passed since Chávez’s ascension. He has
suffered a few setbacks in the intervening years, notably a temporary
ouster in a 2002 coup and a defeat in a referendum last year that, if
passed, would have effectively made him dictator for life. His
propensity for wild rhetoric and diktats—as when he created a new time
zone by fiat in December 2007, moving the clocks in Venezuela back a
half-hour to address the inability of his countrymen to arrive
promptly at appointments—has led to questions about his emotional and
mental stability. It has also made it easier for Western policymakers
to discount the seriousness of his oft-stated goal of fomenting
violent political change throughout Latin America.
But to dismiss Chávez as a lunatic is to wish away his proven
political skill. He is, without question, a powerful figure—and one
who, thanks to a quirk of geography, is also in possession of
dangerously large amounts of oil. His government claims to control
over 100 billion barrels of proven reserves, by far the largest of any
country in the Western hemisphere. Although estimates vary, at current
production levels and prices Venezuela’s oil revenues may top $250
million daily.
Unlike Fidel Castro, who as a client of the Soviet Union had to apply
to his patron for funds, Chávez is thus free to indulge his ambitions.
“In Venezuela we have a strong oil card to play on the geopolitical
table,” he told the Argentinian newspaper Clarín in 2005. “It is a
card,” he added, “that we are going to play forcefully against the
nastiest country in the world, the United States.”
To this end, Chávez has made common cause with FARC, a narco-terrorist
group working tirelessly to overthrow the legitimately elected
democratic government of Colombia, Washington’s closest ally in South
America. No less ominously, he has aligned his government with regimes
and terror groups that would otherwise seem to hold little attraction
for a Spanish-speaking country on South America’s northern coast.
These include Libya—which awarded Chávez the al-Qaddafi International
Prize for Human Rights, named for the country’s dictator—as well as
Syria, Hizballah, and Hizballah’s patron Iran. Virtually alone among
world leaders, Chávez is an impassioned defender of Tehran’s right to
pursue nuclear technology and has even hinted he would be willing to
finance it.
As this list may suggest, there is  something else, aside from simple
anti-Americanism, at work in Chávez’s foreign policy. He and his
supporters are in the grip of another age-old obsession, albeit one
with a few indigenous twists: an obsession, that is, with the
supposedly excessive power of world Jewry, and in particular of
Venezuela’s few, prosperous, and increasingly imperiled Jews.
_____________
Venezuela’s Jewish community, amounting to less than 1 percent of the
country’s total population of 26 million, is among the oldest in South
America, dating back to the early 19th century. During the struggle
for independence from Spain, the fugitive revolutionary Simón Bolívar
found refuge among a group of Venezuelan Jews, some of whom later went
on to fight in the ranks of his liberating army. Today, the majority
of the country’s Jewish population is descended from an influx of
European and North African immigrants who arrived during the years
surrounding World War II. Most reside in the capital city of Caracas,
comprising a tightly knit community made up of roughly equal numbers
from Ashkenazi and Sephardi countries of origin.
Venezuelans pride themselves on living in an ethnic and religious
melting pot. Their homeland, unlike its neighbors Argentina, Paraguay,
and Chile, has no history of having harbored Nazi fugitives. Before
Chávez came to power, members of the Jewish community reported little
animosity from either the government or the populace, and sharply anti-
Zionist rhetoric was relatively uncommon. Nor did Venezuela’s fifteen
synagogues (all but one of them Orthodox) experience much of the anti-
Semitic vandalism common in other Latin American countries with tiny
Jewish populations. The Hebraica center—its building functions as a
lavish social hub, elementary school, country club, sports facility,
and gathering place for Caracas Jewry—was largely left in peace.
No longer. Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of
1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism
throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published
anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have
publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide
Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish
figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the
“Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting
against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s
government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary
schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the
government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism,
in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness
never before seen in the country.
The details are arresting.
•  Graffiti, often bearing the signature of the Venezuelan Communist
party and its youth organization, have appeared on synagogues and
Jewish buildings, with messages like “mata niños” (“child killers”),
“judios afuera” (“Jews get out”), “judios perros” (“Jews are dogs”),
and  swastikas linked to stars of David by an equals sign.
•  Sammy Eppel, a columnist for the independent Caracas newspaper El
Universal, has documented hundreds of instances of anti-Semitism in
government media. To take one particularly noxious example, in
September 2006 El Diario de Caracas, until recently one of the
country’s most important papers, published an editorial containing
these fiery words:
    Let us pay attention to the behavior of the Israeli-Zionist
associations, unions, and federations that are conspiring in Venezuela
to take control of our finances, our industries, commerce, construction
—which are infiltrating our government and politics. Possibly we will
have to expel them from our country . . . as other nations have done.
•  On television, Mario Silva, the host of a popular pro-Chávez show
called La Hojilla (“The Razor Blade”), has repeatedly named prominent
Venezuelan Jews as anti-government conspirators and called on other
Jews to denounce them. “Rabbi Jacobo Benzaquén and Rabbi Pynchas
Brener are actively participating in the conspiracy in conjunction
with the media,” Silva has said. “So as not to be called an anti-
Semite,” he added, “I repeat that those Jewish businessmen not
involved in the conspiracy should say so.”
•  Armed government agents have conducted two unannounced raids on the
Hebraica club during the past five years. The first occurred during
the early morning hours of November 29, 2004, when two dozen men
wearing masks invaded the elementary school just as pupils were
arriving for class. In the second, which came shortly after midnight
on December 2, 2007, government agents broke through the front gate
and disrupted hundreds of celebrants at a wedding party in the nearby
synagogue. In each case, allegedly, the agents were looking for
weapons and other evidence of “subversive activity.”
•  The last few years have seen the creation of a terrorist group in
Venezuela calling itself Hizballah in Latin America. The group has
already claimed responsibility for placing two small bombs outside the
American embassy in Caracas in October 2006—one of them, it is
thought, intended for the embassy of Israel. Although neither of the
two bombs detonated, the group’s website hailed the man who planted
them as a “brother mujahedin” and has urged other, simultaneous
attacks throughout Venezuela in solidarity with Hizballah in Lebanon.
In this connection, although there is no direct evidence linking
Chávez with Hizballah in Latin America, the group’s website has
featured words of praise for him, and the feeling may well be mutual.
Not only has Chávez repeatedly expressed support for Hizballah in
general, but (according to Venezuelan newspapers) he paid $1 million
to print posters of himself with Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah to
be displayed at a Hizballah rally in Beirut.
_____________
Insofar as there is a rationale behind any of this, it would seem to
form a part of Chávez’s general view of the world. According to that
view, the United States has coopted both Europe and Israel into a
transnational enterprise whose purpose is to exploit and impoverish
the world’s less developed but resource-rich countries. Jews,
especially but not exclusively in the form of the state of Israel, are
an integral part of this enterprise. In a July 2006 interview with the
Arab TV network al-Jazeera, Chávez elaborated upon the relation
between the U.S. and Israel:
    The greatest menace to the future of humanity is the United
States, and one of its instruments of aggression in [your] part of the
world is the state of Israel. . . . The Secretary of State has said
that that [the U.S.] will change the map of the Middle East. This plan
was made in advance and in great detail in the Pentagon, except that
Israel is the executor. . . . They want to transform the map of the
Middle East in order to guarantee the dominance and control of the
largest reserves of oil and energy in the world.
As an alleged oppressor of the Palestinian Arabs, Israel has its own
place of special infamy in Chávez’s world view. This latter theme has
served him particularly well in his efforts to mobilize the sentiments
of his rural constituents. Thus, during a 2005 speech marking
Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, Chávez likened the plight of
Venezuela’s Indians to that of Palestinians. Reminding his listeners
of how their ancestors had been “murdered in their land” by
“governments, economic sectors, and great land estates,” he thundered:
“You were expelled from your homeland, like the heroic Palestinian
people.”
All of these elements seem entirely derivative of Marxist-Leninist
theorizing, with a strong admixture of  post-colonialism à la Franz
Fanon and Fidel Castro. But Chávez is not just another Latin American
leftist on the Castro model. While the Cuban dictator may be his most
important political influence, his greatest intellectual debt is to
the Argentinian writer and thinker Norberto Ceresole: a man not of the
Left but of the populist Right, a Holocaust denier, and a sworn enemy
of Israel and the Jews.
Born in 1943, Ceresole was one of the leading spokesmen for the
radical populist government of the Argentinian president Juan Perón.
Later, in the guise of a political theorist, he argued that the only
appropriate leaders for Latin American nations were caudillos:
nationalist, militarist, and charismatic strongmen capable of ushering
in a “post-democratic” age in which the region’s people would become
effortlessly at one with the generals who would direct every aspect of
society. Led by a group of such caudillos, a confederation of Latin
American fascist states would then be in a position to beat back
American global hegemony.
Ceresole reportedly traveled with Chávez during his initial bid for
power. After the latter’s 1998 victory, he published a celebratory
volume, Caudillo, Army, People: The Venezuela of President Chávez. The
second chapter is entitled “The Jewish Question and the State of
Israel.” In it, Ceresole espoused a “new revisionism” that defined the
Holocaust as a “myth” and Israel as a global menace:
    The existence of this political enterprise—Israel: a power
concentrated in the monopoly of monotheism and implemented through an
army, police forces, jails, tortures, assassinations, etc.—seeks to
consolidate itself through a series of ideological manipulations in
the bosom of the hegemonic power of the United States, which seeks to
be accepted as the ruler of the world by any means, even generalized
terror, and dissuasive and persuasive practices.
It was for this reason, according to Ceresole, that one of the
greatest threats to the Chávez regime lay in Venezuela’s “Jewish
financial mafia.” Indeed, the Venezuelan Jewish community as a whole
was to be considered guilty of race-based hostility to Chávez’s
redemptive nationalist movement.
_____________
The ingeniousness of Ceserole’s doctrine, as filtered through the
sensibility of Hugo Chávez, resides in its blending of Marxist
economics with two venerable anti-Semitic traditions. The first, still
powerful in South America, derives from Catholic teachings about the
historic Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. The second,
encapsulated most notoriously in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
has flourished in both rightist and leftist variations throughout
modern European history, resurfacing in our own time in the
fulminations of extreme anti-Zionists. Chávez drew on both traditions
in an address he delivered on Christmas Eve in 2004. Here he spoke
ominously of certain “minorities, the descendants of those who
crucified Christ,” who had “taken possession of the riches of the
world.”
But there was an added element at play in this passage, which has to
be quoted in full to be properly appreciated:
    The world has enough for everybody, but it happened that some
minorities—the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the
descendants of those who ejected Bolívar from here and who crucified
him in their own way in Santa Marta, over in Colombia—took possession
of the riches of the world. A minority appropriated the world’s gold,
the silver, the minerals, the waters, the good lands, the oil, and has
concentrated the riches in a few hands.
Like most of its South American neighbors, Venezuela is a nation of
economic extremes. There are a small number of extraordinarily well-to-
do families—the “white oligarchs”—and an enormously large population
of very poor people, partly or wholly native-American, with few
prospects of economic advancement. Since his ascension to power,
Chávez has been engaged in a policy of forcible redistribution,
nationalizing industries and large farms and turning their proceeds
over to social programs aimed ostensibly at ameliorating the condition
of the poor.
In common with most such efforts at top-down nationalization and
redistribution, however, this one has been a grotesque failure. A
country bringing in at least $1.75 billion a week in oil revenues
suffers from chronic food shortages, including in such staples as
coffee and sugar. Even the oil business, now run by Chávez cronies
rather than by professionals, is nowhere near as profitable as it
might be. And so the inequities persist, and with them the need to
identify scapegoats that can divert attention from Chávez’s
culpability and allow him to maintain his iron grip.
Chávez often speaks of Jesus Christ as the first true socialist, whose
agenda he, like Bolívar before him, is fulfilling. In so doing he
draws upon another Latin American trope, this one of more recent
vintage. The “liberation theology” that emerged in Catholic circles in
Brazil in the 1960’s provided a theological justification for radical
social change; proponents of this quasi-Leninist doctrine use the
phrase “Christ killers” to refer to the capitalists who allegedly
block the fulfillment of their revolutionary vision. In this sense,
Chávez’s Christmas 2004 speech, adroitly weaving together the
teachings of liberation theology with local political history,
appealing to a legacy of deep economic resentment that he himself has
greatly exacerbated, and evoking the incendiary motifs of the world’s
oldest hatred, made up a perfect storm of demagogic rhetoric.
_____________
It is helpful to keep this background in mind in evaluating the
response of Venezuela’s Jews to the outrages, physical and verbal,
that have been perpetrated against their community. Reaction to the
Christmas 2004 speech provides an illustration.
As it happens, one unequivocally strong protest emanated from the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in distant Argentina. “In your words,” read a
statement addressed to the Venezuelan president,
    we find two central arguments of anti-Semitism: the canard of the
deicide and the association of Jews with wealth. . . . Our center
condemns your anti-Semitic statements. Such offense to universal
values demands an immediate and public apology.
But this protest itself drew a protest—from, in fact, the head of the
Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela. “We believe the
president [in his speech] was not talking about Jews,” wrote Fred
Pressner in a letter to the Wiesenthal Center. Rather, Pressner went
on, seizing on the speech’s artful ambiguities, Chávez was referring
to the “white oligarchy.” Still worse, according to Pressner, was the
fact that the Wiesenthal Center, by acting “without consulting us, on
issues that you do not know or understand,” had “interfered in the
political status, in the security, and in the well-being of our
community.”
Unquestionably, the Venezuelan Jewish community is in a very difficult
situation. There had already been something of a split earlier in 2004
following the first raid on the Hebraica club. While some had
reflexively tried to downplay the significance of the incursion,
Pynchas Brener, the country’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, demurred,
pronouncing the raid a “direct aggression” by the state heralding an
“important shift” in relations. “There is not a single Jewish family
in Caracas that was not affected,” Rabbi Brener said.
Nor was there any equivocation on Rabbi Brener’s part in the wake of
the second raid on the Hebraica club in December 2007. This was
particularly ominous, he averred, because of the timing: the raid took
place on the day before the Venezuelan electorate was scheduled to
vote on a constitutional referendum that, if passed, would allow
Chávez to retain office indefinitely. In light of the ruling party’s
well-documented eagerness to blame its political troubles on Jewish
machinations, the raid could have been a fishing expedition—a hunt for
prospective “evidence” pointing, in the event of the referendum’s
failure, to a conspiracy on the part of the country’s leading Jews.
Shortly after this second raid, indeed, Pressner’s organization
abandoned its own previous calls for moderation. “We denounce this new
and unjustifiable act against the Venezuelan Jewish community,” it
declared in a forceful press release, “and express our profound
indignation and repulsion.” For his part, Rabbi Brener proclaimed that
the purpose of the raid “was just to scare the daylights out of the
Jewish community, to convince us not to vote and to keep a low
profile.” But, he added defiantly, “since the Holocaust we don’t scare
easily.”
Neither, of course, does Venezuela’s president. Although the
government acknowledged that the search for evidence of “subversive
activity” at Hebraica was fruitless, and although the referendum did
narrowly fail, Chávez has vowed to achieve his constitutional reform—
that is, to create his dictatorship—by other means.
_____________
One-third of Venezuela’s Jews have fled the country by now, and those
who remain are in a state ranging from discomfiture to terror. When
asked why they stay, some wealthier Jews say that the answer is
economic. “The problem . . .  is that you could never live like this
anywhere else,” the owner of a Caracas textile plant told a reporter
from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Nobody here really wants to go to
Israel. You would need to have ten times as much money to live this
way.” Others, less well off, are similarly reluctant, and offers by
the Israeli government to ease the process of aliyah have so far met
with few takers.
The stated reasons are many. Even amidst all their trouble, it has
been pointed out, Venezuela’s Jews retain a workable relationship with
the Chávez government. Jewish journalists can still speak out. Nor
have Jewish business been targeted for expropriation by Chávez’s
redistributionist policies. Jews can still travel freely, and anti-
Semitic violence has not touched many of them personally. So they hold
out, bearing the yoke of economic and political harassment and hoping
for change.
Are they right to do so? History suggests that once anti-Semitism
becomes an instrument of state policy, the possibility of violence can
never be discounted. For centuries, moreover, anti-Semitism has waxed
and waned with fluctuating business cycles. With both the ailing
economy and Chávez’s social programs dependent almost entirely on oil
revenues, a drop in prices could trigger widespread animosity against
the “Semitic banks” that members of Chávez’s party have repeatedly
denounced for every passing ill. A major event like a military strike
on Iran by the United States or Israel might similarly serve as
justification for seizing the assets of Venezuela’s Jewry. In the
meantime, as the numbers dwindle, and many of the richest depart, it
is becoming increasingly difficult to care for the Jewish poor, who
make up a full 25 percent of the community.
Caught in a vise between an all too realistic fear and a possibly
illusory hope, one of South America’s most productive and peaceful
minorities awaits the future in grim expectancy.

 Sammy Eppel
dal suo sito c'è questo link "Antisemitismo" :
http://www.emailpresenter.com/Viewer/Viewer4.asp?p=/viewer/presentations/20061123/634348139/pres.swf&MsgID=1864581&T%20RK=1&pn=antisemitism%20dossier%20WO%20videos
questa presentazione fa veramente rabbrividire.

 wrote:
perchè quel fascista di zanardo non parla degli squadroni della morte
colombiani addestrati da mercenari ex mossad?

colombiani addestrati da mercenari ex mossad?
Non sarebbe politicamente corretto.