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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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