[Peace-discuss] Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur

[David Green]

FAIR - Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

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 (1/12/06),
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
Chavez¹s words "an 
ugly
anti-Semitic swipe.²

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
planet¹s 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
ellipsis, 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.

Note: Some readers pointed out that before the
Weisenthal Center, the 
Jewish
Telegraphic Agency led the attack on Chavez's speech
(12/30/05).




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