It began with a bulletin from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of invoking an old anti-Semitic slur. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles quickly picked it up, sending out word that in a Christmas Eve speech, Chavez had declared, "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 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” 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, one on Christmas and one on Christmas Eve.

Then more mainstream outlets began to pick up the story. "Chavez lambasted Jews," the “New York Daily News'” Lloyd Grove reported. A column in the “Los Angeles Times” used the quote to label Chavez "a jerk and a friend of tyranny." “Wall Street Journal” columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady 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:

"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, "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.

Most of the accounts attacking Chavez 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 was disputed by the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, which wrote to the Wiesenthal Center: "We believe the president was not talking about Jews…. 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.

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.

Surely anti-Semitism is a problem that deserves to be treated seriously, and not used as a pretense to bash official enemies.

Steve Rendall is with Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, the national media watch group that offers well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship, based in New York City. Jim Naurekas is editor of “EXTRA!,” a publication of FAIR.

© 2006 MinutemanMedia.org

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