Honduras, Chavez and Ahmadinejad
In a column titled "Revolutionary Anti-Semitism," Mary Anastasia O'Grady argues that what's at stake in the fight over the presidency in Honduras is whether Hugo Chavez can import Ahmadinejad's ideology to Latin America:
The Honduras debate is not really about Honduras. It is about whether it is possible to stop the spread of chavismo and all it implies, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism in Latin America. Most troubling is the unflinching support for Mr. Zelaya from President Barack Obama and Democratic Sen. John Kerry—despite the Law Library of Congress review that shows that Mr. Zelaya's removal from office was legal, and the clear evidence that he is Mr. Chávez's man in Tegucigalpa. On Thursday, Mr. Kerry took the unprecedented step of trying to block a fact-finding mission to Honduras by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who is resisting Mr. Obama's efforts to restore Mr. Zelaya to power. ...
The verbal attack on Jews from a zelayista is consistent with a pattern emerging in the region. Take what's been going on in Venezuela. In the earliest years of Chávez rule, a Venezuelan friend, who is a Christian, confessed his fears to me. "In his speech, he always tries to create hate between groups of people," my friend told me. "He loves hate speech." ...
Neither Venezuela nor Honduras has any history of anti-Semitism. But with Mr. Chávez importing Mr. Ahmadinejad's despicable ideology and methods, an assault on the Jewish community goes with the territory.
A few weeks ago, the Forward reported that U.S. Jewish groups are divided over the fight in Honduras:
The recent return of Honduras’s ousted and expelled president to his country is not an issue in which the Jewish stakes are clear or obvious. But Jewish groups are nonetheless taking sides over the turmoil roiling the Central American country and over the Obama administration’s stand on developments there.
On September 4, two weeks before President Manuel Zelaya snuck back into Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs called on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to reverse the administration’s position and support Zelaya’s overthrow. Zelaya was democratically elected in 2006. But the group, which is primarily devoted to promoting strong military ties between Israel and the United States, was concerned that Zelaya was leading the country away from democracy and into alliances with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the time of his overthrow.
“Zelaya was a man who was moving towards Chavez,” said JINSA’s executive director, Tom Neumann. “He was going anti-American.”
But other Jewish groups, and a key Jewish member of Congress, have defended the administration despite similar concerns, viewing Zelaya’s ouster last June as an affront to the rule of law, whose fostering they view as a more important American interest. Many countries in the western hemisphere have also called for Zelaya’s return to office. No country has recognized the government of Roberto Micheletti, former head of the national legislature, who assumed the presidency following Zelaya’s expulsion. ...
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The paranoia shown by jewish organisations to the current crop of leftwing Latin American governments is disturbing, to say the least. These are governments who fight for the rights of their own poor - in most cases, including that of Honduras, it is a largely racially defined poverty, and consequently these governments have as their mortal enemies the same ideological nexus of ultra-Capitalists and fascists that made the 1930s such a lively period.
I have seen the scurrilous attacks attacks by the likes of the Jerusalem Post against people like Bolivia’s Morales and have to say that, most certainly in the case of Bolivia (though I would be surprised if it didn’t hold across the continent) the only criterion for the left is whether you are supportive of their efforts to make their societies fairer places where children from poor, indian families, were able to go to school and those with cancer didn’t have to sell their houses to pay for treatment and so die in the gutter.Literally.
I have lived in Bolivia and jhave family there.I know both socialist activists and fascists - in the east of the country, fascism is called ‘patriotism’.
I have experienced open hostility, often flavoured with a semi submerged streak of sour anti-semitism from those on the right on many occasions.One relative, a drinking buddy of some in the Autonomy movement, greeted news of his first half jewish neioce with the words ‘what’s happened to my race?’’Que pasó á mi raza?’
These were the same groups that rounded up indigenous Bolivians in the streets of Sucre, stripped them and forced them to sing racists songs about themselves whilst being taunted and beaten a couple of years back.
If this was in Germany most readers here would be screaming from the rooftops, so why should it be any different because white Spanish are doing it to native Americans?
The recent episode where Bolivian special forces gunned down a Croatian organised neo-fascist cell, arrived in Santa Cruz to assassinate Morales (PIV connected by all accounts) is the most visible manifestation of what is really going on here.
I have never had an anti semitic comment from a socialist and I have met and chatted with lots, from penniless indigenous shopkeepers and taxi drivers to members of the government.Don’t confuse Israel with Judaism.The two have diverged thanks to the likes of Netanyahu and his odious ilk.Race to the latin reformers is an irrelevance, only present due to it’s politicisation by poverty.
I strongly suggest those who read op eds like the one above and are wont to believe these things have a trawl around the internet and actually read the speeches and opinions of the likes of Chavez, Morales and Correa, as well as checking out sites like upsidedownworld.org - one of the best to tell you what really happens on the ground in Latin America.There was a superb piece recently about the Bolivian/Islamist hysteria pushed by some in the US.
Then decide, because a lot of what is written by the right is, frankly, a lot of lies. They need to lie to keep power.
The ones I read about Morales could fill a book and some of them have been recycled for Zelaya so I do not believe them.
The extreme right in the US and their mercenary armies and death squads are trying to build the public will to allow them back into the slums and villages of Latin America again to restart their long neglected war on the poor.
Don’t give them that mandate.
Frankly, before Monday last week I had never heard an antisemitic remark in Honduras, people always have complained about the “Turks” Called like that because the Palestinians that came in Honduras years ago came with Turk passports and they are the vast majority of rich people in this country, from the Jews little was said before basically we have one publicly known Rich Jew that owns a newspaper, a bank and other many business and even if I call him a Jew “Rosenthal”, poor people call him a Turk 
so if you could walk my streets you will learn that people mix an relate the word Turk with the status “Rich”, even people with complex last names like “Marinakys” plainly Greek are called Turks but never Jews, there has been a synagogue here since I remember but nobody know where it is, it´s never been on the newspapers or the TV I´know it exists because I have Jew cousins that go there…
Basically what I’m trying to say is that people here don’t blame Jews, Turks, Spaniards or North Americans for our disgrace, it has always been the corrupt government to blame.
It is a shame for us Hondurans that someone is taking advantage of momentum to stir their own views into the hot soup cooking here.
P.S: I’m of Italian descent an I’m called a Turk most of the time because I’m white and big nosed
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Stan Nadel
10/06/09 07:30 AM
A non-Jewish friend who lived in Honduras for two years tells me that Antisemitism was in fact very widespread there--all across the political spectrum. But even more problematic is that the source for the alleged quote that underlies this whole story is the regime that overthrew Zelaya and which is desperate to smear him in order to undermine support for his return to office. Why are JTA and others so willing to take his enemies claims on this?