B’nai B’rith decries the reprehensible remarks made on Venezuelan state television on October 26, in which a guest denied the Holocaust and repudiated Zionism.

On the show “Contragolpe” (in English: “Counter-Strike”) host Vanessa Davies interviewed Argentine professor Saad Chedid, who was reportedly in Venezuela to give a lecture titled “Philosophic and Semantic Analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

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While giving a preview of his lecture, Chedid stated among other things that Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was a “sick and paranoid person,” even implying that there was close collaboration between the Nazis and the Jews to create the “implanted” State of Israel.

Referring to the Holocaust, Chedid denied its existence, saying: “Holocaust is a word that means strictly the total burning of an animal—from a pigeon to a bull—so there’s no Jewish Holocaust. The Jewish ideologues have a weird ability to hide things through the use of another word. For example the Yahweh, which is the god of the Jews, cannot be named…”

“This kind of raw anti-Semitic material can unfortunately be found regularly in the state-owned Venezuelan media and in direct violation of a promise Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made last year to curtail such rhetoric,” said B’nai B’rith International President Allan J. Jacobs.

“In May 2011 B’nai B’rith passed a resolution calling on Chavez to immediately end anti-Semitic expressions. We continue to call for such action now.”

Chedid went on to talk about a 1907 report that purports to prove that Great Britain was planning the establishment of a Jewish state more than 100 years ago, with the intention of preventing Arabs from uniting to win their independence.

'Government directly sponsoring hate'

“The content of this and other programs on the state-owned media clearly underscores that the government freely allows anti-Semitism in Venezuela,” said B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin.

“These remarks made on state-sponsored television clearly lead to the conclusion that these vitriolic anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments are given approbation at the highest levels of the Venezuelan government and must not go unchallenged. We call on the international community to denounce these outrageous claims.”

This is not an isolated incident. The Venezuelan public is frequently subject to this kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda. A few months ago, the director of the Venezuelan National Radio recommended that people read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a fraudulent, anti-Semitic text that described a Jewish plan for achieving global domination).

By allowing this type of furiously anti-Semitic material to go unchallenged in the media outlets that they control, B'nai B'rith said in a statement, the government is directly sponsoring anti-Semitism and hate.

B’nai B’rith International has offices in Latin America and says it will continue to monitor these developments.