BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — A Latin American Jewish group has called for the removal from office of a Venezuelan lawmaker who said during an interview that “Zionists” were the main financiers of Hitler.

Congressman Adel El Zabayar, a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, told the Hezbollah-sponsored Al Manar TV headquartered in Lebanon that: “In order to understand what is happening today in the Middle East and what happened in the world in the First and Second World Wars we must examine the original Zionist conspiracy.

“If we look into who financed Hitler before World War II, we will see that the main financiers were the Zionists — the Bush family, in fact. The Bush family made its fortune as a result of what happened in World War II. The goal was to destroy Europe in order to impose the American economy and the dollar currency on it,” he said.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

The Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, posted on its website www.memritv.org the November 14 interview, with a translation from the Arabic, during which El Zabayar also declared: “If you study the history of the killing of the Jews in Europe, you find that Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations.”

He also said: “You will not find in those lists representatives of global Zionism. In 1934 they even issued a coin representing the friendship between Zionism and German Nazism.”

In a letter to Deputy Elias Castillo, president of the Latin American Parliament, known as PARLATINO, Dr. Shimon Samuels, director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Sergio Widder, the Center’s director for Latin America, urged the Latin American Parliament “to call on Venezuela’s National Assembly to divest El Zabayar of his immunity and remove him from national politics on grounds of incitement and endangering the safety of Venezuela’s Jewish community”.

Samuels stressed that “El Zabayar uses Nazi tactics of the big lie and bogus conspiracy theories to incite hatred, bringing shame to all parliamentarians… The PARLATINO must condemn him for violation of its own ‘Declaration against Anti-Semitism,’ adopted from a draft proposal presented by our Center. El Zabayar’s offense reveals how far Jihadist anti-Semitic rhetoric has become mainstream in Venezuela, with a potential for spreading throughout Latin America.”

Adel El Zabayar is also a member of the Venezuelean Federation of Arab Associations (FEARAB) and appears on the cover photo of his Twitter account with a rifle in his hand, https://twitter.com/zabayar



Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.