Full Letter to the Boston Review

To the Boston Review:

I read Claudio Lomnitz’s and Rafael Sánchez’s piece accusing Venezuela of manifesting “signs of state-directed anti-Semitism” with a mélange of surprise and shock. Surprise, because frankly, criticism of Venezuela veers far too frequently into the hysterical. Lomnitz’s and Sánchez’s piece was a subtler and more textured analysis of the “uses of hate” in Bolivarian Venezuela than I had yet seen. But I was surprised at the way Lomnitz and Sánchez deployed evidence to arrive at their conclusions. I thought their main thesis—that “In the Chavista corporealization of politics, any alternative becomes alien and monstrous, and must be expelled from the body of the nation and annihilated”—overtly overdrawn.

I was further troubled upon reading their online reply: the hurried dismissal of counter-arguments, the conflation of anti-Semitism and criticism of Israeli foreign policy. Unfortunate arguments which were merely hinted at or implicit in the first article were made explicit. The conflation was yet more bothersome because precisely the discourse they deploy is unraveling around the world in the wake of the winter massacre in Gaza. What follows is my point-by-point response:

To begin with, the second paragraph of their piece discusses Chávez’s much-talked-about speech where he used what Lomnitz and Sánchez take to be bigoted rhetoric. I reproduce here the full paragraph of the speech (not the one they quote):

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.

Much turns on the precise interpretation of this passage, as Lomnitz and Sánchez know—much turns on a precise interpretation of this passage. They refrain from noting that Chávez delivered the speech at a center run by liberation theologians, who don’t think that Jews crucified Christ. Indeed, it is well known among progressive Latin Americans that Latin American Jews were allies of Simon Bolivar, and gave him safe harbor in Curacao as he fled from persecuting armies.

Yet Lomnitz and Sánchez demur in their response that “Chávez mentions Jews, Christ killers, the abject Venezuelan oligarchy, and the riches of the world in the same breath,” adding that in a fantastical world, “when Christ killers and Jews are mentioned in the same breath, the referent is merely the oligarchy; in any other world, expressions have histories, and denotation cannot shake off ideological connotation.” But they cite no evidence of the mention of Christ-killers and Jews in the same sentence. I don’t understand how they make this leap; Chávez speaks of Christ-killers, and not of Jews.

There is a secondary issue: the precise meaning of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism means Jew-hatred, hatred of innocent Jews for who they are. Even if one were to concede Lomnitz and Sánchez’s point, which is that Chávez should have been aware of the connotations of his rhetoric in an audience different from the one which he was engaging, that does not suggest Jew-hatred but rather a loose tongue. There’s no particular reason to concede this point. The discussion of “those who killed Christ” makes it quite clear that there is an equation being drawn between them and the other groups on the list—the expellers of Bolivar and those who own the riches of the world hardly can be construed as Jewish; the latter can only be seen to be Jewish by anti-Semites.

Furthermore, it wasn’t merely local Venezuelan Jewish groups that denied connotations of anti-Semitism but also the American Jewish Committee, no apologist for anti-Semitism in any form. Maintaining sharp boundary lines between possible and intended connotations is quite important when one is writing of “state-directed anti-Semitism.” Lomnitz and Sánchez are excoriating Chávez for making a statement that would have anti-Semitic connotations only to those who were already anti-Semitic. This is not tantamount to “state-directed” Jew-hatred.

The difference between what anti-Semites might draw from a piece of innocent rhetoric and what reasonable people, with no ulterior agenda, might draw from such a statement is doubly important when one realizes that this speech is the key hook upon which they place the burden of their argument. When the hook is removed, much else falls with it. But not quite all. Consider some other arguments from their original piece.

They cite the police storming of Hebraica, and then offer Jewish community leader Sammy Eppel’s gloss: “Chávez was showing Iran: ‘This is how I deal with my Jews.’” While agreeing that in a world of competing explanations this one could be true, that doesn’t rule out a series of explanations of equal or greater plausibility: a false tip, a deliberately false tip, shoddy police-work, etc. It seems wrong simply to cite Eppel and have that be the end of the evidentiary dig, especially when the Iranian Jewish community, the implied target of Ahmadinejad’s confected malice, isn’t exactly in a head-long rush to flee the Islamic Republic.

Look to another argument from the original piece: “Chavista media became noticeably more aggressive between October and December of last year. Aporrea, the principal Chavista online journal, published 136 anti-Jewish texts; and since the start of the year, the Conference counted an average of 45 pieces per month.” They offer no examples of what is considered anti-Jewish in this context, although their interpretive predilections in their response-piece, wherein they liken criticism of Israeli policy to anti-Semitism, makes me wonder.

They continue: “In the 30 days between December 28, 2008 and January 27, 2009, coinciding with the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the number of pieces increased to an average of more than five per day.” Mere common sense suggests that even if such pieces were overtly anti-Semitic i.e. evincing Jew-hatred, the direct temporal correlation with the Gaza assault indicates causation: Aporrea’s authors blaming Jews for Israeli atrocity. This is a complex issue, not at all clear-cut, but let me first stipulate here that without offering examples of what is being categorized as “anti-Jewish,”  I have little faith in Lomnitz’s and Sánchez’s criteria, especially when they refrain from even adumbrating it, let alone carefully defining terms. They strengthen such suspicions when they write that “This kind of tally may blur the distinction between criticisms of Israeli policies and sheer anti-Semitism.”

As they move forward, they again resort to innuendo instead of straight-forwardly adducing direct evidence of Jew-hatred and suggesting that it is preponderant in the surveyed Aporrea pieces, as they write of “the prominence of classically anti-Semitic themes, tones, and sentiments [which] is nonetheless staggering and undeniable.” This is anyway a digression: indicting Aporrea is different from indicting the state.

Let us look again to their evidence: “Chávez himself has been at the forefront of an effort to equate Israel with Hitler, and then to retroject Jewish conspiracy onto the Venezuelan opposition.” Chávez’s equation of Israel with Hitler is historically incorrect, but it is not anti-Semitic. Serious analysts of anti-Semitism do not accept the European Union definition of anti-Semitism that says that invocation of Hitler in the context of Israel is anti-Semitic, and I see no reason to do otherwise here.

Furthermore, such rhetoric may have been overblown in the context of the invasion of Lebanon. But many Arab governments were silent after Israel had invaded Lebanon, Venezuela has a substantial Lebanese community. Why are Lomnitz and Sánchez so exercised over the possibility of over-the-top rhetoric emanating from Latin America’s most progressive president?

Examine their next piece of evidence: “As recently as January 10 of this year, in the days leading up to the plebiscite to validate Chávez’s permanent reelection, the Venezuelan leader conflated the Jews, the empire (by which he mostly means the United States), and his internal opposition: “The owners of Israel, in other words, the Empire, are the owners of the opposition.”” This seems to me to be poor argumentation. The internal quotation suggests that the Empire, e.g. the United States, is the “owner” of Israel by virtue of the materiel and diplomatic support the USA gives to Israel. Chávez notes that the US government is in some measure the paymaster of the Venezuelan opposition—which it is—through the disbursement of NED monies, which has been extensively documented. He says nothing of Jews, speaking merely of Israel.

Another piece of evidence they introduce is that “Anti-Semitism is close to the intellectual heart of Chavismo,” as evidenced in the close relationship between anti-Semitic Argentinean writer Norberto Ceserole and Chávez. Chávez may have defended Ceserole in 2006 but he expelled Ceserole from the country in 1999. He also told an interviewer that “Of his theses and opinions, some I share, others I don’t…But he was never an advisor, a mentor.” [Hugo! Bart Jones, p. 211].

They may wish to tar Chávez with guilt-by-association, as with such phrases as “Beyond such statements of deference, the imprint of Ceresole’s ideas can be found everywhere in Chávez’s policies, statements, and strategies,” but it won’t stick. Anti-Semitism is Jew-hatred.

Other evidence is brought forward:

Chávez’s immediate reaction to the looting of the Tiferet Israel Synagogue reflects the same kind of conspiratorial outlook—he declared it an attack perpetrated by the opposition against his regime. Before beginning a formal inquest, Venezuela’s president had a theory about the identity of the culprits: “Like any police investigator, you have to ask yourself: who benefits from these violent acts? Not the government, not the people, not the Revolution. . . . It is they themselves who did it! This is what I say to the nation.” Just who “they” are is ambiguous—it may refer to the amorphous “oligarchy” that Chávez regularly decries, or the Jews themselves, or both.

But in fact the attack on the Tiferet Israel Synagogue is precisely the type of 4^th-generation warfare one would expect to be waged against the Venezuelan government. In Lomnitz’s and Sánchez’s attempt to locate anti-Semitism in Chávez’s discourse they’re reduced to speculation: it’s “ambiguous.” Scant sentences later, they write of “his unrepentant attacks on Jews…his regime’s use of the figure of the Jew as the supreme incarnation of abjection…the government’s anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Yet even here, thousands of words into an extensive essay, they haven’t produced a single instance of real anti-Semitic sentiment.

They make one last attempt before arriving at their coda: the existence of “an official delegation, all members donning a keffiyeh [going] to a Caracas mosque” during the “war on Gaza”; war itself a strange locution to use to describe the Cast Lead operation. They write that “Chávez identified the Palestinian cause with the cause of Islam (implicitly siding with Hamas over the Palestinian Authority), and identified the Venezuelan nation with Islam, just as he has identified Judaism with the Empire.” But Lomnitz and Sánchez can not possibly be suggesting that Islam itself is anti-Semitic, could they? Or that Hamas was not the legitimately elected government in Gaza?

They write that “Chavista graffiti ties the Star of David to the Swastika; it also proclaims that ‘Islam is our Patrimony.’” But is it so strange that Chávez would offer unconditional empathy and support for an oppressed people and their chosen spirituality? “Chavista graffiti” again differs from the Venezuelan state, and anyway the identification they note is only anti-Semitic if one chooses to forget that the Magen David is by far more symbolic of the Israeli state than of world Jewry.

So it seems their original essay, whatever its other merits, offers little in the way of evidence for the charge of anti-Semitism they choose to levy against Hugo Chávez. Thus their response was quite unfortunate, for it not only refused to acknowledge the substance of their critics’ criticisms but rather reinforced the original arguments, and even made them if anything more explicit.

Simultaneously, they dismiss the comments of their online responders with the comment that “None of our critics engages our basic argument: that anti-Semitism and homophobia sporadically but consistently emerge as symptoms and instruments of a bigger project,” as though an argument can be unmoored from its evidentiary base. Even considered as a general thesis, the notion that it is Chávez who has polarized Venezuelan discourse is iffy. This is a government that came to power on a wave of ascending discontent since the Caracazo, when the military gunned down poor Venezuelans in the streets under the mandate of then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez. This is a president who was nearly unseated in the 2002 coup d’état, his supporters murdered. A moment on Venezuelan opposition blogs reveals rumors that Chávez is planning genocide, that Bolivarian Venezuela is on the verge of fascism, that the elected president of the government is a monkey. And this is the fault of a democratically elected president who is using the country’s income to finally better the lives of its poor majority?

Still, on some substantive points, Lomnitz and Sánchez do respond, writing that

Hugo Chávez’s allusions and reactions to and statements about Israel are excessive and disproportionate to the issues that are at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This statement presumes that there is such a thing as a non-excessive, proportionate reaction. I’m sure Lomnitz and Sánchez have their own ideas about the “issues that are at stake” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and what kind of “allusions” and “reactions” would be non-excessive and proportionate, but I have no idea what they are and they don’t make any effort to spell out such standards.

By their nebulous standard I am anti-Semitic, because I spend a “disproportionate” amount of time attacking Israeli policy. And by this standard Lomnitz and Sánchez are anti-Palestinian bigots, because they spend more time muttering about Venezuelan anti-Semitism than Israeli politicide. This standard is unacceptable, as I think all agree: we may not read off bigotry from criticism of state policies.

Furthermore, there is something vaguely unacceptable about metropolitan intellectuals deciding on the “proportionate” response to human suffering—since when was it the place of university teachers to adjudge the degree of misery endured by people far less fortunate?

No matter: as they continue,

This excess is anti-Semitism, and it has a purpose: aligning Chávez’s internal and external enemies. We call Chávez’s invocations of Israel excessive because there is no parallel criticism of other governments who might violate similar principles.

Should the actions of Israel only be mentioned after other states have been properly pilloried? I’ve never heard of such a standard. In this context, it bears mentioning that Israel’s actions have by now taken on an added symbolism–they’re emblematic of the US imperial project, to which Bolivarian Venezuela is discursively opposed. Furthermore, the Israeli government has supported right-wing Latin American governments for decades. Is it reasonable—would it be prudent—for Chávez to ignore this history? Lomnitz and Sánchez think so:

We also call Chávez’s invocations of Israel excessive because his movement has identified Islam as Venezuela’s national patrimony, while the star of David has been equated to the swastika.

So in a world of rampant Western Islamophobic bigotry, a world where Islam is identified with terrorism, where Muslims’ countries are under imperial occupation, Bolivarian Venezuela has decided to line up with a religion that is used to mark Middle Easterners as genetic terrorists. Such solidarity makes Chávez’s actions “excessive”? If anything, his speech and actions during the attack on Gaza were an example to the world, as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah explicitly recognized, as he called upon Arab leaders to be more like Chávez.

In the course of their polemic, Lomnitz and Sánchez are collapsing distinctions between Israel, Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and opposition to Israeli policies, and mixing it all up with strange mutterings about Islam as Venezuela’s “natural patrimony,” which suggests or “connotes” anti-Semitism only if Islam itself connotes anti-Semitism. Could they mean to so libel the basis of a billion people’s spirituality?

Their attack on Chávez for drawing close to Ahmadinejad likewise seems to place to the side the “usual standards and procedures of social analysis,” as they characterize the writings of their critics. They write that

Finally, we call Chávez’s language excessive and anti-Semitic because he has chosen President Ahmadinejad as his closest international ally after Fidel Castro, without distancing himself from the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust and explicit calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.

Chávez’s relations with Ahmadinejad are mere realpolitik. Putting aside the veracity of their claims—which are disputable—they are calling on the leader of a country subject to imperial subversion through the NED and external destabilization through client-state Colombia to criticize an allied regime. This is not a standard one sees imposed on other countries or regimes. Israel, to take a relevant example, sent armaments to neo-Nazi regimes throughout Latin America for decades. But it seems that different standards apply to Chávez:

Apparently our critics find no anti-Semitic connotations when Chávez mentions Jews, Christ killers, the abject Venezuelan oligarchy, and the riches of the world in the same breath, or when he blames the Jewish State of Israel for perpetrating atrocities against “half the world.”

As we have seen, this construct is a fiction, yet they repeat it, and then write of “The Jewish State of Israel”—an unacceptable formulation. Israel is not my state, nor the state of most Jews, but is merely identified as such because Israel says so. Israel has no monopoly on Jewish opinion. And so Lomnitz and Sánchez are wrong to repeat and reinforce this conflation. Finally, they skirt close to the gutter, noting of their critics that

Nor are they bothered when the Chavista TV anchor par excellence, Mario Silva, claims that the Venezuelan student movement is financed by Jewish businessmen. To us, all of this smacks more of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion than of a progressive critique of Israeli policies.

Well, am I bothered by this? No question. Still, Chávez deserves scrutiny, not calumny. Too much that is written about Venezuela is cliché: breathless applause or vicious assault. In their effort to veer away from the former, Lomnitz and Sanchez veer far too close to the latter, mistaking the choice as one between Scylla and Charbydis. Discourse in Venezuela merits attention, but not of this sort. And, too, such careless use of the word “anti-Semitism” silences what should properly be a klaxon. If the pogrom returns, and cries of anti-Semitism fall on deaf ears, apportioning blame for cheapening the word won’t matter. What will matter are the consequences of that cheapening. Something worth bearing in mind.

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