BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — A Latin American Jewish group has called for the removal of a Venezuelan lawmaker who said that “Zionists” were Hitler’s main financiers.
Congressman Adel El Zabayar, a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, told the Hezbollah-sponsored Al Manar TV that exaiming the “original Zionist conspiracy” is necessary to understand the contemporary Middle East.
“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,” El Zabayar said. “If we look into who financed Hitler before WWII we will see that the main financiers were the Zionists.”
The Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, posted a translation of the Nov. 14 interview on its website, during which El Zabayar also said: “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 Elias Castillo, the president of the Latin American Parliament, or Parlatino, Shimon Samuels, director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Sergio Widder, the Center’s director for Latin America, called for El Zabayar’s removal.
The Jewish leaders urged Castillo to have Parlatino “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.”
El Zabayar is also member of the Venezuelean Federation of Arab Associations and appears in a photo attached to his Twitter account with a rifle in hand.
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