A visitor to TeleSUR’s website can quickly see Israel holds a special place in TeleSUR’s news coverage. Despite the rest of the countries following an alphabetical organization, Israel is the first country listed.
While this could be just an instance of poor design which that made its past the eyes of everyone involved in the construction and user testing of its website — this isn’t the case.
As you’ll learn after reading the below, this little aesthetic glitch is anything but a mistake. It’s a not so sly code, which will be illustrated in detail below, that TeleSUR is a media company oriented towards helping Venezuela’s PSUV achieve the political goals stated in their Plan de Patria related to Israel rather than applying professional journalism standards.
What does this mean for their brand? Well, when it comes to international news reporting, truth-telling takes a back seat to the desire to delegitimize America by working to malign by any means necessaryits ally Israel.
The official news organization along with its media partners — a mix of private and state media companies as well as contractors — collaborate on projects that go far beyond anything that could be called principled anti-Zionism. Instead, TeleSUR consistently publishes in a false light; while their partners share a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook and the web.
TeleSUR Reports Fake News of Child Abduction
In 2010 the Anti-Defamation Leaguepublished Anti-Semitism in Venezuela: In the Wake of the Gaza Flotilla which contained extensive documentation of anti-Semitic views being expressed in various media outlets and by various members of the Venezuela government — including false accusationsthat Israeli doctors had stolen human organs from Haitians affected by the 2010 earthquake.
Nicolas Maduro, the president of TeleSUR, was cited as describing a situation wherein any potential attack could be ascribed to Mossad — “a conspiracy theory similar to one typically used by anti-Semites who claim Jews and Israel were behind terrorist attacks such as the 1994 AMIA attack in Buenos Aires or 9/11.”
While the whole publication is worth reading — especially for the connections it draws between Venezuela and their state news media’s coverage of international affairs — this article focuses solely on the past five years. Between 2010 and 2015 the Venezuelan state and its media apparatus, TeleSUR, learned to be overt about it’s anti-Zionism and use covert means to spread anti-Semitism in order to achieve political goals.
In May of 2015, for instance, TeleSURand their partner HispanTV, the Iranian’s Spanish-language news service, were both sharply criticized by the Wiesenthal Center and the International Center for Countering Anti-Semitismafter both of them falsely reported that “Israel used humanitarian aid to Nepal in order to disguise the smuggling of 25 infants.”
The article, which is still hosted on TeleSUR’s website, cites unidentified non-governmental organizations and falsely claims that these 25 infants were whisked away by the Israeli adoption agency Tammuz. Adding an extra element sure to inflame people with conservative and traditional religious belief, they also note that “the Tammuz clients include a number of homosexuals”.
Sergio Widder, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Latin America Desk, stated on record that “HispanTV and Telesur Channels are behaving as the successors of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer. The editor of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, would have been certainly proud of such a dark and vile legacy.”
Worth noting is that this isn’t the first time that these news sources fabricated news of an anti-Semitic nature.
TeleSUR and Holocaust Denial Light™
In 2017 TeleSUR again published two articles of anti-Semitic Light™ content in Spanish, this time to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Apparently having learned from the backlash received the first time around they didn’t publish outright fabrications, but instead chose to present the Holocaust in a false light.
One doesn’t need to be a subject area specialist in order to understand ASININE such a comparison is. Let’s look solely at the images above.
I make a point of going into the math here not to make the case that Palestinians have such a quantitatively far smaller life debt that comparing the Israel state is just fundamentally unsound comparative political analysis — using the number of dead to measure the analogy, according to TeleSUR’s own reporting, the 10,000 dead divided by 7,000,000 dead = .001428571429 or .015% — but as it provides a means for applying pressure counter-point to TeleSUR’s reporting on their partner, Russia.
10,000 Palestinians killed, is roughly the same number of people that died fighting in the Russian invasion of the Donbass region. Given the timeline for this violence compared to the decades of Israel’s border consolidation, wouldn’t that then make Russia, using the same logic exhibited by this narrative, SuperNazis?
While the first article equated the Israeli government with that of Nazi Germany; the other informs about five other mass killing events that were “less known about than the Holocaust”. This unto itself isn’t problematic, but the framing within the text is. Specifically, by intimating that Jewish people are evil for having taken steps to ensure their collective survival by forming a state misrepresents the will of those other groups.
No TeleSUR reporter asked any high ranking member of political or cultural leaders from the groups that they named in the article if they wished they had a state organization and military capacity to ensure something like what happened before never did again.
And yet look to the news and you will see the groups mentioned therein working towards exactly that.
But does TeleSUR report this? No. Instead they publish stories in a false light using yet another false analogy. This time the narrative is “Jews have become Nazis”.
A pattern of Misrepresenting History Matches PSUV’s Plan de Patria
What’s missing from TeleSUR’s coverage regarding similar conflicts as that which occur within Israel is as telling as what is there.
There’s no similar coverage of conflicts which have far higher casualty counts in the Philippines, India, Java, etc.The indigenous dispossession engaged in by TeleSUR’s current and former media partners — Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peruetc. — so that those government-supported resource extraction; intensive agriculture; and transportation infrastructure development projects can proceed — isn’t something that’s discussed. Given TeleSUR’s claim that they represent and speak for “The South”, this is quite puzzling.
When one considers that this is because such coverage aligns with the PSUV’s Plan de Patria, however, it makes sense. Venezuela abstains from truth-telling about what’s going on in their partner countries so as to stay on the “good side” of the politicians there.
While Nicolas Maduro, the Ministry of Popular Power and Information and Patricia Villegas — TeleSUR’s executive core — officially only promote crude anti-Zionism, their “off-brand” media partners produce and share media conspiratorial anti-Semitic content. The insulation that they believed to have from such content is, however, easy to take apart following some investigation.
Cynthia McKinney’s Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theories
Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2008. Her campaign imploded and political career fell apart, however, after her father expressed a number of anti-Semitic views. Following her fall from grace she reinvented herself as a journalist. She blogged for TeleSUR, gave interviews to RT, wrote a series of books based upon her experience in war zones, and obtained a doctorate of Philosophy in Leadership and Change from Antioch University.
Her Ph.D. thesis, titled “El No Murio, El Se Multiplico!” Hugo Chávez: The Leadership and the Legacy on Race”, a stylistically appalling but at times insightful reflection on issues related to race, leadership, and statecraft. Less worthy are Cynthia McKinney’s Tweets related to such issues.
The first screenshot about ZioCon’s — which I presume means either Zionist Conservative or Zionist NeoConservative — represents a misinterpretation of the relationship between marketing and production companies and consumer. Seemingly a variation of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy, it suggests that there is a vast conspiracy by American Jews seek to destroy the black community through music.
Cynthia McKinney’sre-Tweet about Ethiopian Jews stem from Lizard-People-Rule-the-World conspiracy theorist David Icke. Like Janus, there’s two faces to what the Tweet claims.
The first claim is that Ethiopian Jews — aka Beta Israel — are “the Real Jews” and that those the settled in Israel and those who live in the Diaspora aren’t.
The Invention of Ethiopian Jewsby Steven Kaplen is published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and shows how this claim is incorrect. After extensively documented primary research and numerous interviews with members of the Ethiopian Jewish community, he comes to the conclusion that:
“Both the Beta Israel’s oral traditions and the testimony of their literature offer strong evidence that crucial components of their religions system developed no earlier than the fourteenth of fifteenth century. Beta Israel accounts of their history trace virtually all major elements of their religion to the influence of the originally Christian monks, Abba Sabra and Sagga Amlak.”
A list of websites too long too name — without sources, without real author attribution, with clear intent to slur a whole group of people as Satanic — states otherwise.
The second face of the claim is that the “fake Jews” are actually part of a giant, murderous, secret criminal empire which practices worships the Devil and practices their black magic order to gain power and profit.
I haven’t reviewed every article writing about it online, but all that I did either were anonymous; the author listed on it didn’t appear to exist anywhere else; had no sources; or sources that were easily shown to be fake following a Google search.
To give an idea of the sophistication of such a views I’ll share an excerpt. Following a history that lays, basically, every mass tragedy in European and American history at the feet of the “fake Jew” Khazarians, of which the RothschildFamily is one “tentacle,” this group takes over America from behind the scenes. Following this they then start to practice their “social manipulations”:
“The Rothschild Khazarian Mafia decided to gain complete control over all public education by setting up the Department of Education and creating globalist and socialist curriculums based on political correctness, diversity and “perversion is normal” teachings. Fluoride is added to the public water and toothpaste, and dentists are mind-kontrolled to believe that fluoride prevents cavities, and is not harmful to brain function or thyroid function, which it is.
The addition of fluoride to the public water supply and to toothpaste is to dumb-down Americans by on average lowering the operational IQ and making folks much more docile than they would normally be. Programs to develop and deploy vaccinations to dumb-down children and create huge numbers of future chronic health problems were initiated. Doctors have been mind-kontrolled and misled by biased research that was cherry-picked, ignoring any studies that were negative — and that included most of them. All vaccine cell lines are contaminated with SV- 40, a known carcinogenic slow-acting virus.”
The Khazarian Mafia conspiracy theory is largely a remix of claims made previously by the John Birch Society, however it also samples from others. According to this conspiracy theory, the Khazarians “continue their Satanic child blood and sacrifice rituals, and trust Baal to give them the whole world and all its riches, as they claimed he had promised them, as long as they kept bleeding out and sacrificing children and infants for him.”
This is what’s referred to as the Blood Libel — or the idea that Jews sacrifice Christian children as part of their religious ceremonies — and it’s a claim that has long been connected to pogroms that lead to the dispossession and death of Jewish people.
Following TeleSUR’s Unpublishing; Anti-Semitic blogs Signal Boost About It
TeleSUR’s brief unpublishing caused a flurry of reports decrying censorship by the news channels of TeleSUR’s media partners. The comments sections of Sputnik and RT, as I documented elsewhere, were filled with more conspiracy theories about the motives behind it.
These, however, were not the only outlets that sought to draw attention to TeleSUR. Several anti-Semitic blogs also started to publish content filled with outrage that such an event would happen. The websites are typical examples of the sort of fake backlinking networks, as I documeted elsewhere, that TeleSUR, RT, Sputnik, WSWS, RealNewsNetwork and MintPressNews, use. Drawing connections between them and TeleSUR beyond this would require more investigation.
TeleSUR Content Hosted by Anti-Semites on The Pirate Bay
While investigating for this article, I thought I decided to do some unconventional reporting and decided to see if TeleSUR had any content on The Pirate Bay. Sure enough they did!
One of the people seeding TeleSUR content is Joseph Blauman, aka joeblowman, the host of the The Joe Blow Conspiracy Show. Given the date that he uploaded the TeleSUR interview of Noam Chomsky and the rest of his digital footprint it’s unlikely that he’s connected with the organization.
The other account, roflcopter2110, also has a large number of anti-Semitic documentaries and is harder to determine.
To be clear I have no evidence that TeleSUR operates this accounts to spread anti-Semitism — but there is clearly a connection between those who tend to believe that the earth is flat, that vaccinations are bad, that fluoride in water destroys your precious bodily essence, and that Jewish people actually worship the devil and sacrifice babies and those that have an affinity for TeleSUR.
Anti-Semitism Spread on Leftist Facebook Groups
On Facebook there’s so much Anti-Semitism-In-the-Name-of-INternational-Extremism content isn’t not just ridiculous it’s ASININE. The bread of the photo sandwich above gives just a small hint at the amount of Rothschild conspiracy content that gets shared online in photos and posts.
Accounts with photos of Che with names in different alphabets — a simple way to determine which Facebook accounts are part of Venezuela’s coordinated inauthentic behavior network — repeat the same sort of nonsense the Cynthia McKinney does along with narratives of far greater absurdity.
What — you ask — could be more absurd then a make believe international criminal conspiracy like the Khazarians? One of the far-out-there claims I’ve seen posted in such groups as the ones shown above states that Osama Bin-Laden was both a Mossad agent AND a Jew and that he is still secretly alive and well and occasionally socializes with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
While the title of the Facebook group in the center of the photo is cut off, it’s full title is NUEVO GRUPO CON MADURO. As in Nicolas Maduro. Notable is that the person sharing this image within a Spanish language group has an Arabic name.
Showing that the point of this coordinated inauthentic behavior network is simply to spread disinformation, misinformation and thereby increase political polarization is evident in the fact that a website like rightoftheright.com would be posted in a group called ALL COMMUNISTS.
Anti-Semitic Sock Puppet Harassment on Facebook
After I saw one the accounts I identified as connected to TeleSUR’s Coordinated, Inauthentic Behavior Network post an article that denied that the Nazis burned ever destroyed the Torah I wrote a reply to their post stating that it was fake news and linked to a credible source which showed this. As is evident by the screenshot of my Facebook notifications in the center of the above picture, this did not please the operator of the sock puppet account.
He proceeded to tell me that he could tell I was Jewish by my nose and by my name — which I am, though I never heard people tell me that I have a “Jewish nose”.
After I posted a comment about how amused I was that even in the face of peer-reviewed scholarship and primary documents that showed he was spreading fake news, he then tagged me in a Facebook story and four posts which had images or text that were textbook antisemitism. I included the one about Kevin Bacon movies as while the “Jews Killed Jesus” comment is poor taste — especially in the context of a vast coordinated inauthentic behavior network promoting anti-Semitic anti-Capitalism — the meme by itself is funny.
And really, after doing this research and discovering that there’s a large scale, well-funded ongoing online campaign to spread the same sort of lies that lead to much of my family being killed in concentration camps in Ukraine a laugh is just what’s needed to help me from falling into a crushing sense of hopelessness about humankind’s ability to learn from the past by refraining from spreading bald-faced lies for political purposes no matter how just they think their cause is.
Sources
Steven Kaplan The Invention of Ethiopian Jews : Three Models.
Preston James, Ph.D -The Hidden History of the Incredibly Evil Khazarian Mafia (Updated)
Anti-Defamation League. Anti-Semitism in Venezuela IN THE WAKE OF THE GAZA FLOTILLA