Embattled Venezuelan President Says Opponent Is Working for the ‘Zionists’

Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan president who is facing claims this his re-election was illegitimate, is saying that his opponent is working on behalf of the “Zionists.”

Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that Maduro told Al Mayadin, which is a propaganda arm for Hezbollah, that Venezuelan National Assembly President Juan Guaido is “a CIA agent who serves the interests of the United States and the Zionists.”

He also praised the Palestinians as “noble” in the interview.

Dr. Ariel Gelblung, the Simon Wiesenthal Latin America Center’s representative, said in a statement, “When it comes to manipulating an adverse reality, autocrats lie shamelessly and seek an outside enemy to stir up the citizenship after their cause is already lost.”

“Just as Israeli rescue workers who arrived in Brazil to aid victims of the natural disaster of Brumadinho were maligned by the Maduro regime as ‘the beginning of a Zionist invasion of Latin America’, so today do they use ‘a non-existent relationship between Guaido and the State of Israel to delegitimize both in a single step,” Gelblung said.

On Jan. 23, Guaido invoked a constitutional amendment to declare Maduro’s presidency illegitimate, thereby making Guaido the president. The United States, Canada, and Israel are among those siding with Guaido, Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and Russia are among those siding with Maduro.

Maduro has a history of using such anti-Zionist rhetoric, saying in 2014, “Israel doesn’t kill in error. It kills with horror.” He also called on Venezuela’s Jews to help end “Israeli genocide.”

“When the president himself calls out Venezuelan Jews to rein in the ‘Zionist’ government and stop the Gazan genocide — as if we could even do that — you think to yourself, ‘How is it that the country I grew up in feels the need to single me out?” a Venezuelan Jew told Foreign Policy. “When did the open society I used to live in turn into this?”