The Venezuelan socialist regime held an “anti-fascist and anti-Zionist cultural tribune” on Monday afternoon – the anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in Israeli history – to express support for anti-Israel terrorism and “repudiate the 76 years of genocide” allegedly committed by Israel.
The Venezuelan socialist regime, much like the other leftist regimes in the region, maintains an antagonistic stance against Israel that intensified in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack and the start of Israel’s self-defense operations against the jihadist group.
Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro is among the far-left leaders accusing Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. Maduro failed to condemn the October 7 attack and justified Hamas’s actions days later, claiming they were the result of an alleged “impossibility of the Palestinian people to find in the multilateral international law a space to assert their historical rights.”
Tuesday’s “anti-Zionist tribune” far-left event was led by socialist strongman Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s new interior minister and a long-suspected drug lord actively wanted by U.S. authorities on multiple narco-terrorism charges.
According to state-owned media, officials from the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), representatives from the leftist ALBA-TCP trade bloc, and diplomatic representatives from the Palestine authority, Iran, and Lebanon, among others, participated in the event.
“When we raise the Palestinian flag we are raising the flag of the free peoples of the world, of the peoples who do not surrender and of the peoples who fight,” Cabello said while condemning “the attacks of the Zionist State of Israel against Iran and Lebanon.”
The socialist official asserted that to see the flags of Venezuela and Palestine being raised is “to see one’s soul being hoisted.” He claimed to the Iranian and Lebanese diplomats that the Venezuelan people will always be “firm in defense of the freedom and sovereignty of the Palestinian people, wherever we are, we are soldiers and soldiers of the Palestinian cause.”
“As Commander Hugo Chávez always taught us, our solidarity has no folds, our solidarity is absolute with the people who love freedom and our condemnation is total against the imperialists, the genocidal, against the United States and the Zionist State of Israel,” Cabello said.
The regime’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab stated during the event that the defense of the Palestinian people is part of the “legacy” of late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez and is continued by Nicolás Maduro.
“Commander Chávez together with [Cuban dictator] Fidel Castro, at the time, were the only presidents, perhaps in the world, who maintained a firm position in defense of Palestine, in defense of the Arab world,” Saab said.
The attorney general accused the “Zionist State of Israel” of attacking “four nations – Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria – simultaneously before the totally blindfolded eyes of the transnational organizations, of the great superpowers that are supporting them.”
“Palestine and Lebanon are giving the whole world a lesson on how a nation should resist the onslaught of terror,” he continued, concluding that the socialist regime joins in “defending a cause that is no longer of the Arab world, that is no longer of the Middle East, it is of the whole of humanity.”
Fadi Alzaben, ambassador of the Palestine authority in Caracas, thanked the Maduro regime for its support to the Palestine cause and claimed that Israel intends to carry out an “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza.
“Enough of genocide! Enough of ethnic cleansing in Palestine! Children are being killed. Stop it! The infamous Israeli army has murdered more than 16,000 children,” Alzaben said.
Attendees at the event did not address the atrocities committed on October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and killed an estimated 1,200. Hamas terrorists conducted door-to-door raids, executing entire families in their homes, including infants. Widespread evidence indicates the terrorists engaged in gang-rape, torture, and desecration of corpses. They abducted an estimated 250 people, of which 101 remain unaccounted for as of Tuesday.
Nicolás Maduro, who was not present at the “anti-Zionist tribune,” referenced the event during the latest broadcast of his weekly show With Maduro Plus, claiming that October 7 marked “a year of this genocide.”
“To defend Palestine and its right to life, to its independence, to existence, is to protect the right to existence of Venezuela, of Latin America and the Caribbean,” Maduro said. “It is a crucial battle between fascism, colonialism, Zionism and the right to independence and cultural diversity.”
The socialist dictator described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “insane and criminal” and claimed that Netanyahu “has led to the total discrediting of the struggle of the Jewish people against Hitler’s extermination.” Maduro also claimed that media outlets that refer to Israel’s self-defense operations as “the war of Israel against Hamas” are accomplices of the alleged “genocide” in Gaza.
“I am surprised that there are news portals, media outlets that headline: one year of Israel’s war against Hamas. Whoever headlines that is an accomplice of genocide, I believe it and I say it and they will not silence us,” Maduro said. “We have to talk about one year of the most horrific war of extermination since Hitler’s time.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
