Posted on YouTube: May 20, 2021
Chilestinians (Palestinian-Chileans) came out to protest the Israel-Gaza War of 2021.
Points to remember:
1) Most Chilestinians are Christian, descended from Arab Christians who fled the Muslim Turks.
2) The few Muslims among the Chilestinians are recent arrivals.
3) Chile is on the other side of the world, so it is late autumn there.
4) Chilestinians are very influential in Chile.
Update: May 21, 2021 – The Chilestinians and leftists have come out to protest against Israel. Particularly in Chile, the Chilestinians can affect the agenda of the country.
In South America, only Columbia and Brazil supported Israel.
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Thank you for resolutely standing with ?? and supporting our right to self defense against terrorist attacks.— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) May 15, 2021
But one has to remember that Brazil has a large Evangelical Christian Community. While Columbia’s Evangelicals are now only 13% of the population, they are growing rapidly in influence and numbers.
(Original report – May 13, 2021)
From what I see on the internet, most of the sources in South America are showing their usual concern, but not really taking sides. While South America is not usually as pro-Israel as the United States is, there is not a lot of criticism against Israel from official sources either … except Venezuela.
Even in Chile – where there is a powerful Palestinian community – the government is not openly hostile to Israel, though it allows private citizens, politicians, or networks to be critical of Israel. Yet, even in Chile, the war in the Mideast is not given the attention that it is here in the USA. If it is even front page news, it is in a bottom paragraph.
It is amazing how a Google search of news in Spanish can bring up American (CNN/Spanish), British (BBC/Spanish), German (Deutsche Welle/DW/Spanish), and Spanish (European) sources. So the Latins get a standard feed of news, just like Americans.
Yes, they have CNN in Chile: CNN – CHILE.
Posted on YouTube; May 12, 2021
You can get a captioned translation.
The video below is from El Tiempo (The Times) in Colombia. It seems to be somewhat neutral, just explaining the facts.
Posted on YouTube; May 12, 2021
It has to be remembered, however, TeleSur (TV South), which is centered in Venezuela, is biased against Israel. Venezuela has Iranian connections.
Posted on YouTube; May 12, 2021
You can get a captioned translation.
Venezuela has had this anti-Israel bias since the time of Hugo Chavez.
This is interesting: A Israeli-Jewish woman from Uruguay is talking to Venezuelan news below:
This is from a state run TV station. VTV (Venezolana de Televisión).
Posted on YouTube; May 12, 2021
VTV – a state run Venezuelan station.
You can get a captioned translation.
STILL HOWEVER
The Palestinians in South America are furious.
Chilestinians (Palestinian-Chileans) have asked the Chilean government to sanction Chile.
Source: Palestine Federation (translation assisted by Google App)
In a public statement, the Chilean Palestinian Inter-Parliamentary Group condemned the attacks against the Palestinian population.
The Chilean-Palestinian Inter-Parliamentary Group called on the Government “to take immediate sanctioning measures in the face of violations of International Law by the Israeli Occupying Power and above all, in the face of the brutal violation of International Humanitarian Law.”
Below you can read the public statement:
Given the acts of violence that are taking place in Occupied Palestine, such as
Deputies of the Republic of Chile, we see ourselves in the need to declare the following:
1. We condemn and reject in the strongest possible way the unjustified and excessive use of force by the Israeli Government, its police and army, who have carried out an unnecessary and brutal bloodshed.
2. As the Chilean Palestinian Committee, we have denounced more than a dozen times the Apartheid and the Persecution of which the Palestinians are victims, the same that has endorsed Human Rights Watch in its most recent report on the Palestinian issue.
3. What is happening right now in the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, are a vivid sample that the Occupation has not ceased and very much … On the contrary, it continues to expand, violating the most minimal rights of the Palestinian People.
4. Faced with this devastating scenario, we find ourselves obliged to demand that the Government of Chile to take immediate sanctioning measures for violations of International Law by the Israeli Occupying Power and above all, in the face of the brutal violation of International Humanitarian Law. It is unpresentable that in full World Pandemic the occupying power not only refuse to vaccinate millions of Palestinians who according to the same Geneva Convention must be under their safeguard, but in this context they operate with total impunity to commit the two crimes against humanity denounced by Human Rights Watch.
5. As Parliamentarians and Parliamentarians we will not be passive accomplices of what happens in Palestine, that is why we speak out loudly to demand an end to impunity with which the Israeli Government has acted for many years.
I seriously doubt that the Chilean government will do anything.
There are Jews in South America, but they do not have the influence they have in America. However, Brazil is very Evangelical, and pro-Israel.
I believe this is from a Jewish News Agency who released a video with a Spanish title.
Posted on YouTube; May 13, 2021
Pro-Palestinian groups condemn Israel for stopping ambulances to help Palestinian victims. But this video (above) is troubling. Palestinians actually attacked a Jewish (Mogen David) ambulance.
To see where public opinion is going, one has to go to Twitter or Facebook, and even there, there are sock puppets manipulating the public response.
May 21, 2021 – Edited: Added an update. Made corrections
Palestinian Christians started arriving in Chile in the 19th Century. In 1938, they founded Club Palestino, with a charter from the British mandate. Today, Club Palestino is one of the more prestigious clubs in Chile.
They are called Chilestinos (almost all are Christian), and have risen to become elites in Chile. The equivalent term in English would be Chilestinians – which is a portmanteau of Chile and Palestine.
The Chilestinos take a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is a Chilestinian version of Palestinian history. Yes, it is in Spanish, but there is an option to auto-translate it to English.
Posted on YouTube: December 2, 2020.
The Palestinians in Chile are not a mere curiousity. Chile is a first world country, and the Palestinians are elites. They shape the foreign policy and course of Chile.
The version of history they present will not be agreeable to those who are friendly to Israel. Indeed, many pro-Israel and Jewish groups have expressed concern about the Palestinians in Chile.
Check out this interesting website concerning the Arab community in Bolivia:
https://comunidadarabebolivia.com/ (dead link)
which translates to Arab Community Bolivia or, as English grammar would have it: Bolivian Arab Community.
The website is affiliated with the Club la Unión Árabe de Santa Cruz (The Arab Union Club), in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.
Since 2013, the Arabs of Bolivia have been trying to form an ethnic organization around their Arab ancestry, with an emphasis on a Youth Organization.
BUT FIRST, LET’S SEE HOW BOLIVIAN ARABS DESCRIBE THEIR HISTORY
Source: https://comunidadarabebolivia.com/cultura/ (dead)
(translated by Google, with some minor corrections by me)ARAB IMMIGRATION TO BOLIVIA
The vast majority of the Arab immigrant population arrived at the beginning of the 20th century, from what are now the nations of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, followed by some Iraqi, Egyptian, Moroccan and Jordanian families; It could be said that about 80% were of Orthodox or Catholic Christian faith, while only 20% were Muslim. This, while contradicting the demographic distribution of the Arab world, has a reason: Arab ethnic-religious minorities were systematically persecuted and oppressed by the Ottoman Empire, which controlled almost the entire Middle East at that time, until World War I.
It is interesting to note that this Bolivian Arab site admits that the reason that Christian Arabs immigrated to South America was that they were being persecuted by Ottoman Turkish (Muslim) Authorities.
They seem to be in denial, blaming it all on the Turks. Yes, the Ottoman Turks discriminated against Christians; but Islamic governments discriminated against Christians before and after the Ottoman Turkish Empire ruled. The persecution was a Muslim, not just a Turkish, practice.
As noted, the demographic patterns of immigration were similar to that of other Latin American countries … heavily leaning towards Christian, even though the Arab world is majority Muslim.
According to Wikipedia, the first imam did not arrive in Bolivia until 1974, with the first mosque being built in 1994 … in Santa Cruz.
Why 1974?
Remember that OPEC launched its first Oil Embargo to protest Israel’s victory in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
Source: OPEC enacts oil embargo
History.com
History.com Editors
February 9, 2010The Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announces a decision to cut oil exports to the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.
…
Eventually, the price of oil quadrupled, causing a major energy crisis in the United States and Europe that included price gouging, gas shortages, and rationing.
The world was thrown into a crisis, and the Arab oil states got filthy rich. They could not do this today, given America’s oil production from fracking.
By 1974, Arab Muslims felt empowered, and I suspect they sent an imam to Bolivia with the idea of introducing Islam to a country that was almost Muslim-free except for a few isolated individuals.
Source: Fox News: Bolivia Becoming a Hotbed of Islamic Extremism, Report Concludes (2009)
One Muslim leader named in the OSC report is Mahmud Amer Abusharar, founder of the Centro Islamico Boliviano (CIB) in Santa Cruz. Abusharar emigrated from the Palestinian territories in 1974 and claims to have built Bolivia’s first mosque in 1994 so that he would not lose touch with his religion.
My note: Wikipedia reports that imam Abusharar died in 2011.
Now, Santa Cruz has an Islamic Center and a mosque. And La Paz – one of Bolivia’s two capitals, the other being Sucre – has a mosque since 2004. Quite an achievement for a Muslim community that all but did not exist before 1974. The worries about foreign intrigues are well founded.
According to the Bolivian website, there are 70,000 Bolivians of Arab descent.
Source: https://comunidadarabebolivia.com/cultura/ (dead)
(translated by Google, with some minor corrections by me)[W]e can estimate with a reasonable error that there are approximately 70,000 Arab descendants living in Bolivia.
Yet, for all of this, Bolivia still has very few Muslims today (around 2,000), which is not that much out of a Bolivian population of approximately 12 million. Roughly 1 in 6,000.
Nor is it much out of the 70,000 Arab-Bolivians (only about 3% of Arab-Bolivians). It is safe to assume that the Muslim presence was far, far less in the 1970’s, as there seemed to be no Muslim institutions in Bolivia at all prior to that time.
Most of the Muslims who did immigrate to Bolivia, prior to the 1970’s, either converted or their children did. The Arab community in Bolivia was – and still is – almost totally Christian.
Source: https://comunidadarabebolivia.com/cultura/ (dead)
(translated by Google, with some minor corrections by me)Regarding religion, although the majority [of the Arab immigrants] were Orthodox or Catholic Christians, plus a few Muslims, practically all would end up converting to Roman Apostolic Catholicism sooner or later, in the absence of other centers of Christian sects in Bolivia, at that time.
Below is a picture of the Islamic Center built in Santa Cruz (Click). It was founded in 1986, and I suspect it has some connection to Club la Unión Árabe de Santa Cruz which seems to have built the website.
Santa Cruz – Islamic Center
The image was taken in 2014.
It seems that the Islamic Center was probably subsidized by Islamic interests. Had it not been subsidized, I suspect Islam would have never risen above the presence of a few isolated individuals and visiting businessmen. According to Wikipedia, most of those associated with the Bolivian Islamic Center are immigrants. From that, we can assume that apart from the Islamic Center, any new Arab immigrants to Bolivia would have repeated the past example of conversion to Christianity.
Putting it all together, it follows that the Islamic Center was set up to subsidize an infusion of Islam into Bolivia, possibly extremist Islam.
We can infer that while Arabs are a glorious presence in Bolivia, Islam is an unnatural intrusion, subsidized by outside interests.
But let’s break from that, and finish up with standard Arab Bolivians, who are almost always Christian.
Chile’s ArabTV talked with some Arab Bolivians.
About Arab-Bolivians, but broadcast on Chile’s ArabTV.
posted on YouTube: September 8, 2020
This is in Spanish, but it there is an option to have it translated to English.
January 18, 2025 – Edited: Noted that some links are now dead. Added some citations.