Chilean President Gabriel Boric used his address at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to urge world leaders to take action to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“The grave humanitarian crisis we are experiencing today, which profoundly affects us, exposes millions of people to the consequences of war,” Boric said, referring to Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Boric called for international collaboration to address inequality, migration and food security.
“The same applies to the conflict in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “We do not shy away from reiterating our position.”
President Boric of Chile is a leftist president in Chile, where Palestinian-Chileans (Chilestinos) have a lot of political clout.
The Anadolu Agency, the source of this story, is a Turkish news agency. Turkey has an Islamic culture; and its President Erdogan is considered semi-dictatorial, and has turned Turkey against Israel. Press freedom is limited. So take that into account.
THE TEN MOST ARAB COUNTRIES IN LATIN AMERICA
Posted on YouTube: October 14, 2020
The video above can be auto-translated.
This is their list which seems to be ordered by population. Were one to go by percentages, Argentina would have the largest population by percentage.
10) Uruguay
9) El Salvador
8) Paraguay
7) Honduras
6) Chile
5) Mexico
4) Columbia
3) Venezuela
2) Argentina
1) Brazil
One has to remember that most of the Arabs who came to the New World were usually Christian, and quite often were fleeing Islamic persecutions.
These Christian Arabs erroneously get lumped together with Muslims, but this is a demographic and historical mistake. Unfortunately, it is a mistake that some Arab-Latin populations make themselves.
For example: The Chilestinos (Chileans of Palestinian descent) are almost always Christian, yet they identity with the Islamic cause of Palestinian liberation. They even embrace Islamic symbolism.
A POSTER by Chilestinos advertising a trip to the Holy Land
(But why did the photo focus on the Dome of the Rock: a Muslim
site, if the Chilestinos are Christian?)
Lucky, in many Latin-American countries the largest or second largest subgroup of Arabs are the descendants of Lebanese Maronites. Maronite Christianity affiliates with Roman Catholicism, and they historically have considered themselves closest to the West. They make sure to distinguish themselves from Muslims.
The Maronite-Latins remember the persecutions their ancestors suffered in Lebanon from Muslims, most recently from the PLO during the Lebanese Civil War. Some even refuse to call themselves Arabs, preferring to invoke their Phoenician ancestry.
As the Canadian-American scholar, T.B. Irving, noted:
[T]he Christian Lebanese immigrants to South America… owe much to their over‑all Arab heritage, even though many of them try to call themselves “Phoenicians”.
There are roughly ten times as many Maronites in the Americas as there is in Lebanon itself, and they remember who drove them out: the Muslims.
The Maronites in Latin America usually vary from neutral to some even being Zionist in their opinions. They can moderate the power of the anti-Israel Arabs.
However, in Chile, the Chilestinos (Palestinian-Chileans), who are Christian, are powerful, rich, influential, and the largest of the Arab subgroups. Hence, the Chilestinos distort Chile’s foreign policies.
In Honduras and El Salvador, there are also Palestinians, but those are countered by a massive Evangelical revival in those countries.
Mexico is a predominantly Christian country, with adherents of Islam representing a small minority. Due to the secular nature of the state established by Mexico’s constitution, Muslims are free to proselytize and build places of worship in the country. The country has a population of around 126 million as of 2020 census and according to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population was 60,000 in 1980, 111,000 in 2010, and is predicted to be 126,000 in 2030; however, according to the 2010 National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) census, there were only 2,500 individuals who identified Islam as their religion. Most Muslims are foreign nationals and the majority are Sunni.
Notice that the official numbers were much lower than the claimed numbers. Most of the Muslims were foreign nationals.
Yet, Mexico may have over a million Lebanese (almost all of whom are Christian),
What we see here is the all too common phenomena of Muslims exaggerating their numbers. Those few Muslims in Mexico may be temporary converts who will become Evangelical or revert to Catholicism in the following year. Mexico, like much of Latin America is in the midst of an Evangelical Revival. Evangelicals may not be growing as rapidly in Mexico as in the other Latin American countries, but they are still growing.
The thing to remember is that, while the Muslim population in Mexico is miniscule, the Arab-Mexican (Christian) population is very large, in the millions. And the Arab-Mexican Christians are significant. Think of Carlos Slim and Salma Hayek. Getting figures for them is unreliable, however, because a lot of them have moved to the United States.
In the case of Islam, practically speaking, Mexico has almost no Muslims. There are exceptions.
Apparently, with the power of Palestinians in Chile, particularly Daniel Jadue, who is a leftist mayor of Palestinian descent, in the capital district, Jews are somewhat uncomfortable.
In the context of the horrific scenes broadcast from Gaza and Israel, it would not have been surprising to hear Jadue speak of “Zionists,” also a misconstrued word. But what he said was that being a Jew is “incompatible” with being progressive. This affirmation attempts to unite ideology and religion, distorting the biblical concept of a chosen people as an ideology. This tendentious statement, expressed by an important public figure and transmitted infinitely by social networks, is a dangerous precedent that attacks, not only Jews, but “the other.” Jadue’s words are not precisely addressed to “my left-wing Jewish friends,” they dig at the core of a dangerous discourse within Chilean society. As Theodore Adorno warned in 1950, one type of discrimination is associated with others, and anti-Semitism leads to xenophobia.
Politicians in the USA tend to favor pro-Israel groups. The opposite is true in Chile, where the Palestinian community rules the day.
As noted elsewhere on this site, the Palestinian-Chileans – Chilestinos – are the power bloc of note in Chile.
Particularly of note is that the leftist president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, has said the Gaza is worse than Berlin in 1945.
So the Jews of leftist persuasion feel sort of betrayed by their fellow progressives in Chile.
Chile has a stable democratic government, but its views on the Mideast have been hijacked by the powerful Chilestino bloc, some members of whom are at the forefront of a Red-Green Alliance.
