Venezuelan Legislator: Bush Family ‘Zionists’ Financed Hitler

In an outrageous display on Lebanese television, Venezuelan member of the National Assembly Adel Al-Sughayar accused the Bush family of funding the rise of Adolf Hitler before World War II.

Al-Sughayar, who serves in the National Assembly (he is described in the video, traslated by the Middle East Media Research Center, as an “MP) as well as running the Federation of Arab Entities and Associations of Venezuela, appeared on Lebanon’s Al Manar TV arguing that, “in order to understand what is happening in the Middle East,” it was necessary to accept that American and international financiers were largely responsible for anti-Semitic movements.

“We must examine the original Zionist conspiracy: the book written by Theodor Herzl in 1899, in which he wrote that the U.S. must surpass Europe,” claimed Al-Sughayar, “He wrote that this new economy must be imposed upon the European economy.” An example of this, he claimed, was that “the main financiers” of the rise of Hitler in Germany “were the Zionists – the Bush family, in fact. The Bush family made its fortune as a result of what happened in World War II. The goal was to destroy Europe in order to impose the American economy and the dollar currency on it.”

Al-Sughayar added that “Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations, progressive journalists, and so on,” but that Hitler allegedly spared some ethnic Jews because they were “representatives of global Zionism.” He also claims that “in 1934, they even issued a coin repressing the friendship between Zionism and German Nazism,” though he does not offer any evidence for any of the claims made in this video.

 Al-Sughayar appeared to be referring to a conspiracy theory popular among both radical leftists and the “Alex Jones” wing of anarchists that defies ideological categorization, who have claimed, with little evidence, that Prescott Bush was “planning a fascist overthrow of America.” In reality, Prescott S. Bush, grandfather to George W. Bush, was a successful businessman-turned-senator with one of the most outstandingly tolerant political records of his day, becoming one of the earliest supporters of the United Negro College Fund and a vocal critic of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attempts to target and eliminate communists in the United States.

There is little evidence that Al-Sughayar contributes much to the Venezuelan National Assembly, though he has made numerous appearances on Middle Eastern television networks making similarly outrageous arguments. Earlier this month, Al-Sughayar, an ethnic Syrian, appeared on Syrian television condemning the “imperial war against the Syrian people,” apparently not being waged by dictator Bashar al-Assad despite his proven use of chemical weapons. Al-Sughayar appears to have left Venezuela in 2013 “to fight alongside the Syrian army, having arrived in the country two weeks ago to visit his ill mother,” according to Time magazine. In response to the fact that Assad has used chemical weapons, he said at the time, “They’ve [the United States] used chemical weapons themselves in Vietnam and other places.”

In exchange for such public displays of loyalty, Assad has been one of the few international leaders to stand alongside the socialist, repressive regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. During the Venezuelan uprising in February, in which the government indiscriminately beat, tortured, and killed unarmed student protesters, Assad sent a public letter of support to Maduro, in which he commiserated with Maduro on “the brutal attack you are facing.”