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Brazilian scientist faces antisemitic hate speech charges

A lawmaker filed a criminal complaint against ex-official Jessé Souza, who said Jeffrey Epstein was an operative for “Jewish Zionism.”

Jesse Souza speaks in Brasilia, Brazil on April 9, 2015. Credit: Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom/Agência Brasil via Wikimedia Commons.
Jesse Souza speaks in Brasilia, Brazil on April 9, 2015. Credit: Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom/Agência Brasil via Wikimedia Commons.

A prominent sociologist and author in Brazil, Jessé Souza, is facing criminal hate speech charges for linking Jeffrey Epstein to “Jewish Zionism.”

Guto Zacarias, a lawmaker for the center-right Brazil Union party in the state parliament of Sao Paulo, filed a criminal complaint against Souza last week, the O Globo newspaper reported.

Souza had said in a video that Epstein, the deceased Jewish-American sex offender, was “the most perfect product of Jewish Zionism,” whose actions were intended to blackmail world leaders to ignore “the Palestinian Holocaust.”

Epstein “is not an isolated case of human evil. Epstein is the most perfect product of Jewish Zionism. He was not only financed by the Jewish lobby Mossad and Rothschild, but Zionism is the driving force behind all the crimes that were committed. The industrial pedophilia network only existed to later serve as a means of blackmailing politicians and billionaires, especially Americans, to gain support for Israel’s murderous practices in the Middle East and Palestine,” Souza said in one video.

Souza, a former head of the Brazilian government’s Institute of Applied Economic Research, is a far-left thinker and the author of several books, including best-sellers “The Elite of Backwardness” and “The Brazilian Rabble.”

In the video, he added: “The Jewish Holocaust was orchestrated by Zionism, with the help of Hollywood and the entire world media dominated by the Jewish lobby, to label any criticism of Israel as antisemitism. It was this fraud that allowed the Holocaust of the
Palestinian people.”

Shortly after posting the video, Souza removed it and posted another.
“I didn’t properly distinguish between ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jewish.’ I have several non-Zionist Jewish friends, and I apologize for the slip-up. I removed the video, but the rest of the video stands,” he said in the second video.

CONIB, the umbrella group of Brazilian Jewish communities, said that the “slip-up” was indicative of how antisemites use the cover of anti-Zionism, sometimes awkwardly, to camouflage their hatred of Jews.

Souza’s videos are “further evidence of how antisemitism, always mutating throughout the centuries, has found its best contemporary version in anti-Zionism,” said CONIB.

Canaan Lidor is an award-winning journalist and news correspondent at JNS. A former fighter and counterintelligence analyst in the IDF, he has over a decade of field experience covering world events, including several conflicts and terrorist attacks, as a Europe correspondent based in the Netherlands. Canaan now lives in his native Haifa, Israel, with his wife and two children.
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