CARACAS, Venezuela – Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro offered an unhinged “history lesson” on Monday in which he declared Jesus “an anti-imperialist Palestinian man crucified by the ‘Spanish Empire.’”
Maduro issued his remarks during the latest episode of his television program Con Maduro Más (“With Maduro Plus”) in the context of accusing Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza following an unprecedented terrorist attack by the genocidal organization Hamas that has killed 1,200 Israeli civilians and counting as of Wednesday.
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The Maduro regime chose not to condemn Hamas’s brutal attack even though many of those killed or missing are from Latin America. Instead, the rogue socialist regime opted to justify Hamas’s actions, claiming that they are the result of an alleged “impossibility of the Palestinian people to find in the multilateral international law a space to assert their historical rights.”
Venezuela’s socialist regime, which has persecuted the Venezuelan Catholic Church for years, is known for hijacking and misinterpreting Christian doctrine to promote socialism. Venezuela, like most of Latin America, is an overwhelming majority Catholic nation.
Maduro, who leads a brutal authoritarian socialist regime known to commit gross human rights violations against its citizens, prefaced his words by claiming that he is a “Christian, a practicing Christian, a Christian of prayer and action, a Christian of Christ straight, straight from Christ.”
“Where was Jesus Christ, our Lord Jesus Christ, born? In Bethlehem, Palestine,” He said. “When He was born, it was Palestine thousands of years ago, more than two thousand years ago. He was born in a Jewish home, and then he rebelled against the domination of the Roman Empire then.”
Jesus was Jewish. The Romans referred to the area as Judea at the time of his birth. The name “Palestine” surfaced over a century after the crucifixion following a failed revolt by Jews against Roman rule.
The “State of Palestine,” referred to as such, stems from a declaration of independence proclaimed in 1988 in Algiers, Algeria, nearly 2,000 years after the life of Jesus. In the declaration, Palestine claims the territory of the state of Israel, as well as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as its own, with its capital at Jerusalem.
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Maduro continued his remarks by claiming that Jesus Christ was the “first anti-imperialist known in modern history, of the last three millennia, at least. The most important anti-imperialist.”
“Of modern history, our Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, Palestinian territory,” Maduro added.
In the Catholic faith, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ was born in the town of Bethlehem, Judea, five miles east of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.
“So Jesus was a Palestinian boy, a Palestinian youth, and when he was crucified, crucified, condemned unjustly by the Spanish Empire and by the oligarchies that religiously dominated the area,” Maduro railed, “when he was condemned unjustly, he was nailed, crucified, killed, tortured the Lord, our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The Spanish Empire could not have possibly been involved in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as Maduro claimed, given that it was established in the late 15th century, more than a thousand years after the fact. The Gospels all state that Jesus was crucified by the order of Pontius Pilate, who, at the time, was the Roman prefect of Judea and not known to be involved with the future Spanish empire in any way.
“He died as a Palestinian man and was resurrected to immortal life as a Palestinian spirit,” Maduro claimed. “So in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I call upon the Christians of the world, I call upon the Muslims, my Muslim brothers, I call upon the Jewish people of the world, let us demand the fulfillment of the resolutions of the United Nations.”
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Maduro made similar “anti-imperialist” claims about Jesus Christ in 2020 during an official event to commemorate Palm Sunday, a day when Catholics observe Jesus’s return to Jerusalem, which is part of Catholic Holy Week festivities.
“Jesus Christ was killed for being anti-imperialist, for confronting the Roman Empire with all his being, his word,” Maduro said at the time. “They killed him for being anti-oligarchic.”
Maduro has also claimed in the past that Chavistas, adherents of his socialist regime, are the “Jews of the 21st century,” a claim he made more than eight years after the Venezuelan socialist regime cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009 and established ties with Palestinian leaders.
Similarly, Maduro’s predecessor, the late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez, claimed in 2006 that “Jesus Christ was the first socialist and Judas [Iscariot] the first capitalist” at a time when Chávez was seeking reelection.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.