It's the Sephardim, stupid!

When times are hard, people fall back on time-honoured conspiracy theories - it's all the fault of the Jews. Except that in Honduras the country's troubles are being laid not just at the feet of the Jews, but the Turcos: what you and I might call Levantines, or more specifically - Sephardi families from Arab countries. Here's Eamonn McDonagh writing in Z-word blog:

"What readers may not know is that Honduras’s problems are not the fault of dinosaur elements at Foggy Bottom, the maneuverings and ambitions of Hugo Chávez or the eternal cruelty and short sightedness of the Honduran oligarchy. They are in fact caused by a handful of scheming Jews. I know this to be true because I’ve just read this story which appeared in El Mundo of Madrid. Sure, it supports the conservative Partido Popular and opposes the government of José Luis Zapatero but it’s a national newspaper and not the bulletin of some fringe fascist group.

"Jacobo G. García starts his piece by referring to the common appearance of the slogan “Turks Out!” in Tegucigalpa graffiti before going on to say the following:

Although everyone refers to them as “Turks” they are in fact Jewish families who arrived from Arab countries in the 1940s and 1950s [… ]. They are the Rosenthals, Facussés, Larachs, Nassers, Kafies and Goldsteins. Five surnames [I make that six, but hey, who’s counting?] that control factories, energy, telecommunications, tourism, the banks and finance, the media, cement works, commerce, airports and Congress. Practically everything. They are the hard core of the 3% of Hondurans who control 40% of national production. They are the chosen few in a country where 70% of the people are poor.

"Now I know it’s a waste of time trying to apply logic to arguments like this but Honduras has a population of 7.11 million and 3% of that is 213300. So how do just five or six families get to constitute the hard core a group that size? What special quality constitutes their “hard coreness”? Why is it worth naming them and not any other rich family in Honduras? Well, because they are Jewish and, as everyone knows, while ordinary oligarchs get on with exploiting the poor in a haphazard and inefficient manner the Jews have racial characteristics which equip them especially well for grinding the faces of the most wretched."

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