A Venezuelan member of parliament recently claimed that while Hitler had killed Jews during World War II, he did not kill any “Zionist Jews”.

In an interview with Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Venezuelan MP Adel Al-Sughayar said that Hitler’s main financiers had been the Zionists, and especially the Bush family.

“Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations… You will not find on those lists any representatives of global Zionism,” said Al-Sughayar, who is chairman of FEARAB Venezuela, a federation of Arab societies in Latin America.

The interview, which aired on November 14, was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“If we look into who financed Hitler before World War II, we will see that the main financiers 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,” claimed Al-Shughayar.

“If you study the history of the killing of the Jews in Europe, you find that Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations, progressive journalists, and so on. You will not find on those lists any representatives of global Zionism. This proves that… In 1934, they even issued a coin repressing the friendship between Zionism and German Nazism,” he continued.

Venezuela is not known as a friend of Israel’s. Its late president, Hugo Chavez, was known to be a good friend of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who travelled to Venezuela to attend Chavez’s funeral in 2013.

Chavez frequently criticized Israel and in 2009, during the counterterrorism Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, cut off Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with Israel and expelled the Israeli ambassador from Caracas.

Nicolas Maduro, who took over power after Chavez’s death, was one of several Latin American leaders who slammed the Israeli self-defense Operation Protective Edge last summer.

At the same time, he has denied being anti-Semitic and claimed that he is of Sephardic Jewish descent. Maduro has insisted that his country has differences with Israel, which he described as “repressive”, but added those differences have nothing to do with the Jewish people.

Venezuela recently welcomed a group of Palestinian Arab students who arrived in the country on a scholarship, and hailed their arrival as a sign of Venezuela’s “condemnation of Zionism”.