“Jews dominate finance and internet sectors,” said an English-language broadcast on Chinese state TV, “So do they have the powerful lobbies some say? Possible.”
By United with Israel Staff
On Tuesday, host Zheng Junfeng, speaking on Chinese state TV broadcaster CGTN, said, “Some people believe that U.S. pro-Israeli policy is traceable to the influence of wealthy Jews in the U.S. and the Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy makers,” The Associated Press reported.
“Jews dominate finance and internet sectors,” Zheng added in his English-language broadcast. “So do they have the powerful lobbies some say? Possible.”
“Zheng then accused the U.S. — China’s top geopolitical rival — of using Israel as a ‘beachhead’ in the Middle East and a proxy in its campaign to defeat pan-Arabism,” reported the AP.
The CGTN show focused on Israel’s response to a 10-day-long attack by Palestinian terror factions that have launched over 3,700 rockets at Israeli civilians, killing victims as young as five years old.
The AP report noted that CGTN’s operator CCTV did not comment on the broadcast.
Israel’s Embassy in China denounced CGTN’s “blatant anti-Semitism.”
The embassy tweeted, “We have hoped that the times of the ‘Jew’s controlling the world’ conspiracy theories were over, unfortunately anti-Semitism has shown its ugly face again.”
“We are appalled to see blatant anti-Semitism expressed in an official Chinese media outlet,” the tweet added.
In general, China publicly backs the Palestinians, despite attempts to gain inroads into the Israeli economy, including a bid by a Chinese entity to run the port in Haifa.
China established formal diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992, and “Beijing has nurtured close economic, technological and military ties, including the purchase of early model Israeli drones,” the AP reported.
According to the AP, “Judaism is not one of China’s officially recognized religions, however, and stereotypes about Jews as shrewd businesspeople and market manipulators are common among the Chinese public.”