Los Angeles Master Chorale

The God Blog

Email | Print | Text - Text +

July 8, 2008 | 7:19 am

Under Chavez, anti-Semitism way up in Venezuela

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

And you thought Venezuela was such a nice place.

Venezuelans pride themselves on living in an ethnic and religious melting pot. Their homeland, unlike its neighbors Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile, has no history of having harbored Nazi fugitives. Before Chávez came to power, members of the Jewish community reported little animosity from either the government or the populace, and sharply anti-Zionist rhetoric was relatively uncommon. Nor did Venezuela’s fifteen synagogues (all but one of them Orthodox) experience much of the anti-Semitic vandalism common in other Latin American countries with tiny Jewish populations. The Hebraica center—its building functions as a lavish social hub, elementary school, country club, sports facility, and gathering place for Caracas Jewry—was largely left in peace.

No longer. Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the “Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country.

The details are arresting.

•  Graffiti, often bearing the signature of the Venezuelan Communist party and its youth organization, have appeared on synagogues and Jewish buildings, with messages like “mata niños” (“child killers”), “judios afuera” (“Jews get out”), “judios perros” (“Jews are dogs”), and swastikas linked to stars of David by an equals sign.

•  Sammy Eppel, a columnist for the independent Caracas newspaper El Universal, has documented hundreds of instances of anti-Semitism in government media. To take one particularly noxious example, in September 2006 El Diario de Caracas, until recently one of the country’s most important papers, published an editorial containing these fiery words:

Let us pay attention to the behavior of the Israeli-Zionist associations, unions, and federations that are conspiring in Venezuela to take control of our finances, our industries, commerce, construction—which are infiltrating our government and politics. Possibly we will have to expel them from our country . . . as other nations have done.

•  On television, Mario Silva, the host of a popular pro-Chávez show called La Hojilla (“The Razor Blade”), has repeatedly named prominent Venezuelan Jews as anti-government conspirators and called on other Jews to denounce them. “Rabbi Jacobo Benzaquén and Rabbi Pynchas Brener are actively participating in the conspiracy in conjunction with the media,” Silva has said. “So as not to be called an anti-Semite,” he added, “I repeat that those Jewish businessmen not involved in the conspiracy should say so.”

•  Armed government agents have conducted two unannounced raids on the Hebraica club during the past five years. The first occurred during the early morning hours of November 29, 2004, when two dozen men wearing masks invaded the elementary school just as pupils were arriving for class. In the second, which came shortly after midnight on December 2, 2007, government agents broke through the front gate and disrupted hundreds of celebrants at a wedding party in the nearby synagogue. In each case, allegedly, the agents were looking for weapons and other evidence of “subversive activity.”

•  The last few years have seen the creation of a terrorist group in Venezuela calling itself Hizballah in Latin America. The group has already claimed responsibility for placing two small bombs outside the American embassy in Caracas in October 2006—one of them, it is thought, intended for the embassy of Israel. Although neither of the two bombs detonated, the group’s website hailed the man who planted them as a “brother mujahedin” and has urged other, simultaneous attacks throughout Venezuela in solidarity with Hizballah in Lebanon.

8 Comments — Leave your comment

Share this post: del.icio.us Favicondel.icio.us Digg FaviconDigg Facebook FaviconFacebook Google FaviconGoogle Reddit FaviconReddit StumbleUpon FaviconStumbleUpon Technorati FaviconTechnorati YahooMyWeb FaviconYahooMyWeb

COMMENTS

We welcome your feedback.

Privacy Policy

Your information will not be shared or sold without your consent. Get all the details.

This antisemitism thing is getting old, isn’t it? Oh, well, I guess we’ll just go on doing dat ole Passover Seder - “. . . in every generation they rise upon us to destroy us - and he Holy One, Blessed_be_He saves us from their hands . . .”

Comment by Ben Plonie on 7/08/08 at 9:17 am

Well…well.. today’s news seems to be full of antichavez reports. looks like the zionist agree to fill the wire with news of chavez supporting hezbolah or jews being chase in Venezuela etc.

Gobbles all over the place…..hum…I wonder where the Jews be today if they didn’t have control of the international media and the US government.

Antisemitic: are you semite? I don’t think so, that in fact is another clear jewish lie.

Comment by Pepeillo on 7/08/08 at 10:58 am

Thanks for stopping by, Pepeillo. Excuse me while I vomit.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 7/08/08 at 2:25 pm

There are people endlessly trying to make a case that the Jews are paranoid. Let’s ask ourselves: How does a Spanish internet geek end up on an LA Jewish Journal website sub-blog, to make a dumb, primitive complaint? You have to ask yourself what makes the Jews so special as to merit this attention.

Jews are a fifth of a prcent of the human population, or one in two hundred. But since they tend to cluster, they may be more like one in ten thousand. Only one in ten thousand people on earth have even met a Jew in their lifetime.

Yet . . . Jews, Israel, Zionism, and anything related to them occupies the attentiuon of the world. In China, they think Israel must be the size of Canada to command so much attention. Fifty thousand people could be swept away in a flood in China before they get the global attention that someone with a headache in Jerusalem gets. Why is that? Because we control the media? The largest shareholders of media companies are Germans and Arabs. So that doesn’t work.

Special to Pepeillo: You’re a looooooooooooooooser.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 7/08/08 at 8:02 pm

WELL WE KNOW THAT HE IS THE NEW STUPET FUHRER, AND ALL THIS IS OLD NEWS TOO WE HOPE SEE THIS CLOWN OUT FAST ENOGH CU

Comment by SHLOMO BAHAR NAHMIAS on 7/09/08 at 4:53 am

Ben

The Jewish population might be 1/200 but the bush administration zionist jews population is more like 60% and AIPAC’s is 100% zionist and they run the white house and the politics in the US.

What did Obama and Mcain did as soon as elected? when to AIPAC to bow down to israel.

There is a difference between the regular jews and the zionist jews who are extremist criminals who historically are the ones responsable for the hollocaust, as they negotiated with Hittler who get gassed and who gets out of naziland.

big financial mafias are all controlled by Jews.
Roshchilds, Morgans, Openhiemers, Cohens etc

This is why the world thinks you are bigger.  Reality is you are not bigger you are just plain disgusting and corrupted, Israeli government is a plain example of the corruption of the jews.

Comment by Pepeillo on 7/09/08 at 5:33 am

Pepeillo - follow this logic carefully.

I have never seen anyone who puts the Jews down and insults them come up with one single solitary living country or culture or society better than us and ours. In any way. That should be the standard. We are disgusting and corrupt? But less disgusting and corrupt than your people, whoever they are. Even if you weren’t lying.

And if there is no one better, than we are the best, just like we and God said.

And if we are the best, you should all surrender and serve us. Pepeillo! Shine my shoes!

... loooooooooooooooosers

Comment by Ben Plonie on 7/09/08 at 10:48 am

Pepeillo, it is you, spewing your hate, who are truly disgusting.

Comment by gabe on 7/09/08 at 9:07 pm

Post a Comment

Name:  
Email:  
URL:  

Type the word you see below:

Comment:

About this Blog

Blog Home
About the Blogger(s)
Contact

RSS


Blog Archive