Venezuela's State-sponsored Anti-Semitism

In November of 2004 the Hebrew Social, Cultural, and Sports Center was raided, with the justification of searching for arms and explosives that were never found, and some sectors of the Venezuelan Jewish community began to perceive signs of hostility.

A curious coincidence did not pass without notice: "Judge Maikel Moreno signed the search warrant on a Friday morning, and if you are looking for arms, it is supposed that you should act immediately," remembers the director of the human rights commission of the Hebrew Brotherhood of Venezuela, Sammy Eppel: "But they waited until Monday to do the search, just when the children were entering the school and the same day as Chavez arrived from a visit to Teheran. My interpretation is that Chavez was showing Iran: 'This is how I treat my Jews.""

In fact, certain alarms had already sounded because of the close relationship maintained at that time between Hugo Chavez and Norberto Ceresole. The controversial consultant to the president is the author of the book Caudillo, Ejército, pueblo, The Venezuela of president Hugo Chavez - whose first pages were concerned with what was called "the Jewish question." Ceresole, accused more than once of antisemitism, puts forth a series of revisionist arguments that not only, for example, puts in doubt the magnitude of the Holocaust, but also categorically states that the country's Jewish population is racist and against Chavez, in the wake of a strong article published by Rabbi Pynchas Brenner - a "prophet of Zionist hate," in the words of Ceresole - the 1st of December of 1999.

"This book is by a mentor of Chavez," stresses Eppel: "It is a manual for Venezuelan revolutionaries written by a person who was also a roving ambassador for Hezbolla."

Arguments such as those - and others even more aggressive - appeared in the mass media controlled by or close to the Government starting at the time of the 2006 war in Lebanon, and again at the end of last year during the highly questioned Operation Cast Lead, both, as we now know, undertaken against Hamas.

The close of 2008 and the first weeks of 2009 were a time of angry and heated words and of terrible images of the war, with ministers, deputies, and high functionaries of the Venezuelan government giving official declarations - such as those referring to the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador - while wearing traditional Palestinian kaffiyes.

Actions began to take the place of words. Public statements of support for the Palestinians in Gaza opened the way to an outbreak of anti-Jewish graffiti. On the 6th of January, the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Cohen, was expelled from the country - for the second time.

On the 21st and 22nd of January, according to reports by the vice president of the Israelite Association of Venezuela, David Bittan, persons that arrived on motorcycles painted anti-Jewish slogans outside the Association headquarters. On the night of the 30th an armed group broke in, causing damage to and profaning the Tiferet Israel synagogue (the case is being treated as a burglary and its authors were quickly detained). And in the early hours of the 26th of February a grenade was thrown against the headquarters of the Beth Shmuel Jewish Community Center in the La Florida subdivision.

That, at the material level; there was also an episode in which a director of the Gran Mariscal Symphony Orchestra refused to participate in the musical Fiddler on the Roof because it is a "Jewish symbol," which points to something deeper and perhaps darker.

Is this twenty-first century Judeophobia the product of government discourse?

The announcement

The director of Latin American Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, Dina Siegel Vann, visited Caracas in March and was convinced that the President's diatribes against the State of Israel created "a permissive environment for attacking the Jewish community."

Ariel Segal, international analyst and professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Lima, connects these events with "manifestations in official media and spaces such as La Hojilla The Cutting Edge" and concludes: "It is obvious that there is permissiveness to go further than just criticism, a criticism that is often based on profound ignorance. When Chavez broke relations with Israel, what he really did was to ally himself with Hamas - not with the Palestinian people in general, but with a specific faction. These things would not have occurred without the permissiveness and tendency of the Government to take sides - and I repeat - not with the Palestinians, but with Hamas, an organization that calls for the destruction of Israel."

As an example, Segal points to the proliferation of messages in official media, not only against Israel, but also against Jews.

The newspaper Vea and the home page of Aporrea.org, as well as VTV and Radio Nacional and other publications in the interior of the country have been monitored with varying degrees of rigor in this matter. A study presented at the World Conference Against Antisemitism in London, in February of this year, enumerated some revealing statistics: between October and December of 2008, Aporrea published 136 texts considered to be anti-Jewish. And during the course of the year, an average of 45 pieces per month were counted. In the 30 days from December 28th of 2008 to February 27th of 2009, this grew to 5.4 pieces per day.

In the case of Vea, the growth of its content on the theme was singular: from only one text in October of 2008, to 13 in October, and 16 in December. And in the same 30 day lapse, their antisemitic content grew to the same 5.4 pieces per day.

That is just a sample. "The 15th of December we presented the Prosecutor's office with a denunciation regarding all these media attacks, by name and number" said Abraham Levy, president of the Confederation of Israelite Associations of Venezuela, CAIV: "We denounced acts contrary to the Constitution because they are attacking us as individuals on the basis of our religious affiliation."

"There are laws against the incitement to violence and hatred," indicated Segal: "And when the violations are committed by opposition groups, sanctions are immediately applied. But in the case of these media, including those of the State, some people are allowed to incite hatred. That implies something."

Between 2003 and now, CAIV sent 61 communications to government entities advising of content that was in violation of constitutional rules: 14 to the President's office, and 18 to other ministries.

"It is undeniable that all the antisemitism in Venezuela comes from sources linked to the Government and State communications media," Eppel pointed out: "For the first time since the end of World War II, State antisemitism exists in a Western nation. And it is an antisemitism that is sold as politics and ideology."

The case of Aporrea, in the opinion of Eppel, is revealing in more than one sense: "Its founder and web master is Martin Sanchez, the Consul General of Venezuela in San Francisco, California. That is to say, Sanchez directs an antisemitic website, that professes hatred for Jews, from the US and as a diplomat. That demonstrates that Aporrea is not, as it pretends to be, independent. Last year they published more than 300 antisemitic pieces. Already, some Jewish institutions in the US are preparing denouncements on the matter."

The Venezuelan Jewish organizations never underestimated the impact that words and the power of the message can have: "We presented an assortment of examples of antisemitic content in official media as a denouncement, and warned that if something was not done about it, things would start happening." explained Eppel: "And they did."

Photo: A Lebanese demonstrator carries a poster of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez reading in Arabic "That's how men are like you lesser men" as he protests outside the EU's offices in downtown Beirut against Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip on January 7, 2009. Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah whose Shiite militant party fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006, warned today that "all possibilities" were open against Israel as he gave a fiery speech in which he blasted the Jewish state's offensive in Gaza.(AFP/Gerry Images)