Venezuelan Jewish leader accuses Chávez of fomenting anti-Semitism
On the eve of the international London Conference on Anti-Semitism, Venezuelan Jewish community leader Sammy Eppel, director of the human rights commission of B'nai B'rith and columnist for the Caracas daily El Universal, accused President Hugo Chávez of leading a state-sanctioned campaign against the country's Jews. Eppel said the campaign of anti-Semitism that hit world headlines with this January's Venezuelan synagogue attack actually began with a raid on a Jewish school in Caracas in 2004. The police were looking for weapons and explosives, but he pointed out that the raid coincided with a high-profile visit to Iran by Chávez. "It was, if you like, a gift for Ahmadinejad, to say that 'this is how I treat my Jews,'" Eppel said.
Eppel also noted that this Jan. 20—days before the synagogue attack—the pro-government news portal, Aporrea, published a "Plan of Action‚" which called for "confiscation of properties of those Jews who support the Zionist atrocities of the Nazi-State of Israel and [the] donation [of] this property to the Palestinian victims of today's Holocaust." It also called for members of "powerful Jewish groups" in Venezuela to publicly denounce by name, as well as the names of their companies and businesses in order to boycott them. Eppel said the plan "was a call to action, people were urged to confront Jews in the streets, they were talking about closing Jewish schools, confiscating Jewish property. It's being done in government and the media and this should be troubling not just us but [the] whole world."
He accused the government of making Venezuela a sort of laboratory of anti-Semitism. "It is like an evil experiment to try and convince the population, that has never been anti-Semitic, and try to introduce anti-Semitism into society," he said. "This is the time to stop because it's spreading hate, discrimination and is a flagrant violation of human rights and it could spread and be very dangerous."
"[E]verything I present comes from open sources," Eppel insisted. "I don't speculate, it's all documented and in the public domain. I'm not taking anything out of context nor inventing anything or presenting a theory." After the synagogue attack, Eppel said that the pro-government media blamed the Mossad and the CIA. The Jewish community was also implicated, but Eppel said he has no doubt who was behind it. "When they give you a standard response like that, it puts a warning light and you immediately think it's the government because why are they looking for excuses if no one has accused them?" (Jerusalem Post, Feb. 15)
Eppel's own newspaper El Universal meanwhile reported police statements that the Jan. 30 attack on the Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue was motivated not by anti-Semitism but rather was a robbery. The paper said authorities believe a police homicide detective headed the gang that attacked the synagogue. The paper also quoted police sources that one of the robbers, also a police officer, who had served as the synagogue rabbi's bodyguard, had thought up the robbery out of anger over the rabbi's refusal to lend him money. The anti-Semitic slogans, the reports said, were painted to confuse police. (Haaretz, Feb. 16)
We submit that the robbery thesis makes no sense. Nobody desecrates a synagogue merely as a "diversion." Profit was an ancillary motive at best. And the fact that El Universal is associated with the opposition does not loan the assertion credibility—it is merely reporting the police statements, not endorsing them. Finally, even if the synagogue attack really is a random anomaly, enough ugly Jew-baiting statements (such as those cited above and in our previous posts) have now appeared in Venezuela's pro-government media to indicate that something is not quite kosher in the Bolivarian Republic...
See our last posts on Venezuela and the politics of anti-Semitism.
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Robbery not anti-Semitism?
From VenezeulAnalysis, Feb. 10:
Well, we're glad that the official government position has at least avoided irresponsible speculation about Mossad being behind the attack. But robbery and anti-Semitism are not mutually exclusive theses. Desecrating Torahs and painting images of the devil strikes us as a long way to go to set up a diversion. It smells more to us like a conversion of motives. Maybe the cop's beef with the rabbi was how whoever really planned the attack turned the cop as a collaborator.
In any case, after the long litany of chavista Jew-baiting which has been brought to light by this episode, statements such as "the Chávez government is not anti-Semitic" sound almost as perfunctory and disingenuous as Ron Paul's glib disavowals of racism.
"Anti-imperialism of fools" in Venezuela?
Hugo Chávez's international fan club are doing logical somersaults to exculpate Bolivarian Venezuela of any taint of anti-Semitism. Israeli propaganda notoriously uses the charge of "anti-Semitism" to dismiss anti-Zionism, or any criticism of Israel. All too frequently, the left lets real anti-Semitism off the hook when it is under the guise (however transparent) of anti-Zionism or protest of Israel. In Venezuela's political discourse (and that of the aforementioned fan club), real anti-Semitism is being let off the hook under the guise of "anti-imperialism."
A recent egregious case in point is "Anti-Semitism or Anti-Imperialism in Venezuela?" by James Suggett on VenezuelAnalysis Feb. 12. Emphasis is added and our deconstructions (at risk of belaboring the obvious) are interspersed:
Amazing that anyone would attempt to let Mario Silva off the hook after his repeated Jew-baiting verbal attacks against members of opposition with Jewish last names.
This would almost be funny if it weren't so clear that Silva really doesn't get it. Whatever evidence he may be able to marshal for a conspiracy, calling on all the country's "Jewish businessmen" to recant doesn't let him off the hook for anti-Semitism—on the contrary, it is anti-Semitism. Why are Jews the only group leftists feel they can collectively tar on the basis of their ethnicity? OK, let's see what Silva has got...
This justifies a Jewish conspiracy theory in which all Venezuela's prominent Jews are presumed guilty until they publicly recant?
Again, Jewish and gentile members of Venezuela's conservative opposition are doubtless involved in such intrigues—but it is the Jews that Silva presumes guilty on the basis of their ethnicity.
We weren't aware that the December 2007 raid was disputed. And what is wrong with the word "raid"? Armed police agents take over a school and conduct a search—in what sense does this not constitute a "raid"?
No acts of anti-Semitic violence—until January 2009, that is. And what possible "broader context" could possibly justify a police raid on a school when it is filled with kids in the middle of the day?
An "allegedly Mossad-like manner"? This constitutes "evidence"? We have already examined the speculation about an Israeli role in the Danilo Anderson assassination.
Once again—even if a campaign of dirty tricks was underway to throw the referendum, does this necessarily justify the raid? And, far from ignoring this timing, some critics have suggested that it was a play by Chávez to whip up paranoia and demonize the opposition in the prelude to the vote.
Bad news. What has it got to do with the Jewish center that got raided?
Yes, biased by anti-Semitism! In what sense is seeing non-existent Jewish conspiracies not anti-Semitism? If this isn't anti-Semitism, the word has no meaning.
Don't Venezuela's national police answer to El-Aissami?
He then goes on to recount Israeli intelligence ties to the Colombian paramilitaries, which are real and well-documented elsewhere, but tangential to the situation in Venezuela. So we'll skip a few paragraphs here. To continue:
Can you imagine leftists cutting this kind of slack for, say, the targeting of Islamic charities in the US by the FBI—which the government also asserts is "legal" and "proper"?
Note again: Silva is exculpated of anti-Semitism—despite his obsession with Jewish last names—because of the undoubted foreign intelligence intrigues against Venezuela. This is akin to exculpating professional Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes by pointing to the existence of Islamist terrorism.
Let's see. Leftists were all supposed to agree that the notorious Danish cartoons equating symbols Islam and symbols of terrorism were racist. But Venezuelan cartoons equating symbols of Judaism and symbols of fascism are not? Just asking. A few paragraphs later Suggett continues:
We thank Suggett for this generous concession.
Well, again, we're glad that Suggett is capable of recognizing some ultra-blatant anti-Semitism as such. But when there is even the slightest room for ambiguity, he gives the Jew-baiters the benefit of the doubt. Putting aside the question of the degree to which it is "government-sponsored," it seems pretty clear there is indeed a "rising wave" of anti-Semitism in Venezuela.
It is certainly no exoneration of Israel to point out that by no stretch of the imagination is it doing "the same thing that Hitler did to the Jews." And if Foxman is only concerned with Iran's opposition to Israel, that doesn't mean Tehran is not busting unions, hanging gays, stoning adulterers, oppressing women, keeping down its own ethnic minorities, etc.
The constitutional reform that was defeated in December 2007 would have, among other things, "allowed authorities to detain citizens without charges and censor the media when the president declares a state of emergency." Chávez's proposed reorganization of the intelligence services that was withdrawn under protest last year would have made citizen collaboration with the political police mandatory. It is certainly a sign of hope that these proposals remain "would haves." But let's not be too quick to exculpate Chávez of "authoritarianism."
A little lip service from the Vice-President of the Foreign Relations Committee is none too comforting when synagogues are getting ransacked and chavista talking heads are making much ado about Jewish last names. The German socialist August Bebel long ago warned that "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." We fear that too many folks in Venezuela may be falling prey to an "anti-imperialism of fools."