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UPDATE
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Anti-Semitism in Venezuela

Last month Venezuelan police raided the Hebraica Jewish Center in Caracas. This was the latest incident of increasing anti-Semitism fostered by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez. The center had been raided in 2004. Both raids coincided with elections.

Here's the Center's denounciation of the raid.

Via Siggy from HACER and the Miami Herald , journalist Sammy Eppel is now in the USA talking about the increasing anti-Semitism in Venezuela:
Journalist: There is a new fear among Jews in Venezuela

A Venezuelan journalist sounded the alarm about repeated acts of 'government-sponsored' anti-Semitism in the South American country at a presentation at a South Florida synagogue.

Among the examples offered by Eppel:

Venezuelan government intelligence services twice have raided the country's most important Jewish center in a vague, ultimately unsuccessful search for weapons. Publications of the government's cultural ministry run articles entitled "the Jewish Question," along with a Jewish star superimposed over a swastika.

A PATTERN?

These examples, according to Eppel, an analyst and journalist who has written for El Universal and El Mundo, among other publications, are evidence of a pattern of official intimidation against the country's fast-dwindling Jewish population. Many of them have resettled in South Florida since President Hugo Chávez's rise.

About 30 people attended Eppel's presentation Tuesday, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League at the Aventura Chabad. Many of the examples were excerpts from government-linked media.

One 2006 article in El Diario de Caracas debates whether it will be necessary to "expel [the Jews] from the country." Another article in the Diario VEA accuses Jews of being involved in the murder of a government prosecutor.

The Anti-Defamation League has admonished the Venezuelan government for making the Jewish community a "target for intimidation."

"We have called on the Venezuelan government to cease their rhetoric and their intimidation of the Jewish community in Venezuela," said Andy Rosenkranz, the ADL's regional director for Florida. "It's very poisonous anytime you have government-sanctioned anti-Semitism take root because it's a dangerous atmosphere for the Jewish community but it also shows the world kind of intimidation and instigation that the government is capable of displaying."

AN ALLIANCE

Eppel drew connections between the anti-Semitism and Chavez's alliance with the Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also stridently critical of the United States. "Chavez actually believes he is going to defeat capitalism and the U.S.," Eppel said.

Venezuela's Jewish community once numbered 30,000, but community leaders estimate that number has dropped dramatically during Chavez's tenure in power.

The article mentions El Diario de Caracas, a tabloid that is circulated for free, and El diario VEA, which according to Wikipedia allegedly receives funds from the Venezuelan government.

The ADL has a report The Chavez Regime: Fostering Anti-Semitism and Supporting Radical Islam. The report points to

Intimidation and Vandalism: Government sponsored anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism may have an impact on the well-being of the Jewish community in Venezuela. The frequency of intimidation, vandalism and physical attacks against Jewish institutions in Venezuela is on the rise. Anti-Semitic graffiti and leaflets have appeared near synagogues and densely populated Jewish neighborhoods with statements including "Jews Assassins," "Jews Dogs," "Go Away Zionists," "Jewish Zionist Assassins Leave," and Stars of David equated with swastikas.

Today's Miami Herald editorial: Stop the attacks on Jews in Venezuela
OUR OPINION: MESSAGE TO MR. CHAVEZ: ANTI-SEMITISM NOT ACCEPTABLE

This is yet another instance of the many ways Chavez continues to undermine civil society in his country.

UPDATE
Via Irish Spy, Hurricane Hugo, by Thor Halvorssen Halvorssen, director of the Human Rights Foundation,

"IMAGINE OUR JOY at being free and far from a land in which everything threatened us with death." The young refugee's words leap off the tattered clipping from a 1939 edition of La Esfera, a Venezuelan newspaper. "It is such a holy occurrence given that we were expelled from Germany and you have embraced us." The refugee had arrived on one of two steamboats--the Koenigstein and the Caribia--that left Nazi Germany that year with a human cargo that would otherwise have been sentenced to death. The ships eventually docked in Venezuela, and the passengers who disembarked significantly increased the size of Venezuela's Jewish community, which eventually grew to 45,000 people.

Sixty-five years later, an exodus of that community is well underway. The reason is not far to seek. The land that embraced those refugees has become unfriendly. Consider the traumatic morning of November 29, 2004. As parents and school buses delivered children to Colegio Hebraica, a Jewish grade school in Caracas, 25 secret police commandos in combat gear and face masks burst into the main building. Scores of preschoolers were locked in the school as panicked parents tried to retrieve them. The children were eventually freed, but the raid went on.

The government-appointed judge who ordered the raid said the commandos were looking for weapons linked to a bombing that killed Danilo Anderson, a crooked local prosecutor who had made a fortune shaking down the government's political opponents. The raid followed speculation aired on a state-run television station that Anderson's killing was
the work of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency; presumably this guesswork justified the storming of a Jewish elementary school.

The Hebraica raid was not an isolated or random act of state-sponsored anti-Jewish violence. Hostility to Jews has become one of the hallmarks of the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chávez, the radical populist who became president in 1999, and of Chavismo, the neo-fascist ideology named for him. In January, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released a "Report on Global Anti-Semitism." The report documents how openly anti-Semitic the Venezuelan government now is. Besides the raid on the Jewish school, it noted that "President Chávez cautioned citizens against following the lead of Jewish citizens in the effort to overturn his referendum victory. Anti-Semitic leaflets also were available to the public in an Interior and Justice Ministry office waiting room."

Thor was my podcast guest last May (because of technical difficulties I basically had to speak at the top of my lungs, thank you for your forebearance).



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Melanie Phillips on the new British anti-Semitism

At City Journal, Britain's Anti-Semitic Turn:

But a subtler reason exists for Britain's embrace of the new anti-Semitism. After the Second World War, the radical Left set out to destroy the fundamentals of Western morality, but its campaign played out very differently in America and Britain. In America, it resulted in the culture wars, with conservatives, many churches, and sensible liberals launching a vigorous counterattack in defense of Western moral values—and, as it happened, Israel.

Exhausted by two world wars, shattered by the loss of empire, and hollowed out by the failure of the Church of England or a substantial body of intellectuals and elites to hold the line, Britain was uniquely vulnerable to the predations of the Left. The institutions that underpinned truth and morality - the traditional family and an education system that transmitted the national culture - collapsed. Britain's monolithic intelligentsia soon embraced postmodernism, multiculturalism, victim culture, and a morally inverted hegemony of ideas in which the values of marginalized or transgressive groups replaced the values of the purportedly racist, oppressive West.

Further, people across the political spectrum became increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. This erasing of the line between right and wrong produced a tendency to equate, and then invert, the roles of terrorists and of their victims, and to regard self-defense as aggression and the original violence as understandable and even justified. That attitude is, of course, inherently antagonistic to Israel, which was founded on the determination never to allow another genocide of Jews, to defend itself when attacked, and to destroy those who would destroy it. But for the Left, powerlessness is virtue; better for Jews to die than to kill, because only as dead victims can they be moral.

And this general endorsement of surrender feeds straight into a subterranean but potent resentment simmering in Europe. For over 60 years, a major tendency in European thought has sought to distance itself from moral responsibility for the Holocaust. The only way to do so, however, was somehow to blame the Jews for their own destruction; and that monstrous reasoning was inconceivable while the dominant narrative was of Jews as victims.

Now, however, the Palestinians have handed Europe a rival narrative. The misrepresentation of Israeli self-defense as belligerence, suggesting that Jews are not victims but aggressors, implicitly provides Europeans with the means to blame the destruction of European Jewry on its own misdeeds. As one influential left-wing editor said to me: "The Holocaust meant that for decades the Jews were untouchable. It’s such a relief that Israel means we don't have to worry about that any more."

Read it all, and don't miss Melanie Phillips.com

The Hamas Mickey: "good because it keeps the kids off the street"

Tonight's France2 newscast had a report (Propagande islamiste: le mickey du Hamas 20h19m32s), on the Hamas Mickey who is called Farfur, and they interviewed a family unit with a dozen children. The oldest daughter and the father thought the program was good because it teaches what Islam is about. The mother, her face fully covered except for her eyes, said it was good because "it keeps children off the street, where they can come under bad influences". Only the father's name, Hazem, was shown. The mother and daughter remained unnamed.

Fathi Hamad, programmin director for TV Al Aksa, said that the Israeli propaganda had done his station a great favor: a million dollars' worth of publicity.

Another day in the cult of death.

Update, Tuesday 15 May: David Horowitz Sees What Jorge Luis Borges Saw


Cross-posted at DNN

Venezuela: Nascent anti-Semitism?

Under Chavez's Rule, Jews Fear for Future in Venezuela

Although Chavez – a former army officer and coup leader known for his fiery anti-American rhetoric – has never been much favored by Venezuelan Jews, relations between his government and the community started to deteriorate in earnest in 2004.

In November of that year the Club Hebraica was raided by police under a search warrant issued by a local pro-Chavez judge. The warrant, which came after the murder of public prosecutor Danilo Anderson, suggested that the Hebraica was being used to store weapons.

That accusation apparently sprung from rumors that Anderson had been killed with equipment from Israel"'s Mossad spy agency. After searching the school and the club, police left empty-handed.

Incredulous that authorities might think the Jewish community was storing weapons in its school, some observers concluded that the raid really was intended to intimidate the community.

"Chavez must have known about" the raid, one community member said.

"In this society, nothing happens without his permission," this member said. "There was a feeling that the government wanted to send a sign that no group was immune from its control."

The situation deteriorated further a month later, when Chavez said in a speech that "the descendants of those who killed Christ" and "the descendants of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here" had "taken possession of all the wealth in the world."

Though the Christ-killer comment clearly appeared anti-Semitic, some commentators said Chavez actually was referring to global capitalism. Indeed, when Jewish leaders soon afterward met with the president at Miraflores Palace, his official residence, he assured them that he had not been referring to the Jewish community.

That meeting in January 2006 brokered an uneasy peace, but the official reaction to Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon last year unleashed what Freddy Pressner, head of CAIV, the Jewish community"'s umbrella organization, calls "an explosion of anti-Semitism in Venezuela."

Chavez repeatedly compared Israel's behavior to that of the Nazis, a stance that locals say encouraged a wave of similar slanders. Sammy Eppel, a Jewish journalist in Caracas, catalogued a host of violently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic writing and cartoons in the local government and pro-government media.

In one article, which appeared last September in Diario de Caracas, a pro-government newspaper, journalist Tarek Muci Nasir wrote of the "Jewish race" that "the only resource they have left to stay united is to cause wars and genocide."

A cartoon that ran last year in Diario VEA, a state-owned newspaper, depicted Hitler saying, "How they've learned from me, these Israelis!"

One worrying trend is the extent to which these sentiments appear to be approved and encouraged by the government. The Ministry of Information last year organized a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas, an act that Pressner called "insensitive and imprudent."

After the demonstration, the wall outside the synagogue was daubed with "Jews, killers – leave" and "Zionist baby-killers." At other times, graffitti has appeared there with slogans such as "Jews go home" and "Here are the murderers of the Palestinians."

A more worrying development was the appearance of a Venezuela-based Web site claiming to be the local branch of Hezbollah. The site warned, "Hizbolla Latin America is analyzing placing explosives against a U.S. ally in Latin America. This would indicate the launch of Hizbolla Latin America."

Another concern is over Chavez's increasingly close economic and political ties to Iran. As the world has condemned Tehran's nuclear ambitions, Venezuela has emerged as one of Iran's few solid allies in the world.

At the same time, Chavez effectively cut all diplomatic ties with Israel last year by withdrawing his charge d'affaires. He had recalled his ambassador three years earlier.

Is this part of a trend?

Only time will tell.

"We are not sure, for the moment, what the nature of this act was,"

French rabbi attacked in Paris train station

Elie Dahan insulted and struck in face while walking along corridor in Gare du Nord station by man who fled before he could be identified.

A French rabbi was attacked at a Paris railway station by a man who fled before he could be identified, police said on Thursday.

Elie Dahan, grand rabbi of the Nord Pas de Calais region in northern France, was insulted and struck in the face as he walked along a corridor in the Gare du Nord station, although it was not immediately clear what motivated the attack.

Dahan need brief hospital treatment for his injuries.

"We are not sure, for the moment, what the nature of this act was," a police official said.

The Gare du Nord was the scene of last month's riot.

Cross-posted at Maverick News Media and DNN

Anti-Semitism in texbooks: South Korea

Allyson, who will be my guest in next week's Blog Talk Radio, emailed me with this:

Remember that myth that "America is (supposedly) the most racist country on the planet"?
Well, someone recently translated South Korean elementary schoolbooks.... and you'll never guess what they found

Teaching Korean Kids about America...and Who Really Runs It

Chapter 8: "One Must Know the Jews to See America"

More at Reading Monnara

Maria sent this article, Sold on a Stereotype:
In China, a genre of self-help books purports to tell the secrets of making money 'the Jewish way.'

Showcased in bookstores between biographies of Andrew Carnegie and the newest treatise by China's president are stacks of works built on a stereotype.

Another title teases readers with "The Legend of Jewish Wealth." A third provides a look at "Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives."

And some of the books use J P Morgan and J D Rockefeller as examples of Jewish businessmen.