Official antisemitism erupts in Venezuela

Armed police raided the Jewish elementary and high school at the Jewish Cultural Centre in Caracas on 29 November 2004 implementing a court order that alleged that materials of a criminal nature, such as electronic equipment, arms and explosive devices were concealed in the building.

The swoop started at 6.30 am, when school buses and parents had already started to bringing children to the school, but, after rooting through the building for three hours, the police left having found zilch. The court order, it has since been revealed, had been issued three days earlier but the police waited until Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, arrived in Teheran for a state visit to Iran.

That was two years ago, but things have only got worse in the intervening period. Indeed, since election of the left-wing populist Chavez in 1998, Venezuela has witnessed a proliferation of virulently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda, frequently entwined with nakedly anti-Jewish slogans.

The Jewish population in Venezuela numbers only around 25,000 out of a total population of close to twenty-seven million. So, why does the official media of a government that claims to be socialist, devote its energy to poisonous attacks on a very small Jewish community?

One possible explanation given is the fact, that one of Chavez’s important early advisers and political mentors was a – now deceased – Argentine Holocaust denier called Norberto Ceresole, a friend of the French fascist Robert Faurisson and the French ex-Communist Roger Garaudy who converted to Islam and also took up Holocaust denial. Ceresole strongly believed that Latin America must forge alliances with Arab nations to fight the United States and what he called “the Jewish financial mafia.”

The tendencies towards distortion of the Holocaust might, further, be explained partly against the background of the increasingly close relationship between oil-rich Venezuela and Iran and other Muslim countries. As such, this kind of nonsense has been incorporated into the Chavez government’s anti-imperialist rhetoric with Israel is viewed as a key factor in US politics and, thus, an enemy of the ‘anti-imperialist revolution’.

Antisemitic ranting is not confined to government circles but is spread throughout the mass media. For example, in the Diario VEA newspaper, as recently as 20 September, the hardcore antisemite Basem Tajeldine raved: “The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was directed to eliminate the social basis of Judaism that believed in assimilation with the Europeans, the low class majority of Jews … The ideological affinity and the great ties of collaboration that existed between German Zionism and Nazism is undeniable … Sionazis is the most appropriate term to catalogue (sic) the organisation of the political capitalist Jewish elite of Israel that is responsible for the present Holocaust of the Arab people”.

Similarly in El Diario de Caracas earlier this year, Tarek Muci Nasir claims that “The only resource they [the Jews – Editor] have left to stay united, is to cause wars and self- genocide,” Nasir goes on to urge that his readers “pay attention to the behaviour of the Israelite-Zionist associations, unions and federations that conspire in Venezuela to seize our finances, industries, commerce, construction, even infiltrating public positions and politics” and warns that “Possibly it will again be necessary to expel them from the country, like other nations have done before… this is the reason why the Jews are always in a continuous stateless exodus and thus in the year 1948 they invaded Palestine.”

Commenting on the September visit to Caracas by Iranian’s fanatic president Ahmadinejad, Freddy Pressner, head of the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, expressed “outrage”, citing the Iranian leader’s open denial of the Holocaust and his statements about erasing Israel from the face of planet. Chavez’s bloc with Iran is making Venezuelan Jews worry about their own security for the first time.

Sammy Eppel, a Caracas-based columnist, addressed the deepening antisemitism in Venezuela in his presentation at a recent conference, in Budapest, of the Tel Aviv University-based Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism. In his lecture, he revealed that he had found no fewer than 195 examples of antisemitic content in the official and pro-government media in a 65-day period ending on 31 August 2006.

Among slides shown by Eppel was one depicting the front page of a government publication called Docencia (Teaching) which denounced the “Jewish killers” perpetrating the war in the Lebanon and which conflates the Star of David with the Nazi swastika, Eppel pointed out that, until a few years ago, “there were hardly any antisemitic articles” in the Venezuelan media and that “the government has adopted an antisemitic policy.”

At meetings between Jewish community leaders and top-level government officials, including Chavez himself, the government, according to Pressner, has bleated that its hands are tied, saying, “We’ll do what we can, but we can’t deny people freedom of speech.”

The antisemitism evident even in the political cartoons published in government-owned newspapers is now finding explosive expression at street level. For example, antisemitic slogans, bearing the “signature” of the Venezuelan Communist Party and its youth organisation, have even been sprayed on the walls of the Jewish Cultural Centre in Caracas in broad daylight. The perpetrators were filmed on CCTV but when a complaint was lodged with the police and interior ministry nothing happened.

It is clear beyond any question that under Chavez’s leadership, Venezuela is experiencing a disturbing rise in antisemitism, fostered in large part by Chavez’s own rhetoric and that of governmental institutions. The relentless and baseless attacks on the Jewish community are now putting it at great risk.

Karl Pfeifer

A number of images from Sammy Eppel's presentation are available online, here. It is well worth a look. Just click on the images for the slide-show to progress.

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