[A-List] Venezuela: a new anti-Chavez smear?

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Unease among Venezuelan Jews as Chávez embraces foe in Tehran
By Hal Weitzman
Financial Times: May 15 2007

A dozen children are half- listening to a guide at the small synagogue
in the centre of Coro, a town that was Venezuela's first capital before
the title passed to Caracas, 300km to the east.

The guide points to the floor of the country's oldest Jewish house of
prayer, which is covered in a thick layer of sand. "The sand reminded
those praying of the time the children of Israel spent wandering in the
Sinai desert," he says.

The sand also symbolises the transience of Jewish settlement in Coro:
Jewish traders from Curacao arrived in the town in 1827. In 1855 almost
all left after a mob ransacked their shops and homes.

That history aside, Venezuela's Jews say the country has traditionally
stood out in the region for its lack of anti-Semitism. But in recent
years they have watched with growing unease as President Hugo Chávez has
warmly embraced the government of Iran, which last year hosted a
Holocaust denial conference and let loose a volley of scathing verbal
attacks against Israel.

Jewish leaders say relations between the community and the government
are at a historic low. Rabbi Pynchas Brener, chief rabbi of Caracas's
Ashkenazi Jews, says: "This is the worstI've seen the situationhere in
40 years."

Mr Chávez's closeness to Tehran has even become a source of tension
between Caracas and Buenos Aires. Argentina is seeking nine Iranian
officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president, in
connection with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in
Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed. The Argentine government
accuses Tehran of having planned the bombing, and Lebanon's Hizbollah of
carrying it out.

When, in March, some 70 Jewish leaders from around the world gathered
for a two-day meeting in Caracas, the keynote speaker was Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner, the first lady of Argentina and widely tipped to
run for the presidency in October's elections. In a sideswipe at Mr
Chávez, she spoke of the need "to act in a concrete way against any sign
or glimpse of anti-Semitism".

Conditions in Venezuela began to deteriorate in November 2004 when a
Jewish school was raided by police. The search warrant, issued by a
pro-Chávez judge following the murder of Danilo Anderson, a public
prosecutor, suggested that the school was being used to store weapons.
This apparently sprang from rumours that Anderson was killed using
equipment from Mossad, the Israeli secret service. The police left
empty-handed.

"Chávez must have known about it," says one community member. "In this
society nothing happens without his permission. There was a feeling that
the government wanted to send a sign that no group was immune from its
control."

A month after the raid, Mr Chávez 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". In a subsequent meeting Mr Chávez told Jewish leaders he had
not been referring to their community.

Last year relations took another turn for the worse when the official
reaction to Israel's attack on Hizbollah in Lebanon unleashed what
Freddy Pressner, head of CAIV, the main Jewish communal body, says was
an "explosion of anti- Semitism in Venezuela".

While few Jews blame the government directly for that sentiment, many
say Mr Chávez's repeated comparisons of Israel's actions with those of
the Nazis created a hostile atmosphere.

Jewish leaders also criticise the government for having organised an
anti-Israel demonstration outside the city's main Sephardi synagogue,
the wall of which was subsequently daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti.

At the same time, Mr Chávez, a radical leftist who casts himself as a
political counterweight to President George W. Bush in the Americas, has
strengthened ties with anti-US allies such as Iran and Syria.

Mr Chávez has distanced himself from statements by Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad,
Iran's president, that the Holocaust was fiction and that Israel should
be destroyed but few Jews in Caracas feel reassured.

Up to one-fifth of the Jewish population has left since Mr Chávez took
office in 1999, and the community is nervous about releasing numbers for
fear it will be seen as a lack of commitment to Venezuela and could
affect the 15,000-20,000 who remain.

Sammy Eppel, a Jewish commentator, says: "They're not burning synagogues
or persecuting people on the streets but there is officially sanctioned
anti-Semitism. The Venezuelan people aren't anti-Semitic. This is being
directed by a few activists."


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