Playing the ‘Anti-Semitism’ Card Against Venezuela (tags)
"Although the arrests helped ease the anxieties of Venezuela’s Jewish community, the international media pressed on with the storyline of a politically motivated attack. The very week that the Venezuelan Israelite Association issued a statement praising the swift and successful investigation, The Washington Post ran an editorial titled “Mr. Chavez vs. the Jews,” which again blamed the robbery on the government, or, more specifically, on an ugly comment left on a “pro-government Web site,” demanding “that citizens ‘publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park’ and called for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, seizures of Jewish-owned property and a demonstration at Caracas’s largest synagogue.”4 The editorial concluded that the synagogue was then “duly attacked.”5 The idea that the sacking of the Caracas synagogue was based purely on anti-Semitism has persisted, even showing up in a recent piece authored by two academics in the high-brow Boston Review. The authors claim the attack is a sign of “state-directed anti-Semitism.”