The Post’s prism

In retrospect, I went too easy on yesterday’s Washington Post report on antisemitism in South America.

I was uncomfortable with how the reporters framed the antisemitism as a reaction to Israel’ s war against Hamas. In fact, as Travis Pantin wrote last year in Commentary, Hugo Chavez’s antisemitism has been a feature of his politics for a decade.

Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the “Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country.

While the Post article mentions a 2007 raid on a Jewish club it ignores that the raid was part of a pattern. It was a repeat of a raid that happened three years earlier.

Ostensibly, the raid was part of the investigation into the November 18 assassination by car bombing of State Prosecutor Danilo Anderson. Anderson (who was initially appointed to prosecute environmental crimes) was handling high-profile political prosecutions — including that of the plotters of the April 2002 coup attempt against Chavez. The assassins are unknown, but the Chavez, his allies, and the state-controlled media have blamed the Venezuelan opposition, Venezuelan expatriates in Miami, and various foreign forces including the Mossad. This putative Mossad connection was the excuse for the raid on the Colegio Hebraica.

Without providing a fuller accounting of Chavez’s cultivation of antisemitism the Post’s third paragraph stands out.

Anger at Israel’s recent military strikes in the Gaza Strip against the Islamist group Hamas have sparked demonstrations here and in two countries closely allied with Venezuela: Bolivia and Argentina.

Meanwhile Chavez is campaigning to get voter approval to become dictator for life once again; having failed to achieve that goal in late 2007.

The Washington Post, instead of focusing on Chavez’s tyrannical tendencies, views the problem through its typical prism:it’s Israel’s fault.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.