ICYMI: Chavez foe seen victim of anti-Semitism in Venezuela

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ICYMI: Chavez foe seen victim of anti-Semitism in Venezuela

posted on Feb 18, 2012 01:40PM

Chavez foe seen victim of anti-Semitism in Venezuela
Reuters
February 17, 2012
By Andrew Cawthorne

Two prominent U.S.-based Jewish organizations condemned on Friday as anti-Semitism a wave of verbal and written attacks by President Hugo Chavez’s supporters against Venezuela’s opposition leader.

Henrique Capriles, the grandson of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, has faced a barrage of insults since winning the Democratic Unity coalition’s presidential candidacy on Sunday. One that caused particular outrage was a profile by a state radio commentator entitled “The Enemy is Zionism.”

The full gamut of attacks, though, has ranged from Chavez calling him a “pig” to a prominent TV commentator accusing him of being caught in a car having sex with another man.

With official after official lining up to condemn Capriles as a flag bearer of the “bourgeoisie” and “Yankee imperialism,” some Chavez supporters have even been circulating a cartoon of him in pink underwear with a Nazi Swastika on his arm.

Capriles, who is a Catholic, has kept quiet about the vitriol against him, saying he only wants to fight the problems that really bother Venezuelans such as crime and unemployment.

He is seeking to unseat Chavez in an October 7 election that is shaping into the biggest challenge to the socialist leader’s 13-year rule of the South American OPEC member.

Opposition sympathizers are fuming at the vitriol aimed at Capriles, and two U.S.-based groups have sprung to his defense.

“As we have witnessed in the past, blatant and persistent anti-Semitism is used by President Chavez and his government apparatus as a divisive political tool to scapegoat Jews,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

“What we are seeing at the outset of Venezuela’s presidential elections is an attempt to cast the opposition candidate as a ‘traitorous Jew’ unworthy of the presidency and who, if elected, will subvert the interests of the Venezuelan people for the benefit of some mythic worldwide Zionist plot.”