Venezuela's Jews under attack?

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

Here's a disturbing story. Jewish groups in Venezuela are protesting what they claim is intimidation by government forces on the eve of the country's national referendum.

The JTA and the New York Times report that Venezuelan paramilitary officers conducted a raid for suspected illegal weapons shortly before 1 a.m. on Sunday at the Israeli Union of Caracas synagogue during a wedding party; no weapons were found. The Jewish community in Venezuela has come under assault before: once in 2003 when Iraq war protestors attempted to vandalize another Caracas synagogue and again in 2005 when Venezuelan police raided a Jewish school looking for—you guessed it—weapons.

The small, 200-year-old Jewish community in the country has been critical of president Hugo Chávez. And for understandable reasons: Chief among their concerns is his relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad, who have both made their thoughts about Israel well known.

But perhaps more curious than the details of this peculiar raid is that fact that very few non-Jewish news outlets in South America bothered to report the story. In Venezuela, the raid was mentioned in only a single major daily newspaper, El Nacional. In fact, searches for any stories related to the Jewish community in other major, Spanish-language Venezuelan papers proved empty. Perhaps the other news outlets were too busy covering Chávez's first electoral defeat but then again... perhaps not.