What is happening in Venezuela?

Folks, hat tip to Gindy, over at Gindy.blogspot.com, who has raised an alarm by asking:

“Can you name a modern non-Muslim country that uses it’s police to raid a Jewish school with the specific purpose of terrifying and alienating it’s students and community at large?”

The answer: Venezuela.

Folks, the following article shocked me:

From JTA:

None of the 1,500 children at the only Jewish day school in Caracas, Venezuela, will forget drop-off on the morning of Nov. 29 [2004].

On that morning, 25 government investigators, some of them armed and hooded, intercepted busloads of kids and turned them away. Pandemonium broke loose as confused parents attempted to leave the school through the narrow driveway.

Other panicked parents, whose kids were already inside the school, tried desperately to gain access. A couple of dozen children were locked inside, the preschoolers in one room and the older children in another. Not knowing whether this was the unfolding of a hostage crisis, anguished parents pleaded for the return of their children. Over the next 30 to 60 minutes, the investigators allowed all the children out. They were unharmed.

The raid, it turns out, took place in connection with the murder of Investigating Prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who was assassinated in his car by a remote bomb planted in his cellular phone. Anderson was in charge of several politically sensitive cases, namely the prosecution of key members of the opposition to President Hugo Chavez in an attempted coup in 2002.

The prosecutors had received a tip reporting the transfer of weapons and explosives from Club Magnum, a shooting club, to the Jewish school. Club Magnum was not searched.

Folks, the Venezuelan government is mirroring Nazi Germany 1939. While President Chavez’s internal security forces raided this Caracas Jewish grade school, he was on an international tour to tighten Middle Eastern alliances and raise the stakes in an arms race with neighboring Columbia. Mr. Chavez flaunted his anti-American credentials in Tehran. “Iran-Venezuela ties are strategic and purposeful and the two countries are not under the influence of any foreign country, while both are opposed to the idea of a unipolar world,” the Tehran Times quoted him as saying after a meeting with President Khatami.

Raise your antennae, folks. Spread the word about Chavez and Venezuela. Venezuelan Jews need our help.

Jewish School Raided in Venezuela