Hard as it is to believe, anti-Semitism has been injected into a public debate over a proposed monkey-breeding facility in Puerto Rico, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

It all began on Monday, Nov. 30 when animal rights activist Robert Brito was quoted in local newspapers “Primera Hora” and the “Puerto Rico Daily Sun” as suggesting that an “Israeli company” was developing the facility as part of a campaign of “ethnic discrimination” and “genocide” aimed at the island population. He went on to blame “Jewish economic interests” for past environmental incidents, including a fire at a petroleum plant. “This is a concerted action by Jewish economic interests,” he wrote of the proposed primate facility. “This invention of bringing a facility for wild monkeys from Israel to Guayama constitutes ethnic discrimination against Puerto Ricans who live in Guayama.”   

Mr. Brito called on Puerto Ricans to boycott locally owned Jewish businesses and synagogues, both on the island territory and in the U.S., in an effort to stop the facility from opening. To date, no actual protests against the Jewish community have been reported, according to the ADL.
For the record, the company setting up the facility is Bioculture Ltd. It has facilities at 19 sites around the world and is based in the African island nation of Mauritius.

On the surface, this is simply absurd and should be dismissed as lunacy. However, scratch a little farther and one realizes this also reveals how deep anti-Semitism’s pernicious emotions go for a small segment of the population. To paraphrase a cliché, “even paranoids have their enemies.”

I love the title, but on a deeper level this should be of a concern for the greater American Jewish community as Latino population grows exponentially.