Archives for May 2015

Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman resigns from both the AMIA and the DAIA, while endorsing Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s slanderous accusation that the Jewish communal organizations aim to destabilize her government:
Argentine Foreign Minister Turns on Jewish Leaders as AMIA Controversy Deepens

The endorsement by a Jewish politician of Fernández de Kirchner’s slanderous accusation that Jewish communal organizations are trying to destabilize her government is a genuine gift for Argentina’s professional anti-Semites. They include individuals like , a Buenos Aires lawyer who has launched a private prosecution against AMIA and DAIA, alleging that both have engaged in treason. Labaké, an advocate of the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the AMIA bombing, is basing his charges on Fernández de Kirchner’s remarks, which were in turn grounded on the original accusation by Jorge Elbaum, a former director of AMIA and a government loyalist, that AMIA, DAIA and Nisman’s supposed subversion was being financed by the American hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has been locked in a separate legal battle with the Argentine authorities.

Just as anti-Zionist Jews provide a protective layer against charges of anti-Semitism directed at the BDS movement, men like Elbaum and Timerman perform much the same service on behalf of Fernández de Kirchner. Indeed, Timerman’s decision to openly turn on AMIA and DAIA brought forth an angry denunciation from Dr. Shimon Samuels, the international director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In an email to journalists, Samuels declared: “By this personal act, [Timerman] has rejected his Jewish education values and destiny – among them burial in a Jewish cemetery – and has, apparently, abandoned the Argentine victims of this Tehran-sponsored aggression,” a reference to the evidence uncovered by Nisman that Iran was behind the AMIA atrocity.

At the same time, Argentina to compensate victims of 1994 Jewish center bombingPayment is to be made to the 300 injured and to the families of the 85 people killed in the attack, which Israel accuses Iran of ordering and Hezbollah of carrying out. The decision came about after Ruth Tenembaum, the widow of one of the 85 people murdered in the 1994 attack, had pursued the case in court for nearly a decade.

Considering Argentina’s record of not default, I wonder how long – if ever – will it take to collect.

Whether the survivors collect or not, as Ben Cohen of The Tower points out,

neither that acknowledgment [of Argentina’s failure to protect the AMIA building from a terrorist attack] nor the compensation will lead to any convictions in either the AMIA bombing or the Alberto Nisman case.

Cohen refers us to read Eamonn McDonagh’s posts on the Nisman murder, pointing to Lagomarsino.