Argentina, Al-Assad And Two Kinds of Dead Jew

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
04 July '10

1.

In Argentina in the 1970s hundreds of young Jewish people were kidnapped, tortured and murdered because they adhered to one of the revolutionary branches of Peronism or Marxism, because they were in contact with someone who did or simply because the rabid antisemites in the police and army saw being Jewish as necessarily being some kind of Bolshevik. 1n 2010 some of their murderers and tortures are having to answer for their acts in courts throughout the country. The present government deserves much credit for this as large sectors of society would prefer the crimes of the 1976 - 1983 dictatorship to be forgotten about.


2.

On the 18th of July, 1994 85 people, almost all of them Jews, were murdered in a bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires. The government of Iran is suspected of being responsible and a number of Iranian citizens, including Iran’s current defense minister, are wanted by the Argentine courts in connection with the attack. The official position of the Argentine government is that it supports the demand for their extradition.

3.

President Bashir al-Assad of Syria has just visited Buenos Aires. He was dined, if not wined, by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The diplomatic love-in with Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world wasn’t spoiled by any mention of dead Jews. In today’s edition of Pagina/12, a national daily and government mouthpiece, there appears a report by Santiago O’Donnell in which describes a press conference given by al-Assad and his own participation in it.

Under the headline “Secular, Modern and Multilateral” the young tyrant is presented as the very model of potable, progressive leadership. His lie about the existence of a flourishing Jewish community in Syrian is accepted at face value and his attempts to play down the Holocaust are described as a “stumble”. O’Donnell can’t bring himself to ask the obvious question about the Iranian fugitives so he asks instead about Syria’s relations with Hezbollah and gets a bromide in response. Right at the end O’Donnell excuses himself for not asking any questions about the totalitarian nature of al-Assad’s rule on the grounds that journalists rarely get access to leaders of such importance. The overall tone of the piece is one of mild fawning.

(Read full post)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.