A half-hour portion of Cristina’s speech before the Argentine parliament the other day, which lasted about four hours in all. This portion specifically concerns the AMIA and Israeli embassy bombings. If you can understand Spanish, you really need to see this. It’s just stunning. She calls out ALL THE BULLSHIT. And all the bullshitters, too.
Hot off the dismissal of a scandalous so-called case against her by a prosecutor later found dead of an apparent suicide, the president of Argentina is turning the spotlight on the very country that wants this negative attention the least. No, it’s not Iran. Guess again…
Argentine president Cristina Fernández requested of Israel that the former ambassador, Itzhak Aviran, testify in regard to the cause of the attack on the Jewish mutual centre, AMIA, in 1994, in order to explain why he said months ago to the media that his country killed the terrorists.
During her speech opening the legislative year, the president announced that “since no judge has requested it”, she herself will “formally request of the state of Israel that ex-ambassador Itzhak Aviran please come to testify”, so that Argentines may know “at least, [who were] the material authors” of the AMIA attack.
Aviran, who was ambassador in Buenos Aires between 1993 and 2000, caused a great controversy early in 2014, when he stated in an interview that “the great majority” of those responsible for the attack that left 85 dead in 1994 “are now in the other world, and we ourselves did that”, referring to the state of Israel.
The Argentine foreign office at the time deemed the declarations to be of “extreme gravity” and accused Israel of concealing information, but the Israeli government denied the information and called Aviran’s statements “pure fantasy”.
“21 years have passed and we don’t have a single person sentenced, nor even one prisoner due to AMIA,” the president said, accusing the Argentine judiciary of failing to advance in investigating the attack, as well as that against the Israeli embassy two years before, which left 29 dead.
“It has always strongly called my attention, I still can’t understand why the state of Israel accuses [Argentina] over AMIA, and not for the bombing of its own embassy,” Fernández pointed out.
“Does anyone know, can anyone inform this president what is the result of the investigation (of the attack against the embassy) by the Supreme Court? Can anyone inform me why the state of Israel isn’t making accusations about the embassy?” Fernández asked.
The attack on AMIA has come to the forefront of the political scene after the death, in circumstances still unexplained, of Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor charged with the investigation, who was found in his home with a gunshot wound to the head on January 18.
Four days before, Nisman had presented a denunciation against the president, foreign minister Héctor Timerman, and several directors of the ruling party, over a supposed plan to cover for the Iranians suspected of carrying out the attack.
The denunciation was dismissed last Thursday by magistrate Daniel Rafecas, on the basis that there was no evidence to support the accusations.
Translation mine.
Well. Wasn’t that a party? Cristina sure knows how to drop a bombshell, doesn’t she. Imagine an Israeli ambassador — or former one, rather — being called to testify before an Argentine court about the attacks on his country’s embassy and on the AMIA centre, too! I doubt he’d show (because diplomatic immunity blah blah, and also BAWWWWK buk buk bk bk), but it sure would be interesting to hear him clear up his statements to the effect that Israel disposed of the guilty parties already, without so much as a word of by-the-way to Argentina! Because if Israel did that, then why this twenty-year campaign to pin the blame for the still-unresolved crime on Iran? And why the current campaign to discredit Argentina in the eyes of the world? And if the assassins were in fact, as Israel insists, Iranian — then why hasn’t there been an international incident in which Iran declares war on Israel as a result? Because I doubt very much that Tehran would take the murder of Iranian nationals lying down, especially if Israel were behind it.
All of this comes at a very interesting time for Argentina, when the country has shrugged off its debts and kicked the vulture capitalists out of country. Little wonder, then, that the right-wing international media are out to demonize Cristina Fernández by any means possible — even publishing that ridiculous, superstitious bullshit about her standing godmother to a Jewish young man in order to save him from becoming a werewolf! Can’t let her look good for righting the dire economic situation that led to Argentina’s debt default in the wake of the crash of 2001, can we?
All this comes at a very inconvenient time for Israel, too, since Bibi came to blah-blah, without presidential invitation, before the US congress. This is not only irregular, it’s illegal, and 56 US representatives have boycotted the speech in protest. It’s unleashed a torrent of blatantly racist hate from one teabagger crapagandist, who wants to see the dissenting parliamentarians strung up and lynched. How fitting that a troll who clearly learned nothing from history would allude to Jim Crow-era practices in defence of an apartheid state where black and North African Jews are treated as second-class citizens, to the point where some are even covertly chemically sterilized. It’s like they learned nothing from their own history, either — else why recapitulate the sort of things that one expects to hear about, say, a Josef Mengele?
And suddenly the bizarre accusations of Alberto Nisman start to make a horrible kind of sense. If Nisman was indeed working at the behest of Mossad handlers, then we can place him (and maybe his death as well) in the context of a demonization campaign by Israel against Argentina. And this in the face of all Argentina’s extensive efforts to co-operate with Israel. Talk about bad faith!
In the end, this will be an own goal for Israel. And they’re already losing badly on the global stage, so they can ill afford to look any worse.
