“Everything has to do with Everything” sounds like the title of some obscure New Age manifesto. In fact, it’s the headline on a disjointed article by Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in which she claims, in essence, that an international Jewish conspiracy was supporting the efforts of Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor who spent more than a decade investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment in January, one day before he was due to appear before the Argentine Congress to launch a report charging Fernández de Kirchner and her cohorts with covering up Iran’s culpability for the AMIA bombing. Fernández de Kirchner said almost immediately that Nisman had committed suicide, but she backed down after waves of contradictory evidence emerged that strongly suggested he’d been murdered. If Nisman was murdered, the president opined, it was carried out by those—exactly whom, she didn’t say—who were out to get her as well!
The grim reality is that establishing the truth around Nisman’s death is as much a priority for the Argentine government as finding those responsible for the AMIA bombing, the single worst anti-Semitic atrocity since the Second World War. It’s not simply that justice has been denied in both these cases; Fernández de Kirchner has now gone one step further by portraying herself and her government as the innocent victims of a dastardly global operation masterminded by you-know-who.
In common with many of today’s anti-Semitic rants, Fernández de Kirchner didn’t mention the word “Jew” in either her article or in a bizarre series of tweets which the Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky deemed worth reading only if you’re under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. But the underlying meaning was crystal clear.
The source of Kirchner’s accusations was Jorge Elbaum, a court Jew and government employee who authored an op-ed in the government mouthpiece Pagina/12. In that piece—which Fernández de Kirchner told us she’d read “3 times! (Something I never do with any news story)”—Elbaum alleged that Nisman had told Argentine Jewish leaders distressed by their country’s rapprochement with Iran that “Paul Singer will help us.”
Since those same leaders have denied that Nisman said those words, it is distinctly possible that Elbaum invented the quote in order to fit the theory that Singer, a leading hedge fund manager who has been embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute with Argentina following the country’s 2001 default on its foreign debt, was now funding political opposition to Fernández de Kirchner’s government. In that regard, Elbaum highlighted Singer’s financial support for the Washington, DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), whose research has highlighted Iran’s support for terrorism around the world. “You see,” wrote Fernández de Kirchner, “everything has to do with everything.”
“Everything,” in this case, starts with Paul Singer (dubbed by her as the “Vulture Lord”), FDD, and Argentina’s Jewish leadership, who are engaged in what she called a “global modus operandi” that “generates international political operations of any type, shape and color.”
Given these flimsy connections, grounded not on concrete evidence, but on the ant-Semitic assumption that Jews involved in international affairs do so with a hidden agenda, it is hardly surprising that Nisman’s case against the Argentine government has been summarily dismissed in the wake of his death. Yesterday, the pro-Kirchner prosecutor Javier de Luca announced that he would not be pursuing Nisman’s complaint against the government. For good measure, de Luca added that German Moldes, another prosecutor who argued that Nisman’s complaint merited a federal investigation, was a “gangster.”
As Moldes pointed out in a radio interview, “I warned three weeks ago that there were delaying maneuvers in places, maneuvers which slowed down the filing in the Appeals Court in order to give [De Luca] time to enter.” It was, Moldes continued, “already decided that he was going to put the final nail in the coffin. He was the grave-digger.”
With Fernández de Kirchner now arguing that her opponents’ real aim is to wreck a final deal with Iran over its nuclear program—”For many of us, peace is the best tool to achieve greater global security. It’s a shame that a powerful few have not yet understood that,” she pontificated—perhaps it’s time to finally admit that Argentina’s corrupt judicial system will never secure justice for either the victims of AMIA atrocity or Nisman himself. Twenty-one years after 85 people were callously murdered in a truck bombing, the international community must now hold Argentina’s own leaders to account for their collusion with Iranian-backed terror.
For more on the anti-Semitism and intrigue in Fernández de Kirchner’s Argentina, read Iran, the Nisman Murder, and the Future of Jewish Life in Argentina, written by Eamonn MacDonagh for the March 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine.
[Photo: Presidencia.gov.ar / Wikimedia]