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Yesterday I reviewed Bridget Kevane’s ignorant and ill-intentioned attempt to besmirch the memory Jacobo of Timerman. Today I’m going to take a look at her hatchet job on Argentina in general and its current ambassador it Washington in particular, a text in which she gets in a few final swipes at Timmerman along the way.

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The article starts with a report of an interview with Héctor Timerman, Jacobo’s son,  Argentina’s ambassador to the United States.

When I ask him why the Argentine Jewish community remembers Timerman rather bitterly, he says that his father was an outspoken critic of the regime and that the Jewish community feared this would bring about reprisals.

Kevane knows how the entire Jewish community in Argentina, not just in Buenos Aires, feels about feels about Jacobo Timmerman. Wow, I wonder how she got her hands on that sort of complex sociological information. I’m sure it can’t possibly have been from chatting with a couple of people in Buenos Aires who didn’t like Timerman, for justified or unjustified reasons.

I ask him, as others had asked his father more than 30 years ago, if there is anti-Semitism in Argentina. He bristles at the question, as if angry that people could still ask this of his country, and then answers with the care and caution of a diplomat: the Church, the military, and the aristocracy were the institutions that manifested the most virulent form of anti-Semitism during the dictatorship. But Argentina as a nation, he says, has never been anti-Semitic; its people are not by nature anti-Semites.

He answers with the care and caution of a diplomat. Well, what a surprise. He’s the Ambassador to the United States, he’s not paid to open his heart to dilettante Latin American scholars, he’s paid to be extremely careful about what he says and put forward the best possible image of his country. What he says about antisemitism during the dictatorship is correct and his final comment about Argentina and its people is also reasonable; how can a country be ontologically and for all time antisemitic? Germany was surely antisemitic was under the Third Reich but it isn’t anymore.  And as for Argentine people not being antisemitic, even if this country was the hell for Jews that Kevane evidently believes it to be, it would still hardly be fair to characterize all its citizens as antisemites.

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This is Gevane’s response to Hector Timmerman’s remarks:

Argentina has a long and well-documented history of anti-Semitism;

That’s true, so have France, the United Kingdom and the USA, to give just three examples.

…several generations of army officers were trained and modeled after the German army,

Antisemitism in the Argentine military has had rather more to do with the influence of the French Army  than the German one. Anyone even moderately versed in Argentine history would know this. That said, Nazi symbols were indeed  used to terrorize Jewish victims of torture during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

…and during the Dirty War the Catholic Church was a prominent agent of anti-Semitism.

Yup. There have always been a strongly antisemitic streak in the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina and in Spain and in Italy and in France and in Poland. I could go on…

How to explain the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing that destroyed the Jewish community center, leaving more than 100 dead and three times as many injured?

How about this? That those attacks were almost certainly carried out by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

How to explain the May 2009 clash between anti-Semites and Jews during a ceremony celebrating Israel’s Independence Day?

Those responsible for that attack were immediately arrested and are awaiting trial for their offenses. Argentina has its share of the Jew-hating new left.

Héctor Timerman calibrates his remarks in the same way that his father did in the ’70s: anti-Semitism as a broad social phenomenon doesn’t really exist, Argentina itself is not anti-Semitic, no country is anti-Semitic.

As I explained above, Héctor Timmerman is Argentina’s Ambassador to Washington and there are inevitable restraints on what he says.  Also, he says neither that antisemitism as a broad social phenomenon doesn’t exist nor that no country is antisemitic. How stupid does she think he is?

These statements contradict what Héctor Timerman told a U.S. Embassy official at the time of his father’s arrest. A State Department summary of the meeting describes Héctor Timerman saying “somewhat excitedly” that the current climate in Argentina was like that of Germany “just before Hitler’s Putsch” and that his father was arrested because of anti-Semitism.

Note the use of the euphemism “arrest”, rather than the more accurate “kidnap”. No wonder Héctor  Timerman was speaking excitedly, given the circumstances. And of course there was a driving element of antisemitism behind Jacobo Timerman’s detention, no one is saying that there was or is no antisemitism in Argentina. As for the reference to Hitler’s Putsch, it happened a full decade before he came to power so if that’s what the atmosphere in Argentina had been like at the time it would have been a relief to all. In fact, the atmosphere in Argentina at the time was more comparable to that prevailing in occupied Europe after the promulgation of Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel decree, an inaccuracy that no doubt reflected the mental commotion suffered by Timmerman’s family when he was kidnapped.

I can only guess at why Ambassador Timerman today insists on the distinction; his future, like his father’s, would be put at risk if he were to honestly answer the questions that I put to him. He is lying to me out of self-interest, and to protect his country.

Kevane really has some gall to accuse Héctor Timmerman of lying to her. His career would certainly be at risk if he said exactly what he thought in every interview he gives. The same goes for every ambassador in Washington. The idea that he personally would be at risk if he did so is so ridiculous as to not merit a response.

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Kervane ends her piece with a piece of cod psychoanalysis of her principal victim, Jacobo Timerman. It includes the following disgraceful statement:

….his inability to understand how the junta had so abruptly and irrevocably ruined him by first corrupting his own moral sense.

How dare she say that from the comfort of her Montana mountain fastness, where the toughest moral choice she has to make is whether to buy Fairtrade coffee or the ordinary sort. Timerman never tortured anyone, never snitched on anyone and did his best for those who had been kidnapped by the state and were being tortured in the most horrific manner, and all of this in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. He certainly failed to identify the innovative nature of the 1976 coup as soon as he should have, but why that should that cloud his status as a victim of state terrorism, a victim who went on to do all in his power to denounce it?

And what of Argentina? It’s a country with a thriving Jewish community which also has a significant history of antisemitism, an antisemitism that is today largely practiced by elements of the stupid left. It’s neither intrinsically antisemitic nor intrinsically anything else, it’s a complex, evolving country, most of whose Jewish citizens live perfectly ordinary lives and will continue to do so regardless of jeremiads emanating from Bozeman, Montana.