The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff hasn’t taken long to bring the creepy crawlies of racial hatred out from under the nearest rock. An Argentine national newspaper has today headlined a piece about him with the words “The ‘Jewish Rahmbo’ brings more war.”
Iran has deigned - for the first time - to respond to a long-standing Argentine request for the extradition of a number of its citizens, some of them prominent public figures and one of them an ex-president, Hashemi Rafsanjani. They are all wanted in connection with the AMIA investigation. To nobody’s surprise, the answer from Tehran, received yesterday, is “no.”
On July 18th, 1994, a bomb killed 85 people at the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. The investigation into the worst single terrorist crime in Argentine history was cack-handed where it was not corrupt and no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for it.
It looks like the fighting in the Caucasus is over, at least for the moment. It’s hard to know how many people have been killed or driven from their homes in recent days but the figure must run to thousands in the former category and tens of thousands in the latter. Let me mention a few of the things I haven’t seen in Buenos Aires in the last seven days.
Continue reading ‘Six Things I Haven’t Seen In The Last Week’
Just occasionally, the good guys win. On the 14th of November last year in Buenos Aires, a bus driver shouted racial insults at the son of a rabbi who wanted to board his vehicle then physically attacked him, smashing his glasses, before kicking him back on to the street. The youth found a policeman and told him what had happened and the policeman managed to stop the bus and arrest the driver.
José Pablo Feinmann is a philosopher. He is also an enthusiastic supporter of the present government of Argentina, just as he was of the previous one, and writes articles about its activities and policies for the newspaper Pagina/12. He has also written several novels, plays and collections of film criticism and is a regular on television programmes dealing with cultural matters. A better example of the term “public intellectual” you’d look hard to find.
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