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Readers with good memories will recall the appointment of Jorge Palacios, a disgraced former Federal Police officer to head the city of Buenos Aires’s first autonomous police force. To put it mildly, it wasn’t an idea that prospered. Palacios was obliged to resign when indicted on charges of being involved in the cover up of the AMIA massacre and is now in prison while being investigated on charges of organizing illegal wiretaps. Among those who had their phone conversations illicitly listened in on was Sergio Burstein, a well known campaigner for justice for the families of the survivors of the AMIA attack.
Continue reading ‘Israeli Embassy Controls Buenos Aires City Hall’
Israel must negotiate with Hamas and its refusal to engage with these legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people shows that it’s not interested in a settlement of the conflict. So says the chorus of the kind hearted. I’ve argued against this view here and here, among other places. Guess who has now come up with a proposal for Israel to negotiate with one its most determined enemies? Shaul Mofaz, that’s who.
Continue reading ‘Hamas: The Song Remains the Same’
We’re no nearer to seeing any of the Iranian suspects wanted for the AMIA massacre in custody but some progress is being made towards making some of the Argentines responsible for obstructing the original investigation answer for their actions.
Continue reading ‘AMIA: Investigating the Cover Up’
The great Norman Geras, says that,
… Arab and Palestinian collaboration with Nazism has no bearing on what the Palestinians lost or what they have suffered because of Israel’s creation. To maintain the contrary is to make every Palestinian responsible for Haj Amin al Husseini. It is also to treat the existence of Israel as a form of punishment - punishment on account of Husseini and other Arabs who were complicit with Nazism.
Continue reading ‘Norm, Palestinians and the Nazis’
Daniel Levy has his say on the Goldstone report here. What might the title of the piece mean? It’s got quite a new age ring to it so perhaps we shouldn’t expect too much by way of a specific diagnosis of what’s supposed to be ailing Israel. It does, however, reflect a common way of thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a framework which sees everything through the lens of the doings, plans and - above all - the faults of the Israelis. There may be a lot of dead Palestinians as a result of the Gaza Campaign but, it would appear, the priority is for Israelis to heal themselves. And remember now that Levy is not exactly a Likudnik, he’s as dovish as they come and sees himself as a fierce critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
Continue reading ‘Levy on Goldstone’
Lisa Goldman has drawn my attention to a reaction by David Landau to the Goldstone report on Israel’s campaign in Gaza and I take the opportunity to do the same for readers of this blog.
Continue reading ‘Gaza: Landau on Goldstone’
Seth Freedman is a regular in the role of Acceptable Jew at The Guardian’s CiF website. In this piece he looks at the controversy surrounding the allegations of organ harvesting fom dead Palestinians leveled at the IDF in a Swedish newspaper. He concludes that it’s all Israel’s fault, naturally.
Continue reading ‘The Swedish Scandal: Freedman Blames Bad Jews’
Osvaldo Bayer is concerned that the Jews don’t appeared to have learned anything from their history.
But there are also those people who have tragic experience of persecutions, such as the Jews, who have laws that lead to humans being humiliated. It’s well known that the State of Israel doesn’t recognize marriages between Jews and non-Jews. [… ] It has thus become fashionable for Jews who want to marry a non-Jew to go to Cyprus to do it. Quite an industry has built up on the island to allow non-Jews and Jews to get married. According to Jewish law only those born of Jewish mothers are regarded as Jewish.
Continue reading ‘Osvaldo Bayer: Progressive Jew Obsessive’
Last night, I received a phone call informing me that a close and much loved relative is very sick. So I am about to get on a plane and won’t be back for about three weeks. I will try to post when I can, as will Eamonn, but please, dear readers, don’t expect too much from this blog during the month of August. Thanks for your understanding.
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Fifteen years ago today a truck bomb destroyed the headquarters of the AMIA Jewish community organization in Buenos Aires. 85 people were killed and hundreds injured.
Continue reading ‘AMIA: 15 Years of State-sponsored Cover-ups and Impunity’
Writing in El País today, Moisés Naím condemns the silence of the Muslim world in the face of Chinese repression of the Uighurs and contrasts it with the indignation produced the the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark. Readers will be able to figure out for themselves the relevance of all this for the themes with which this blog mainly concerns itself. The following is my translation of Naím’s article.
Continue reading ‘Deaf, Dumb and Blind: Muslim Reactions to the Uighur Tragedy’
Buenos Aires city mayor Mauricio Macri has appointed Jorge Palacios, a disgraced former Argentine Federal Police officer suspected of involvement in the cover up of the AMIA massacre, to be the head of the city’s first autonomous police force. Such is the strength of the suspicions attaching to Palacios’s role in the aftermath of the AMIA attack that State Prosecutor Albert Nisman is believed to be on the point of indicting him on charges of having warned a suspect , Kanoore Edul, that he was under investigation and that his home was about to be raided by the police. Speaking for one of the groups representing victims of the attack, Sergio Burstein stated his “complete rejection” of the appointment and described it as “an insult to the dead.”
Continue reading ‘AMIA Suspect Gets Top Cop Job’
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
In the June 23 issue of the anti-fascist magazine blick nach rechts (”A look to the right”), Anton Maegerle notes that European neo-Nazis have been expressing their solidarity with the Tehran regime.
Continue reading ‘“Heil Ahmadinejad, Foe of Imperialism”’
Much is being made in the public prints about the two conditions set out by Netanyahu for Palestinian statehood in his recent speech at Bar Ilan University. One is a demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the other is that the future Palestinian state be demilitarized. I’ll leave the former for another day and say something about the question of what a demilitarized state might actually mean in practice.
Continue reading ‘Palestine: A Demilitarized State?’
This is a guest post by Phoebe Maltz.
There have been a number of solid take-downs of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s Israel series, by Eamonn McDonagh here and by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin and more. These critics provide sound evidence of just where Cohen gets Iran, Israel, and the Middle East wrong. This needs pointing out, but risks falling right into Cohen’s clever trap. He wants to get The Zionists all riled up, because the more goats he gets, the more readers will take the time to comment on his “courage.”
Continue reading ‘What Does Roger Cohen Want?’
