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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’
Archive for the 'Z word blog' Category
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
Adam Lebor’s hymn to a wonderful city, here.
Federal Judge Claudio Bonadío yesterday denied bail to the five detainees arrested as a result of their participation in an antisemitic attack in Buenos Aires on Sunday as he judged them to be a flight risk and capable of intimidating witnesses. The judge now has ten days to decide exactly what charges to bring against the five; newspaper reports suggest a number of possibilities, ranging from resistance to lawful authority to assault causing injury and attempting to impose their ideas by force or through fear.
Continue reading ‘Judge Refuses Bail to Buenos Aires Antisemites’
A street event jointly organized by the government of the city of Buenos Aires and the Israeli embassy to celebrate the 61st anniversary of Israel’s foundation was yesterday disrupted by a gang of 15 or 20 people who emerged from a nearby subway station and laid into members of the public with clubs, chains and nunchakus.
Paul Rogers here speculates about the possibility of Iran testing a basic nuclear device before its presidential election in June.
There’s a retrospective of Avi Mograbi’s films on at a leading Buenos Aires art house and Z32, his most recent effort, has a regular slot at a state-sponsored cinema that normally only puts on Argentine films that wouldn’t survive on the commercial circuit.
A hearty mazal tov to occasional Z Word contributor Terry Glavin, who was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence at the British Columbian Book Prizes ceremony. As anyone who knows Terry and his work will realize, it’s richly deserved.
This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff.
Last Friday, I attended a “Durban Counter Conference” at Fordham Law School in New York. The event was sponsored by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and The New York Jewish Week. There were only about 40 people in the room, most of whom were over 50 years old. It was an assembly of alter cockers, an unfashionable scene for sure, nothing like the boho chic Darfur rallies and anti Iraq war protests I had attended in years past.
Netanyahu said he would support President Obama’s decision to engage Iran, so long as negotiations brought about a quick end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “How you achieve this goal is less important than achieving it,” he said, but he added that he was skeptical that Iran would respond positively to Obama’s appeals. In an hour-long conversation, held in the Knesset, Netanyahu tempered his aggressive rhetoric with an acknowledgement that nonmilitary pressure could yet work. “I think the Iranian economy is very weak, which makes Iran susceptible to sanctions that can be ratcheted up by a variety of means.”
Benyamin Netanyahu is interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg, here.
