ARGENTINA 2007
There was a relatively steep decline in antisemitic
manifestations in Argentina in 2007, from more than 500 in 2006 to 348. Most incidents were graffiti sightings, including swastikas and antisemitic
slurs, but there were also complaints of phone call threats and verbal abuse
from neighbors and in the workplace. A number of ultra-right-wing journals
regularly disseminate antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-Zionist propaganda.
THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
The Jewish community of Argentina, numbering about 180,000
out of a total population of 37 million, has been declining since the 1960s.
Some 80 percent live in Buenos Aires city and the Greater Buenos Aires area. Other
cities with a large Jewish presence include Rosario, Córdoba, San Miguel de Tucumán, Mendoza, Bahía Blanca, La Plata and Santa Fe.
The Jewish community maintains many
educational, cultural and religious institutions, including a Hebrew and a
Yiddish press, publishing houses and an educational system from kindergarten
through university. The leading Jewish organization is the DAIA
(Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas), which represents
communities and organizations to the authorities and is responsible for
safeguarding the rights of members. AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) is the main community organization. The Vaad ha-Kehilot is the umbrella
organization of all the communities in the provinces.
antisemitic activity and extremist
groups
There was a
relatively steep decline in antisemitic manifestations: a total of 348
antisemitic acts were registered by the CES (Center for Social Studies) of the
DAIA in 2007, compared to more than 500 in 2006. The geographic distribution was: Buenos Aires city: 256 (73.56 percent); Greater Buenos Aires: 12 (3.44
percent); Buenos Aires province: 25 (7.18 percent); other provinces: 55 (15.80
percent). The large number of incidents recorded in Buenos Aires may partly be
explained by a greater willingness to report them.
Most incidents were graffiti sightings, including swastikas
and antisemitic slurs, but there were also complaints of phone call threats,
verbal abuse from neighbors and in the workplace, and antisemitic mail and
articles. Some letters and graffiti employed Holocaust terminology that demonized
Israel and Zionism.
Extreme right groups and
individuals were behind antisemitic incidents as well as the distribution of
antisemitic propaganda. In addition, Argentineans of Palestinian or Arab origin
demonstrated together with radical left-wing groups (though to a less extent
than in 2006 – see ASW 2006)
on various occasions against Israel and even called for its destruction. For
example, at a rally marking Palestine International Day on October 10, the
president of the OLP (Palestine Liberation Organization) and head of Ash Shahid
Mosque, Mahmud Aid, declared that all the region’s [Middle East] problems would
be solved if the State of Israel disappeared.
Violence, Vandalism, Threats and
Insults
A number of violent and defamatory incidents were
reported. For example, stones were thrown at a Jewish-owed store in Santa Fe Province on January 1. The perpetrators were a group of rugby players from a local
club.. Some two weeks later, the walls of
the home of a Jewish woman in Dorrego, Santa Fe Province, were vandalized with
graffiti and a mail message sent to her, stated: "We’ve already drawn on
your house. What more do you want us to do so that you leave Dorrego?" A
taxi driver told a passenger during the Passover festival in March that he
wished all the Jews would be blown up by a bomb.
Several Jewish community
institutions, as well as individuals, received anonymous antisemitic threats by
post, e-mail, or phone. A letter sent on March 14 to the DAIA, read:
As an Argentinean I am
sick of the cursed Jewish race of sub-human people like you in my country… Look
at Hitler, there is a reason that he made soap out of you… You shout loudly
when you see a swastika, but you do not hesitate to perpetrate a massacre in Lebanon and Palestine. We hope that… you disappear once and for all. You are not Argentinean, you
are Jews, and you are a cancer in my country.
On March 23, an antisemitic
message was left on the phone of a Jewish community member in Buenos Aires. The
caller said: "It’s a pity they didn't make soap out of you. Hitler didn't
finish his work."
A Jewish woman was the
recipient of antisemitic e-mails at her workplace, such as: "It is a duty to
kill all Jews like you." Elsewhere, a woman employee who asked for some
vacation days in order to take a course for conversion to Judaism, was told by
her boss on February 17: "Jew, dirty Jews."
Several disputes between
neighbors reported to the DAIA deteriorated into antisemitic insults. For
example, a woman told her Jewish neighbor "It’s is a pity that Hitler
didn’t kill all of you in the concentration camps."
Antisemitic
insults were also reported in the media. On the Channel TELEFE TV program
"Gran Hermano 5" (Big Brother 5) screened in August, one of the participants
said: " I am not a mouse or a Moishe [a derogatory reference to Jews].” A
presenter on a current affairs interview program broadcast by Radio Metro, said,
"I’d never go to a Jewish restaurant. Jews are dirty."
The Holocaust was described
as “a Jewish lie" in a letter signed by the unknown "Persecuted
People and Victims of Israel and the US," sent on November 5 to the German Goethe Institute. The letter claimed, inter
alia, that the Holocaust could not be proven, and that the German state had
“no intention of killing Jews and sending them to gas chambers." Some wall
graffiti also referred to the Holocaust as a Jewish invention (see below).
Graffiti
As in previous years, this was the most common way of
expressing antisemitism in Argentina in 2007. Dozens of swastikas were reported
on the walls of city streets and on Jewish institutions, especially in Buenos Aires. In November alone, 25 cases of swastikas and anti-Jewish inscriptions were
reported on the streets of the capital. On January 29, a swastika, signed by "Hitler Youth," was reported on the wall of a synagogue in San Cristobal, Santa Fe Province.
Calls for the destruction of Israel were commonly sighted on Buenos Aires streets walls throughout the year. For example, the
caption "Israeli peace" accompanied by an image of two bombs and a
swastika was sighted on March 19, while on May 5, the slogan "Israel is a murderer state” was observed alongside a drawing equating the Star of David
with the swastika. The slogans "Jews to the oven," "Jews are murderers"
were reported in several places in April.
Antisemitic Publications and
Group Activity
Extreme right-wing groups are behind the publication of
a number of antisemitic nationalistic publications and websites. Influenced by The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they disseminate the view that the world
is dominated by Freemasons, Jews and Communists, who seek to control the world,
and employ classic stereotypes to demonstrate that the Jews want to control
Argentinean territories. In addition, they frequently use Nazi terminology and
quote the arguments of Holocaust deniers, which they combine with allegations
of ritual murder, deicide and the Jews as “the Synagogue of Satan."
For example, the website
Ciudad Libertad de Opinión www.libreopinion.com,
run by neo-Nazi leader Alejandro Biondini, has links to other neo-Nazi and
antisemitic pages, and spreads the views of Biondini’s party, Partido Nuevo
Triunfo (PNT; see ASW 2006).
The site hosts several antisemitic journals, including: Valkirias Argentinas
of the Juventud Femenina Nacionalista Social Argentina (Women’s nationalist social
youth of Argentina − JFNSA); Sangre Joven (Young blood) of the
Juventud Nacionalista Social Argentina (National social youth of Argentina − JNSA), and Universitarios Nacionalistas (Nationalist university students)
of the Juventud Universitaria Nacionalista Social Argentina (University nationalist
social youth of Argentina − JUNSA). The site also has a daily news agency
called Red Kalki, Biondi’s nom de guerre).
Attacks on “Zionism,”
combined with Jewish conspiracy theories, constitute the main antisemitic
thrust of these online journals. On March 30, Biondini wrote in Argentinean
Valkirias that it was not British soldiers but Freemasons and Zionists who
killed Argentinean troops in the 1982 Malvinas/Falkland War. In July columnist
Matias Falagan stated in Sangre Joven that "the Argentinean Republic will soon become Eretz Argentina, a territory in the hands of the enemy of
the peoples of the world."
Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad was enthusiastically supported on the Ciudad Libertad de
Opinión site for his complaints about the lack of freedom to research
the Holocaust, and his questioning of the legitimacy of the State of Israel, in
the speech he delivered at Columbia University on September 25.
In September, Biondini, under his pseudonym Red Kalki,
reviewed the book AMIA: La Gran Mentira Oficial (AMIA: the great official lie) by nationalist authors Fernando Paolella and Christian
Sanz. He argued that the CIA and the Mossad had planted false evidence in the
Jewish community center (for data on the 1994 bombing of the AMIA cemter, see,
for example, ASW
1997/8, “Why Argentina: Police Involvement in Argentinean
Antisemitism”).
Another
antisemitic publication is Patria Argentina, the journal of the Confederación
nacionalista Argentina (Argentinean Nationalist Confederation − CNA) online. An article submitted by the operator of
the journal, Santiago Roque Alonso, in March, described, with photos and
Hebrew-language posters, the presence in Patagonia, southern Argentina, of "Israeli military tourism." Referring to books by Theodore Herzl
and the Andinia Plan (a local version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
written in Argentina in the 1970s), Alonso maintained that Jewish pretensions
to Argentina were not new, and warned that the "Jews are planning not only
to conquer Patagonia but all of Argentina: the presence of young Israeli
military groups in that area is part of the decision to implement its occupation
goals."
The journal also published articles
of the antisemitic priest Julio Meinvielle, who was well-known for his
antisemitic views from the 1930s on. In The Jews in the Mystery of History, written in 1937, he blamed the Jews for Jesus death, provided a
religious explanation for the danger posed by the Jews, accused them of
dominating the world and concluded with the Church’s rejection of the Jews and
their ostracism from the rest of society.
Cabildo is a
right-wing nationalist journal that supports the pre-Vatican II (before the
changes in the Catholic Church doctrine toward the Jews introduced by the
Second Vatican Council in 1965) stand. Thus, one can find traditional
antisemitic statements such as: "The Jews are waiting for the Messiah and
mean no other than the anti-Christ" and "They [the Jews] urge
consumerism so that that their businesses can succeed and think that happiness
comes from possession of goods.” This explained why Argentina’s shops were in
the hands of Jews (columnist Juan Esteban Olmedo). In August Olmedo compared the
priest Christian Von Wernich, during his trial for involvement in the military
rule of Argentina (1976-83), to Jesus who was judged by the Sanhedrin.
Opinions questioning or
trivializing the Holocaust also appear in Cabildo, In February,
columnist Aníbal D’angelo Rodriguez asked why it was prohibited to sell
Hitler dolls and said that it was "ridiculous" to claim that
questioning the Holocaust increased the possibility that it would happen once
again. Also, in February, Luis Antonio Leyro, expressed doubts about Auschwitz being an extermination or a concentration camp.
