Behind Obama’s Love Affair with Iran : Steve Apfel
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5565/behind_obama_s_love_affair_with_iran
The murder of dozens of Jews in Buenos Aires 20 years ago by Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists is being whitewashed in Barack Obama and the West’s desperate policy of making nice with Tehran.
In downtown Buenos Aires there is a cream painted building locked down like Fort Knox. Alongside the building is a billboard, but it’s no suave ad for Kelvin Klein. The billboard is black, and eighty five names, handwritten in white, cover it from top to bottom.
They are mainly the names of Jews. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists murdered the eighty five when they blew up the Jewish community building, badly injuring many more. This happened in 1994.
Lately, Argentinian President Cristina de Kirchner, another Eva Peron in her beauty and blinding ambition, has been bartering with Iran: a cover-up of the crime in exchange for Iranian oil and Argentine grain.
To add to the witch’s brew, the prosecutor who spent a decade compiling a million page case on the bombing, and was about to testify on the cover-up of de Kirchner and her cronies, got a bullet to the head in his bathtub. His name was Alberto Nisman. Last year he indicted a Hezbollah man and some former Iranian officials of high rank, for whom arrest warrants were then issued.
Now comes word that American President Obama tipped his own bag of tricks into the bubbling pot. Diplomatic sources have told World Tribune that the US pressed Argentina to end, or at least fudge the investigation of Iran’s involvement in the bombing of the Jewish building.
It was to be Iran’s quid pro quo for a thaw in relations with America and Europe. At one high-level meeting the US boldly asked Argentina “to lay off, according to a source close to de Kirchner. “Buenos Aires,” said the source, “eventually complied.”
The murdered Alberto Nisman left a 289 page complaint against the Argentine government. In it, Nisman writes that leaders “took the criminal decision of inventing Iran’s innocence to satisfy commercial, political and geopolitical interests.” What is not clear is whether the report contained evidence of U.S. involvement in the plot to clear Iran of the crime.
Now, as America and Europe go helter skelter to ‘make nice’ with Iran, Obama has vowed to veto a congressional bill that would re-impose sanctions on Iran. Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, considers Obama to be Iran’s leading defender.
Menendez claims that the administration is coordinating with Teheran in efforts to block U.S. sanctions. The US State Department may have been playing a supportive role as far back as 2013. In that year Alberto Nisman was invited by U.S. lawmakers to testify about his findings at a Congressional hearing on, “Threat to the Homeland: Iran’s extending influence in the Western Hemisphere.”
Argentina’s public prosecutor stopped Nisman from testifying, but in his absence, panel chairman Rep. Jeff Duncan noted that the State Department had omitted Nisman’s findings in its assessment that Iranian influence in Latin America and the Caribbean was “waning.”
Duncan added: “In stark contrast to the State Department’s assessment, Nisman’s investigation revealed that Iran has infiltrated for decades large regions of Latin America through the establishment of clandestine intelligence stations and is ready to exploit its position to ‘execute terrorist attacks when the Iranian regime decides to do so.”
Obviously there is more to the West’s nuclear talks with Iran than meets the eye. One thing is clear: the West puts a higher priority on ‘making nice’ with Iran than in bringing to justice the murderers of several dozen Jews.
Steve Apfel is director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. He is the author of the book, ‘Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ (2012) and a contributor to, “War by other means.” (Israel Affairs, 2012). His articles and blogs are published in several foreign journals. His latest book, “Balaam in Modern clothes: enemies of Zion”, will be released in 2015
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