The Bigot Defense on Argentina’s “Presidenta” Kirchner
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bigot-defense-1436569461
The oldest prejudice reappears in attacks on American capitalists.
Which Shakespeare play should children read? Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has an opinion, and it reveals something more than the Argentine President’s literary sensibilities.
On a visit last week to a Buenos Aires school, Mrs. Kirchner learned that the children were reading the Bard’s “Romeo and Juliet.” “I said, you have to read ‘The Merchant of Venice’ to understand the vulture funds,” Mrs. Kirchner replied, adding that “usury and bloodsuckers have been immortalized in the greatest literature for centuries.”
Not all the kids may have caught her point, but her allusion to Shylock, the play’s vindictive Jewish anti-hero, would not have been lost on literate Argentines. Nor would they have missed her reference to those “vulture funds,” her term of abuse for Argentina’s holdout creditors, led by Elliott Management’s Paul Singer, who have had the chutzpah to insist on being repaid. Her refusal to do so led to Argentina’s default last year, which hasn’t stopped her from heaping thinly veiled anti-Semitic abuse on Mr. Singer, who happens to be Jewish.
Speaking of bigotry, Mr. Singer’s firm is also active in an effort in South Korea to stop the takeover by Samsung holding company Cheil Industries of Samsung C&T for a price considerably lower than its book value. Elliott has a 7% stake in C&T and believes Cheil is shortchanging investors by a cool $7 billion—for the sake of preserving family control of Samsung for the next generation.
Elliott has made a powerful business case on behalf of minority shareholders, which may be why advocates of the takeover have responded in the ugliest terms. “Opposition to the merger can be interpreted along the lines of the Jewish alliance,” wrote columnist Kim Ji-ho on the news site Mediapen.com. “Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless and merciless.” Similar themes are being sounded in other South Korean media outlets.
The persistence of anti-Semitism over time and across cultures is one of mankind’s darkest puzzles. So is the hatred of capitalism, property rights and freedom. As the Argentine and Korean examples show, the bigotries have a way of traveling together.
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