Axis of Evil
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The New York Times issued an intriguing frontpage dispatch yesterday on a defector’s claims that Iran bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 and then paid the Argentine president, Carlos Menem, $10 million to hush it up. Well, if the Iranians indeed paid Mr. Menem $10 million to cover it up — and strenuous denials were issued yesterday by both the Iranian’s and Mr. Menem’s brother Eduardo — it sure doesn’t look as if the mullahs got their money’s worth. For Iranian involvement in the bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina has long been an open secret. A 1997 report by Sergio Kiernan for the American Jewish Committee, for instance, noted that “Argentine intelligence discovered that the Iranian cultural affairs attaché, Monsher Rabbani, had been seen shopping for a van similar to the one used in the bombing.” The 1997 American Jewish Committee report also says that an Iranian embassy employee “blamed Iranian diplomats for the AMIA bombing, specifically naming Moshen Rabbani as the organizer.”
This is no doubt the same “Mohsen Rabbani” that the Times’s defector fingers as having led the planning of the attack. Even the State Department’s 2001 “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report’s section on the terrorist organization Hezbollah notes that the group “attacked the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and is a suspect in the 1994 bombing of the Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires,” and that it “receives substantial amounts of financial, training, weapons, explosives, political, diplomatic, and organizational aid from Iran and received diplomatic, political, and logistical support from Syria.”
It’s not surprising to see Iranian, Hezbollah or Syrian links to the Buenos Aires attack, in which 86 people were killed. After all, Iran has been found liable in American courts of other terrorist attacks, including the one that killed a New Jersey girl, Alisa Flatow. What is surprising is that there are still those in the Bush administration advocating a soft line against the Tehran regime, instead of robust support for those who seek to replace it with a government less prone to the murder of Jews.
