In Buenos Aires, joy over Pope Francis’ election is tempered by questions about the ‘dirty war.’
Peter Eisner March 17, 2013
Very few Argentines were on hand for the proceedings, for the white smoke followed by the traditional proclamation, Habemus papam — “We have a pope.” But on the other side of the world, the people of Buenos Aires erupted with jubilation when they learned that the new pontiff, Pope Francis, was Argentine.
The celebration was more about national pride than religious pride, however. At the moment that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has become the face of Catholicism in the Southern Hemisphere and the world, his own country is becoming far less religious. Only about 25% of Argentines regularly attend church — far below the 44% attendance rate in the United States — and evangelical Protestantism is growing in popularity. Even churchgoing Catholics in Argentina, like their counterparts in North America, flout the church’s dictates about marriage, birth control and education. (FULL STORY)
Advance billing makes it known ahead of time that The Gatekeepers is a stark critique of Israeli policy from within. The film features unprecedented interviews with six former bosses of Shin Bet, Israel’s super-secret domestic intelligence agency.
Experiencing The Gatekeepers, however, exceeds all expectations. This is a bold film that systematically and coldly analyzes decades of Israeli security policy in dealing with Palestinians and the enemies that surround Israel.
The Shin Bet bosses use steely, unsentimental logic: whatever the justifications of the past and the present—Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is a failure.
They may have their hard-line critics in Israel and the United States, but these particular men are hard to dispute. They are deeply committed to Israel, hardened veterans of battle, and unassailable in their logic.
Together, the men – Ami Ayalon, Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon, Avi Dichter, and Yuval Diskin– represent three decades of successes and failures in the Israeli war on terrorism. All have realized that even their successes have been a failure.
In the end we are left with deep questions about morality, the Israeli psyche and extremism on all sides.
The Shin Bet bosses by no means excuse Palestinian terror – although one of the former leaders switches from Hebrew to English to characterize the Palestinian view of Israeli security forces with the old saying: One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter.
Success, in any case, is a strange commodity. As one of the men realized after a chance conversation during peace talks with a Palestinian psychiatrist: for the Palestinians, “victory is to see you suffer.”
They realize that there has been and can be no end to the morass of the Middle East under current circumstances. Israeli actions, the Shin Bet leaders say, amount to “no strategy, all tactics.”
The Gatekeepers portrays the horrors exacted by extremism on both sides. While there is a hopelessness in the generations of unending cycles of death, I still found myself uplifted by the fact that the movie exists at all. These men face forward and speak truths and the filmmaker, Dror Moreh, has the guts to tell the story.
The way out is spoken clearly by the oldest and perhaps the toughest of them all – Avraham Shalom, at 86, a veteran of the Palmach underground fighters that battled and killed British soldiers in the Israeli war for independence after World War II. His answer is a call for negotiations:
“Talk to everyone, even if they answer rudely. So that includes even Ahmadinejad, [Islamic Jihad, Hamas], whoever. I’m always for it. In the State of Israel, it’s too great a luxury not to speak with our enemies…Even if [the] response is insolent, I’m in favor of continuing. There is no alternative. It’s in the nature of the professional intelligence man to talk to everyone. That’s how you get to the bottom of things. I find out that he doesn’t eat glass and he sees that I don’t drink oil.”
Israeli is the democracy that has allowed the filmmaker Moreh to make this film, even though the Israeli government is outraged and calls on Israeli filmmakers to practice self-censorship.
(By the way, as for the Oscars, I loved the film, Searching for Sugar Man, which won for best documentary against The Gatekeepers and another Israel political film, 5 Broken Cameras. Awards are awards but The Gatekeepers is unsurpassable in its strength and merits.)
Are there enough Israelis to listen and respond to the pragmatic reality that brought The Gatekeepers out of the shadows to the stage? I don’t know.
The Argentine government, under President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, has signed an odd accord with Iran to conduct a so-called “truth commission” that would investigate the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people died and hundreds were wounded in the attack.
In 2007, Argentine won Interpol indictments of six suspects in the case. Members of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization, and the Iranian government were among the suspects.
The new Argentine-Iranian deal appears to abandon that. As an Argentine journalist, FABIÁN BOSOER, and a New School professor, FEDERICO FINCHELSTEIN, warn in the New York Times, the truth commission has no teeth:
The problem is that any recommendations by the commission would be nonbinding; moreover, some of the suspects in the attack are now high-ranking Iranian officials — including the sitting defense minister, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi — and therefore untouchable. Indeed, Iran has repeatedly refused to cooperate with Argentine investigators and ignored international warrants for the arrest of senior Iranian officials believed to have taken part in planning the bombing.
Two ironies in the story come to mind:
Nestor Kirchner, Kirchner’s late husband and former president, became emotional when I asked him about the AMIA investigation shortly after he came to office in 2003. Argentina, he said, would never rest until the culprits were found. He recalled his own past, having been himself a victim of human rights abuses himself during Argentina’s dirty war.
The principal Argentine official responsible for the Iran deal is Hector Timerman, the foreign minister. Timerman, a veteran journalist, is the son of Jacobo Timerman. The elder Timerman, who died in 1999, was also a victim of abuse at the hands of the right-wing Argentine military.
“If we don’t solve the problem of the AMIA — who placed the bomb, the
local connection and if there was a political cover-up — people will think
that Argentina is a place where we don’t punish those who commit horrendous
crimes and it will open the door to new attacks.”
Will the new deal with Iran help determine culprits and punishment? Not likely.
Pope Benedict XVI’s abrupt decision to resign reminds us of the departure of another pope exactly seventy-four years ago this week, a moment at which the Roman Catholic Church faced a different crisis.
Pope Pius XI had died on February 10, 1939 and the world was on the brink of a second war. As the Nazis massed forces against Europe, in Rome Pius XI was engaged in a last-minute effort to awaken world leaders against Hitler, Mussolini and the Nazi campaign against the Jews. But the pope faced dissidents within the Vatican.
I’ve just finished a book about Pius XI and his challenge to Hitler — The Pope’s Last Crusade — which comes out in March.
Pope Pius XI
Just as now, the Catholic Church was divided among factions that would either modernize and deal squarely and openly with injustice, or retreat, circle in closely and insulate their institution from the outside world. Now the challenge involves moral values – including the response of the Catholic leadership to a sexual abuse scandal that has traumatized the conscience of the clergy in Europe and America.
But then, on the eve of World War II, the Vatican was dealing with a different, vast moral question – how or even whether to battle and confront Hitler and the murderous machine descending on Europe.
When people think of the Vatican during World War II, they think not of this pope but of his successor–Pius XII–who has often been criticized and condemned for his silence during the war. But before that, there was a little-remembered pope, Pius XI, loudly outspoken against the Nazis and determined to call attention to their atrocities. The pope did not resign; he pleaded with his doctors to help him stay alive long enough to issue a major declaration against Hitler and anti-Semitism.
Benedict XVI’s departure – he is the first pontiff to resign in more than 600 years – gives the Roman Catholic Church a chance once more to decide between modern and conservative values and to clarify its role in the world.
At key moments in history, the rare decision to choose a new pontiff has extended beyond the confines of the Vatican and beyond the hopes of the world’s Roman Catholics. The challenges are different but the essence is the same – will the Catholic Church act forcefully to confront injustice? Or will it withdraw quietly and declare tacitly that religion must be cloistered from politics and justice.
We hear grousing in England about old King Richards bones. Had to remember the old Steely Dan song:
We seen the last of Good King Richard
Ring out the past his name lives on
Roll out the bones and raise up your pitcher
Raise up your glass to Good King John
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Libya, a Tea Party Republican senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, used indirect language to blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi last year. Paul described their deaths as the worst tragedy involving Americans since 9/11. Partisan politics, ignorance and nonsense.
A newly elected senator answered him strongly:
“I think if some people on this committee want to call the tragedy in Benghazi the worst since 9/11, it misunderstands the nature of 4,000 Americans plus lost over ten years of war in Iraq fought under false pretenses,” newly elected Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in response.
Under a Republican president, George W. Bush, the United States went to war using lies about U.S. intelligence information. To this hour, a number of Americans — perhaps the same number that voted Republican in the 2012 presidential election — think that President Bush invaded Iraq based on “the best available intelligence” at the time. That has been proven to be a lie, as I wrote with my colleague, Knut Royce, in the book, The Italian Letter. I also wrote about it in the Washington Post.
President Bush has not stood before the Senate to answer that serious charge. It is fairly certain that he never will.
With all the high-powered analysis and frivolous reviews of gowns and hair-styles, what more is there to say about the inauguration of President Obama? I stood on the National Mall among one million people in festive mode and could only ask a simple question: what would happen if the energy against the president might be turned into common dedication and statesmanship for the national good?
We have every reason.
The poet Richard Blanco said it in his own poignant way, poetry that echoed through the crowd:
“One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
” My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day…..”
