In her address to the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina declared that her government “will continue tirelessly seeking the truth and justice in the AMIA case”—referring to Hizballah’s 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center. Not only is this statement patently false, writes Clifford May, but Kirchner’s government seems to be collaborating with Iran to cover up the latter’s role in the attack:

[The story of] the AMIA bombing and the murder of [the state-appointed prosecutor investigating the case, Alberto] Nisman, started with . . . an agreement Argentina made in the late 1980s to provide Iran with nuclear technology and assistance. Eventually, under pressure from the United States, the Argentine government did not give Iran’s revolutionary theocrats what they wanted.

One plausible theory—in essence, Nisman’s theory—is that the attack was Iran’s way of sending a message and a warning: “This time we kill Argentine Jews. Disappoint us again and who knows what our targets will be?”

While Kirchner originally supported Nisman’s efforts to uncover Iranian complicity in the bombing, by 2013 she had changed her tune and Nisman eventually came to believe that she herself was involved in the cover-up. May continues:

[I]t’s at least possible [Kirchner] came to believe that refusing to shield Iran was simply too dangerous. Perhaps she rationalized, too, that [whatever understanding she came to with Iran] was the best deal she could get and that even a bad deal was preferable to no deal—much as President Obama came to view the agreement he cut giving Iran’s rulers a long list of concessions in exchange for their vague promise to delay a nuclear-weapons program whose existence they refuse to acknowledge.

Whatever the reasons, Mrs. Kirchner’s Faustian bargain necessitated abandoning both the AMIA victims and Nisman. Did it necessitate something even worse? That remains an unsolved murder mystery.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.