Iran’s official news agency attacked the Simon Wiesenthal Center in a report last week marking the 13th anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
Iran is widely seen as responsible for the attack, which killed 85 and wounded some 300. After the Simon Wiesenthal Center indicated Iran’s culpability in a news release last week, the Islamic Republic News Agency denounced the center.
The events in the AMIA case “demonstrate the existence of a premeditated conspiracy in which the role is clear of international Zionism and its Argentine agents,” the news agency said.
While Interpol has issued arrest warrants for several Iranians and Hezbollah agents in connection with the AMIA attack, the Iranian news agency issued a strongly worded report saying the charges are the result of illegitimate pressure from Zionist groups.
In response Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations, said, “Both the language and the content of this report show a conspiratorial approach which seems taken from the infamous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ the fabricated anti-Semitic libel of an alleged Jewish plan for world domination, and has become the Bible for contemporary Jew-hatred.”
