In the wake of a short Post article noting that Bill de Blasio ignored (at best) the anti-Semitism of the rulers of Nicaragua during his 1988 visit there, his supporters have insisted the Sandinista junta wasn’t anti-Semitic. In fact, the record is clear — and ugly.
When it came to the 50 Jews in a few families who made up Nicaragua’s entire Jewish community, the Sandinistas had only scorn and hostility, even before taking power.
In December 1978, during Friday night services, a host of Sandinistas arrived in trucks and firebombed the only synagogue in Managua. As the congregation ran outside, the guerrillas forced them back in at gunpoint.
Guerrillas shouted, “Death to the Jews. What Hitler started we will finish.” Others yelled, “Judaism and Somozaism [after the then-ruler, Anastasio Somoza] are the same thing.”
One attacker later said the point was meant to intimidate the small Jewish community, whom the Sandinistas viewed as enemies of their revolution. It worked: Almost all Jews fled the country in fear for their lives.
Later, the synagogue was converted to a youth center, its walls plastered with anti-Israel slogans such as “Death to the Zionists” and propaganda for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In power, the regime and its adherents continued their openly anti-Semitic verbiage. The Anti-Defamation League’s 1983 report called Nicaragua “a country without Jews, but not without anti-Semitism.” The official Sandinista newspaper, Barricada, ran an editorial in January 1990 in which it attributed distrust of their country by the “Yankee bureaucracy” to the “traditional ‘Jew-style’ with which the US Congress manages the taxes of the taxpayers.”
The pro-Sandinista Nuevo Diario editorialized that “the world’s money, banking and finances are in the hands of descendants of Jews, the eternal protectors of Zionism.” With this economic power, “they control political power, as now happens in the United States.”
In May 1984, Marcel Ruff, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Central America,” stated: “Anti-Semitism was one of the major factors, though not the only one, which caused the Nicaraguan Jews to leave Nicaragua.” That is, it was dangerous for a Jew to stay, especially since most were in business and hence suspect by the new, Marxist-Leninist rulers.
Ideologically, the Sandinistas had very close ties with both Moammar Khadafi’s Libya and Yasser Arafat’s PLO. A Sandinista cadre took part in the 1970 hijacking of an El Al airliner. The Sandinistas also fought alongside the PLO in its bid to overthrow the king of Jordan in the same year.
Both Libya and the PLO gave the Sandinistas economic and military aid after they gained power. Nicaragua became the first Central American nation to give the PLO diplomatic representation, at a time when it was listed officially by the United States as a terrorist group.
Arafat himself came to Nicaragua to open the PLO embassy in 1980, where he told the Sandinistas, “We are together, your enemies are our enemies, your friends are ours, and if you suffer aggression, we will fight on your side.”
The response came from the head of the Sandinista secret police, Comandante Tomas Borge, who had gotten his guerrilla training in PLO camps in Lebanon: “The PLO cause is the cause of the Sandinistas.”
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan told legislators from Western Hemisphere nations that a “new danger” existed in Central America, due to the support given the Sandinistas by Libya, the PLO and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.
Indeed, in 1988, the very year young Bill de Blasio traveled to Nicaragua, he could have read a major Rand Institute report, which noted the “support, training and arms furnished to the Sandinistas by the Palestine Liberation Organization.”
So when de Blasio went to the country, the evidence about Sandinista anti-Semitism was easy to find. This might be excused as a young man’s folly, were it not for Bill de Blasio’s continuing pride in the support he gave to Marxist Nicaragua decades ago.
Ronald Radosh is a Hudson Institute adjunct fellow and a columnist for PJ Media. In 1987, he was a member of Mayor Ed Koch’s NYC Delegation to Central America.