By Monica Showalter
How’s this for a guy who goes against the current?
Argentina’s presidential frontrunner, Javier Milei, a militant libertarian and zero-apologies supporter of Israel, has picked up and waved the Israeli flag at a gargantuan campaign rally — and the crowd went wild:
While it’s kind of unusual for a presidential candidate to pick up another country’s flag at a campaign rally for the presidency of his own country, there is some valuable context to explain why that is going on.
One, he doesn’t care what polite society thinks of him, so waving the flag of a country he admires is entirely in character.
Two, Argentina has the largest population of Jews outside Israel and New York City, so there are at least some voters who will care about this issue, too.
Most important, Milei was firing a dart at his socialist opponent, whose government literally cut diplomatic relations with Israel in the wake of its response to a monstrous terror attack on its soil. They joined a slew of other Latin American governments who cut off their own noses to spite their faces, given the benefits Israel has given them, all to go with the terrorists.
That’s significant in Argentina, because memories are still there of the two monstrous terror attacks by Hez’ballah on Argentine soil in the 1992 and 1994, where more than 100 innocent people were killed and the socialist government did nothing about it.
I have an Argentine friend who was there when the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish Center happened and she was appalled at how incompetent the clean-up was, with no effort to secure the crime scene and people walking all over the rubble in downtown Buenos Aires. That wasn’t going to be solved in a proper way, she told me. The short story was that they just let the bad guys do what they do and get away with it, leaving Argentines helpless and bitter, and too bad about the lives lost. Argentina, like the U.S. and Israel, is one of the rare nations that has been victims of this kind of mass terror attack, probably the pilot project to precede the ones that hit the U.S. and now Israel.
You can bet that if Hezb’allah tries that again with Milei at the helm, the message sent from Milei’s flag-waving is that they won’t get away with it like they did earlier, and there will be an Israel-like response.
You can see why the voters would care about that.
Argentina is going to the polls for the final round of voting on Sunday and the odds look good. Milei is drawing gargantuan enthusiastic crowds at his rallies. His economic plan to dollarize the country is economically sound and will fix that country’s horrible economy. The center-right coalition that split the ticket three ways in the first round has since endorsed Milei and done a good job of campaigning for him, too, not going the #neverTrump route of taking its marbles and going home. They have shown maturity, political adulthood, urging their voters to choose Milei over the socialist alternative which offers only inflation, poverty, crime, and oppression.
Whether there will be rigging or cheating by the ruling socialists is unknown, but one hopes the Milei team will be on top of it, having seen what happened in Brazil last year.
The crowds look so enthusiastic and huge it seems they could win despite cheating, but there could always be surprises.
One hopes that for the sake of Israel, Milei wins, and stands next to the little Mediterranean democracy as its good friend in the face of an onslaught of atrocity-terrorism and its repulsive apologists. Perhaps Argentina can even help them at a time when Israel needs such allies.
Argentina will stand tall as Israel wins, Israel will never forget its friend, and one can only hope that peace and prosperity comes to both of them.