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Former Nicaragua solidarity activist Bill De Blasio is the frontrunner in the NYC mayoral election. The right-wing is pulling out all the old lies against Nicaragua from Reagan’s dirty war against the Sandinistas in order to tar De Blasio. While the Nicaragua Network/Alliance for Global Justice has no position for or against any candidate for political office in New York or anywhere else, we do have an interest in countering the current slanders against Nicaragua.

The worst article so far has been in the New York Post accusing the Sandinistas of anti-semitism, a charge long ago debunked and revealed as part of the disinformation campaign run out of the Reagan White House.

You can read the article here: http://nypost.com/2013/09/26/de-blasio-ignored-nicaragua-anti-semitism/.

Use your own knowledge and experience plus the information below to write a letter to the editor of the Post at letters@nypost.com and send a copy to the Nicaragua Network at nicanet@AFGJ.org .

Robert Siegel worked with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) in the 1980s and early 1990s and reports that they debunked the charges then. Siegel writes:

The facts and the history of this anti-semitism lie are the following:

This lie originated at a spring 1983 meeting in Coral Gables, Fla., attending by contra leader Edgar Chamorro and three CIA agents. The CIA agents said to Chamorro: "The American media is controlled by Jews, and if we could show that Jews are being persecuted in Nicaragua, it would help a lot."

The CIA plan called for inviting two Jewish exiles from Nicaragua, Abraham Gorn and Isaac Stavisky, to the White House to denounce the Sandinistas for persecuting them when the CIA agents knew full well that Gorn and Stavisky left Nicaragua because they were Somoza allies, not because they were victims of anti-Semitism

This well-publicized White House encounter took place on June 20, 1983, with Ronald Reagan declaring that "Jews had been terrorized into leaving Nicaragua." The next day a photo of the meeting ran in The New York Times.

The Gorn-Stavisky charges, widely reported in the media, formed the basis of an Anti-Defamation League (ADL ) report claiming that the Sandinistas had seized and desecrated Nicaragua's only synagogue and confiscated Jewish property.

The ADL's allegations were later refuted by five separate (Jewish and non-Jewish ) fact-finding investigations----as well as by the U.S. State Department, former U.S. Ambassador to  Nicaragua Anthony Quainton, and ex-contra Arturo Cruz.

Elliott Abrams, as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, spearheaded the U.S.' terrorist war against Nicaragua. Abrams was such a well-know liar that the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee refused to take even ordinary and routine testimony from Abrams unless he gave such testimony under oath. When asked at a United Jewish Appeal meeting on June 28, 1984, why he was so insistent about supposed Nicaraguan anti-Semitism, Abrams replied: "We're in a propaganda war."

Another source for information is a 1986 article in the New York Times in which Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York disputes the anti-Semitism accusation: http://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/19/world/rabbi-disputes-reagan-point-about-the-jews-in-nicaragua.html

Write a letter to the editor of the Post at letters@nypost.com and send a copy of your letter to the Nicaragua Network at nicanet@AFGJ.org.