Anti Defamation League Scores American Friends of Middle East

A statement by American Friends of the Middle East that Arab League nations “may be goaded” into taking reprisals against their Jewish nationals if Israelis persist in “equating Israelis and Jews,” was denounced today by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The statement which was released by William Archer Wright, Jr., executive secretary of AFME, was made in a defense of recent anti-Semitic speeches by Farid Zeineddine, Syrian ambassador to the United States and Mohammed Fadhil Jamali, chairman of the Iraqi delegation to the United Nations.

We have had major success in getting the Arabs to use the term Israelis rather than Jews when referring to the citizens of Israel, Mr. Wright said in his statement. I regret that we have not been successful in getting the Israelis to do the same. Indeed, it would seem that it is a calculated strategy of the leaders of Israel to equate the words Israelis and Jews. If this is persisted in, the Arabs may be goaded in abandoning the restraint which has characterized not only their semantics but their considerate treatment of the many thousands Arabs of Jewish faith in their countries.

Mr. Wright defended speeches by Ambassador Zeineddire to the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, and by Mohammed Fadhil Jamali, who addressed the Economic Club in Detroit. In his talk, the Ambassador revived Nazi racial theories about Jews, declared that American Jews gave allegiance only to “Zionism and not to the countries of their nationality,” and tartly suggested; “Why not let New York be a homeland for the Jews?” Mr. Jamali similarly charged that American Jews gave their first loyalty to a foreign state and not the United States.

Both speeches evoked a formal protest from the Anti-Defamation League to the State Department. Mr. Wright denied that the speeches were anti-Semitic or that the Arab diplomats had acted with “impropriety.” They had, he argued “not said anything that might be construed as an attack against American Jews as such but were attacking “political Zionism.”