There have been 422 anti-Semitic incidents, of various degree of violence but all of them grave, in the United States, between 1962 and 1966, Arnold Forster, general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, reported today. In the same period, he stated, there were 749 acts of violence against the civil rights movement, 119 of these in the north.
He cited those figures in a report for delivery tomorrow before the 54th annual meeting of the ADL, which will run through Monday. At the ADL session, he said, he will call for enactment of Federal and State laws, requiring the registration of all firearms with local governments, as a step toward curbing militant, extremist, right-wing organizations.
The anti-Semitic incidents in the period 1962-66, he reported, included synagogue and Jewish cemetery desecrations, vandalism against synagogues, arson, swastika smearings and shootings. He said “the power of suggestion was so strong and the atmosphere so right” that, in 1960, following a synagogue desecration in Cologne, Germany, there were 890 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in that one year.
Mr. Forster warned that paramilitary organizations of “assassins-in-training” are plotting armed enforcement of their “violent racial and political doctrines.” Such organizations, he charged, are “brothers-in-arms” of a number of extremist, right-wing organizations. Among such groups he listed: “The Minutemen, American Nazi Party, National States Rights Party, Ku Klux Klan units “operating behind the front of rifle or sporting clubs, ‘California Rangers, Texas Rangers, Green Mountain Boys and the Christian Youth Corps.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
