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Ha-orah Reports Arab Propaganda Agencies and Groups Flourishing on West Coast

March 19, 1970
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Arab propaganda agencies are flourishing on the west coast, voicing the “libels of terrorist groups” against Israel and Zionism, according to a report in Ha-Orah, a radical Jewish student publication here. The report was made by Anita Trow, public relations director for Americans for Permanent Peace in the Middle East. She listed a number of such organizations with headquarters in California cities. She said La Puente was the home of the Palestine Arab Fund, which she described as “the most lethal unofficial Arab operation in the West,” which supports Al-Asifa, the military arm of El Fatah. She reported that Hollywood was the headquarters for the United American Arab Congress, which compares “the Six-Day War to Pearl Harbor, places ads in the newspapers, circulates flyers and keeps its members writing letters to the editor.”

She asserted that “a minimum” of 100 chapters of the Organization of Arab Students were “going full blast” in the United States and Canada. She credited that organization with having accomplished “the Herculean job of swaying public opinion from the pro-Israel stand of 1967.” She reported that Sacramento “has the most active chapter of the American Committee for Justice in the Middle East” and that Downey has Americans of Lebanese-Syrian Ancestry for America. In San Rafael, there is an Ad Hoc Committee for Balanced Coverage of the Arab-Israel Conflict. The American Friends of Lebanon in San Diego sponsored a full-page “open letter” in local newspapers to President Nixon, indicting the Jews of Israel for their “Nazi-like methods.” The Arabic Society of Americanists was described as a similar group in Bell, Calif.

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