Daniel P. Moynihan, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, warned yesterday that the UN Third Committee’s resolution equating Zionism with racism and colonialism could, if adopted by the General Assembly, legitimize anti-Semitism in many parts of the world.
Responding to questions on the nationally televised CBS-TV “Face the Nation” program, Moynihan quoted the Soviet Nobel Laureate and dissident Andrei Sakharov as saying that the resolution “will give anti-Semitism the appearance of international legality.” Moynihan added, “This is not just Israel. We are talking about the Ukraine, we are talking about Brazil, we are talking about our own country perhaps and that is just appalling.”
The American envoy characterized the draft resolution as “not a question of left or right but rather of despotic governments in the main voting against those governments which maintain the tradition of liberal democracy.” However, when Moynihan was asked if by implication he included Egypt, whose President Anwar Sadat was getting “a glorious reception” by President Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, among the despotic, anti-democratic forces, he suggested that Egypt might have been forced to go along with the Third Committee majority.
According to the text of his interview, Moynihan said; “I think it was certainly the case that Egypt, and not a few countries like Egypt, were in a situation, a Moslem country, and they went along with this vote…many countries were forced into the situation by this group–mostly Cuba, Algeria, Iraq and the Communist bloc itself.” He added, “There were perhaps some perfectly attractive regimes in the Indian Ocean, for example, democratic societies which are Moslem, felt they had to go along with this.”
WILL FIGHT ‘THAT HIDEOUS THING’
Moynihan agreed with a reporter that the anti-Zionist resolution “is likely” to pass when it comes before the General Assembly plenary. “If it does not do so, it will be the first time in the history of the United Nations that something like this has been turned around,” he said.
He said that if the resolution is endorsed by the General Assembly the only way the democracies can “respond in any effective way would be to say it is not important. And, of course, that is saying the UN is not important, saying we don’t pay attention to things like this and in order to prevent its impact on Israel, on the legitimacy of that state, on the whole question of anti-Semitism in the world, we are just going to have to act like the United Nations is not very important, and we don’t want to do that. We most emphatically don’t want to do that.”
Moynihan continued: “If our alternative is to maintain the effectiveness of the United Nations as an institutional role and legitimating anti-Semitism in the world and legitimating an assault on democratic principles, then we have to take a choice….We will stand with the rights of a liberal democracy. We will stand with racial tolerance, with ethnic tolerance. We will stand against that hideous thing….if irresponsible and obscene acts like this Zionism-anti-Semitic resolution continue, we are going to have to sort of put some buffer” between the U.S. and the UN.
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.
