Spearheaded by Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D.NY), 28 U.S. Senators have sent a letter to President Carter to express their “strong expectation” that the President will withhold $190,000 from this country’s contribution to the United Nations, according to Dr. Harris Schoenberg, director of the UN office of B’nai B’rith International. The $190,000 represents the United States’ proportionate support of the UN Special Unit on Palestinian Rights.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Schoenberg said that B’nai B’rith has information about activities organized by the Special Unit and slated to take place at UN headquarters in New York City on Nov. 29 when the first annual celebration of UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is scheduled.
On that day the Special Unit on Palestinian Rights, which was created last year by the General Assembly, will present a film that is being produced especially for the occasion. There will also be an exhibit of photographs and posters depicting Palestinians in the UN Visitors’ Lounge during that week with photos selected by representatives of Senegal, Guinea and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Six studies on the Palestinians will also be published by the UN Special Unit.
FILM JUSTIFIES TERRORISM
Dr. William Korey, the director of B’nai B’rith’s international research and an expert on the UN, described the forthcoming film to leaders of the Greater Albany Jewish Federation last week. Korey, who said he was one of the few people who had seen an outline of the script, explained that the purpose of the film is to “glorify Yasir Arafat and the PLO.”
The movie, he continued, “is going to show a number of PLO terrorist raids and justify them” and “then condemn Israel for any responsiveness. It will be an anti-Israeli film which, in effect, says that Israel has usurped ‘historic Arab home-land’ and made the Palestinians ‘homeless and oppressed.’ A determined effort will then be made by the UN Special Unit on Palestinian Rights to have the film aired on American television as well as on television throughout the world.
“This special unit is planning to be in business permanently,” Korey warned, “and Nov. 29, the anniversary of the 1947 UN partition of Palestine, is to be celebrated annually as a day of mourning.”
A GLORIFICATION OF THE PLO
The special unit, a section of the UN Secretariat, has the purpose of serving the Palestine Committee, Schoenberg explained. “The unit was voted on and authorized by the General Assembly on Dec. 2, 1977,” he added, “only 12 days after Egyptian President (Anwar) Sadat’s peace mission to Jerusalem. Instead of hailing this breakthrough as a tremendous step forward, the General Assembly chose to glorify the PLO by setting up this special unit.
“When the unit was created, ” Schoenberg continued, “the vote on the resolution was 95 in favor, 20 against and 26 abstentions. The 20 states that opposed the creation of the unit, including the U.S. and other Western democracies, said then that it was ‘subversive of the UN charter concept of an impartial international civil service,” but these 20 nations have ended up paying 60 percent of the unit’s budget.
Schoenberg explained that despite their monetary contributions they have no part in policy formulation. “On the instructions of the chairman of the Palestinian Committee, which is made to guide the operations of the special unit, no national from these 20 countries is permitted to serve on the staff,” he said.
In addition to the Nov. 29 observance and film premier, Schoenberg said “the special unit will issue news bulletins throughout the year and will report on actions and resolutions of the UN on behalf of the PLO that support the delegitimization of Israel and Zionism.” Referring to the six studies on the Palestinians that the special unit is planning to publish, Schoenberg called them “primitively distorted or maliciously false.” Korey said they were “tendentious and heavily biased.”
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.
