A slashing attack on the United Nations by Arnold Forster, national general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith is contained in a speech prepared by Forster for delivery tonight at the Hillcrest Jewish Center in Queens, the day after the world organization celebrated the 33rd anniversary of its founding.
According to Forster, the UN has betrayed the high hopes held for it and has been taken over “by the Soviet bloc countries, the Arab and Third World militants.” He implied strongly that the United States should withdraw financial support from the UN. “I have examined the UN Charter very carefully and nowhere do I read that we in the United States are obligated to pay for our own execution, “Forster stated.
He observed that the late Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the early patrons of the UN, “would have walked out in disgust, as many Western diplomats did a few weeks ago in Geneva when the United Nations once again … deliberately … and with full knowledge of the significance … reaffirmed the obscene racism is Zionism resolution.”
BITTER ATTACK AGAINST PLO FILM
Forster’s most bitter attack was aimed at the UN-sponsored PLO film “to romanticize Yasir Arafat … And your local television stations will be asked by the UN to put it on,” he said. “This film, made entirely by the UN staff, glorifies the world’s number one terrorist, Yasir Arafat, whose PLO has, as our own Anti-Defamation League report disclosed earlier this year, murdered 1131 people, killed 2471 and taken 2755 hostages.”
Forster said that according to the outline of the film he has seen, “the UN promises to show the PLO as benevolent as the PTA. To give the Madison Avenue treatment to their leader Yasir Arafat …. And remember, good people, the United States is paying 25 percent of the bill.”
Forster noted an appeal to President Carter by 28 Congressmen to withhold the U.S. contribution. “This is a dirty film, an obscene film,” he said, “and neither the people nor the government of the United States should have any part of it whatsoever.”
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.
