Former U.S. Senator Jacob Javits of New York warned that Arab propagandists in the United States are resorting to “a very clever subterfuge for anti-Semitism” by insinuating that the American Jewish community dictates the policies of Israel.
In an address to leaders of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Javits said that Arab countries had learned “how to use lawyers and public relations experts, how to send speakers around to college campuses and other places where public opinion is made.”
These techniques, he said, are now being employed to suggest that “whatever Israel does that the U.S. doesn’t like has been fomented by the American Jewish community. It’s a very subtle and very dangerous thesis with no element of truth whatever.”
Javits made his remarks at the four-day meeting of ADL’s National Executive Committee. The speech followed presentation to him of the ADL’s Haym Salomon Award in honor of “his contributions to America’s democratic society,” by Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress.
In an earlier part of the program, Maxwell Greenberg, ADL’s national chairman, discussed the problem of contemporary anti-Semitism and cited a sharp increase in anti-Jewish episodes reported by ADL last year. He suggested that these are symptoms of a “sickness in our society, ” in which Jews, as in the past, are “the victims of scapegoating when the majority feels insecure.”
He singled out the United Nations for creating an atmosphere which “makes it fair play to go after Jews wherever and whenever the occasion fits.” He equated “anti-Zionist” pronouncements in the United Nations with “anti-Semitism.”
“The Jordanian Ambassador to the United Nations made that painfully obvious, ” Greenberg said, “when on the floor of the UN, he launched into the familiar anti-Semitic diatribe about international Jewish bankers and international Jewish economic power.”
Greenberg was referring to Ambassador Hazan Nuseibeh’s statement Dec. 8, during a debate on the Mideast in the General Assemby, that there is a Jewish cabal “which controls, manipulates and exploits the rest of humanity by controlling the money and wealth of the world.”
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.
