— More than 100 scholars, scientists and artists in the United States and abroad — including 30 Nobel laureates — joined yesterday in a “statement of conscience” voicing “alarm at the growing danger to world peace resulting from the erosion of the United Nations.”
The statement — signed by Simone de Beauvoir, French author; Sir Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University; Nobel Prize physicist Hans Bethe and historian Barbara Tuchman, among others — said that the world body was being “perverted by irrelevant political machinations” ‘hat have “crippled” UN specialized agencies such as the International Labor Organization, World Health Organization and UNESCO.
Citing the “assaults orchestrated by the Soviet and Arab blocs in their campaign to isolate and discredit Israel,” the signers’ said:
“The United Nations condemns the historic Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and exalts PLO terrorist. Those who vow to eliminate the State of Israel and refuse to make peace are permitted to sit in the councils of the peacemakers, while Israel, a member state created in fidelity to the principles of the UN, is slandered and faced with the threat of deligitimization.”
The convocation was issued at a day-long conference sponsored by the Committee on UN Integrity at the City University Graduate Center. The Committee is composed of Nobel Loureates Kenneth Arrow (economics), Hans Bethe (physics) Felix Bloch (physics) and Andre Lwoff (medicine) Sir Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University; Robert Kibbee, chancellor of the City University of New York; and Elie Wesel, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Council.
Wiesel read the declaration following a luncheon session at which Sen. Daniel Moynihan (Dem. N. Y.) assailed the 1975 General Assembly resolution, passed while he was serving as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, calling Zionism a form of racism. He noted that the “statement of conscience” read by Wiesel had charged that the UN Resolution “must bear some responsibility for the scourge of anti-Semitism now reappearing in many parts of the world.”
The statement adopted by the 100 scientists and intellectuals had been circulated by the Committee on UN Integrity earlier. It was particularly critical of the UN’s “tragic failure” in the Mideast:
“In its preoccupation with Palestinian rights, the United Nations neglects the plight of millions of men, women and children in other parts of the world who are in immediate danger of death from famine, disease and war.” The statement added:
“The campaign to ostracize Israel has … made an international charade of efforts to extend freedom of speech and press, to help the working man and woman to meet the needs of children, to achieve equality of women.”
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