The League of Arab States, headquartered in Cairo, has set 1980 as the target date for isolating Israel politically and diplomatically and is carrying out a five-year, $30 million world-wide propaganda master plan to do the job, an official of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith said today.
Jerome Bakst, ADL’s national director of research and evaluation, said the master plan is being implemented in the United States, Western Europe and Latin America. Bakst was the principal speaker at the ADL Seminar of the B’nai B’rith Mid-Atlantic region’s 124th Annual Convention which opened last night at the Concord Hotel.
“In the United States,” Bakst said, “the pro-Arab tilt in American Middle Eastern policy, evident for many months, has generated a climate that is far more favorable to the propaganda activities of the Arab League, its Palestine Liberation Organization clients, and their American allies than at any time since the Six-Day War.”
The most noticeable evidence of the new climate of opinion in the U.S. with respect to the Mideast, he added, “is a growing trend toward acceptance of the notion that the Palestinian issue is the core of the Middle East problem, rather than the refusal of the PLO and its Arab League sponsors to end their 30-year war to destroy Israel, make peace, and recognize Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign and independent Jewish State in the world community of nations.”
FINDING WIDER ACCEPTANCE IN U.S.
Bakst told the B’nai B’rith delegates that this trend had been noted in a major ADL report on the Arab propaganda campaign in the United States, issued last November which showed that “the Arab propaganda theme–that the Palestinian issue, rather than Israel’s right to existence and legal recognition by the Arabs, is central in the Middle East conflict–had found ready acceptance in certain intellectual, academic and church circles whose Third World sympathies and leftist ideologies incline them toward a pro-PLO position.”
More recently, however, Bakst stated, “there is growing evidence that other influential segments of the American establishment are also coming to view the Palestinian issue, not the ongoing Arab war to destroy Israel, as the crux of the Middle Eastern conflict.” These influential segments, Bakst said, “include some government officials, leading newspapers, widely read columnists, and magazines. The ‘op-ed’ pages of leading newspapers devote increasing space to articles by PLO and pro-PLO writers.”
Meyer Bushman, the ADL national commissioner chairing the session, said “the $30 million now earmarked by the Arab League for its five-year, world-wide master plan does not include additional sums being spent for propaganda by individual member states of the Arab League by the PLO from its $200 million Arab League subvention, or outlays by sympathizers of the Arab League and the PLO in the United States and other countries.”
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