The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith warned today that opposition to Israel and to American support for Israel may replace Vietnam as a key issue of the far Left and segments of the extreme Right. The warning was issued here today by Judge David A. Rose chairman of the ADL’s national executive committee.
Addressing a session of the ADL’s 58th annual meeting, Judge Rose stated that “a sustained anti-Israel propaganda campaign” by extremists in the United States since the Six-Day War escalated sharply in 1970 and again this year. He said that “the anti-Israel hate campaign by these extremists not only poses a serious threat to Israel’s survival, but is, in its broadest sense, anti-Jewish.”
Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the renowned Jewish scholar, tonight received the America’s Democratic Legacy Award presented annually by ADL for “distinguished contributions to the enrichment of America’s democratic heritage.” Dr. Heschel, a theologian, author and educator, is Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
LEFT, RIGHT UNITE
Judge Rose said that as American involvement in Southeast Asia winds down, some leaders of anti-war efforts in the US are attempting to turn the anti-Vietnam movement into an anti-Israel campaign. He noted an article by James Lafferty, a leader of the National Peace Action Coalition, which appeared recently in Free Palestine, the major pro-Arab Fatah publication in this country.
According to the ADL spokesman, Lafferty, a radical Detroit lawyer, spelled out plans for “exploiting the legitimate aspirations of many Americans for peace and converting existing anti-war groups to anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian purposes.” The magazine is edited by Lafferty’s law partner, Abdeen Jabara. Lafferty is one of five national coordinators of NPAC and Jabara is a member of the organization’s steering committee.
Judge Rose also cited a lawsuit brought last month by Jabara on behalf of Lafferty and others. The suit, filed against Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and Presidential advisor Henry Kissinger, seeks to force these officials to disclose government studies of American involvement in and commitment to the Middle East as well as US “contingency plans” for the area.
Judge Rose cited the following as leading the extreme Left’s propaganda campaign: the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party; its youth arm, the Young Socialist Alliance; and various Trotskyite publications; the Maoist and pro-Peking Workers World Party; its youth arm, Youth Against War and Fascism, and one of the latter’s front groups, the Committee to Support Middle East Liberation; the Moscow-oriented Communist Party; and the Progressive Labor Party, formed a decade ago by Communist Party dissidents.
Judge Rose also noted that the new Left’s so-called “underground press” has in recent years exposed many thousands of young Americans to “substantial doses of anti-Israel propaganda and a one-sided barrage of articles extolling the Arab cause in general and glorifying Palestinian revolutionary guerrilla terrorists in particular.” He said that Liberty Lobby, headed by Willis Carto, a known anti-Semite, is the most vehement of the far Rightist groups opposing Israel.
The ADL official charged Carto with using the “million-dollar-a-year, Washington-based lobby” as “the pivot and showcase for a complex of other organizations, publications and enterprises whose extremism and anti-Semitism are often far from subtle.”
Judge Rose said it was ironic that far-Left and far-Right groups are aiming a propaganda campaign against the same targets–Israel and “Zionism,” and that both make comparisons between US involvement in Southeast Asia and potential involvement in the Middle East. He said the extremists neglect to recognize that Israel has explicitly stated that it will accept no military support other than material and certainly does not want manpower.
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