The chairman of the board of the American Bank and Trust Co. and the president of B’nai B’rith have asked Congress and the President to introduce legislation to counteract the use of the Arab boycott against American individuals and businesses.
In a letter addressed to the entire New York State Confessional delegation, the bank chairman, Abraham Feinberg, condemned the blacklist of the New York bank as “blackmail obnoxious to our American ideas” and said “it certainly represents a flagrant violation of our laws against restraint of trade.” He called upon the Senators and Representatives from New York who, he said, represent the financial center of the United States and the free world, to introduce legislation to counteract the “outrageous act of the Arab boycott office.”
Feinberg stressed that the more than 50,000 depositors and stockholders of the American Bank and Trust Co. pay taxes to the federal government that indirectly supports U.S. economic assistance to Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries represented in the Arab boycott office which has promulgated the boycott list. “We have a solemn obligation to protect our interest, They will want to know what their elected representatives are doing about the Arab blacklisting and boycott,” Feinberg said.
“I would hope that all legislators will request the Secretary of State to lodge a formal protest with all Arab governments against these actions and advise them of legislation soon to be introduced on this subject.”
In a letter to President Ford, B’nai B’rith president David Blumberg declared that it “be made crystal clear that American principles and policy are not for sale.” He added; “Not since Hitler subsidized Nazi organizations and propaganda in the United States has there been so insidious an attempt to subvert American public policy and divide the American people.”
Blumberg said that the U.S. needs “another civil rights law” to ensure that the anti-discrimination gains of the past generation “are not vitiated by foreign states.” B’nai B’rith sent similar appeals for the development of legislation to Sen, William Proxmire (D.Wisc.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Rep, Peter Rodino Jr. (D.NJ), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
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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.
