Anti-semitic Acts Attributed to Zionist Agents to Further Its Own Propaganda

The Soviet news agency Novosti today accused “Zionist agent provocateurs” of deliberately committing anti-Semitic acts to further Zionist propaganda. In an eight-page French language commentary dated Feb. 8 but received here only today, Novosti said that “agents of the Zionist secret service set fire to synagogues, violated Jewish cemeteries and committed other ignoble provocations which are now being exploited by the Zionist propaganda machine.” Novosti carries news of the Soviet Union for foreign consumption. Its dispatches are not published inside Russia. The news agency claimed that the “same technique has been used by the Zionists in Iraq, Egypt and Morocco and even in the United States and Argentina.” Observers here believe the Novosti charges were published to counteract the forthcoming world conference on Soviet Jewry which opens in Brussels next Monday. It quoted out of context items from the Israeli press and past statements by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, to the effect that “the appearance of anti-Semitism is the Zionists’ best weapon,” Novosti claimed that Dr. Emil Goldstucker, a prominent Czech Jewish refugee who fled the 1968 Soviet invasion of his homeland “wrote anti-Semitic letters to himself.”