The Daily Defender, a leading Black newspaper published here, has castigated President Idi Amin of Uganda for his recent telegram to United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim in which he expressed approval of Hitler’s slaughter of six million Jews.
An editorial in the Defender brushed aside a subsequent statement by the Kampala government alleging that Amin was “misinterpreted” and that he was not anti-Semitic but “only against the Zionists who had established the State of Israel by turning millions of Arabs into refugees.”
That statement, said the Defender “in no way can be construed as justifying (the) utterance by the President of Uganda. Whether Israel was established by Zionists or not is not the question at issue. What is at issue is Amin’s approval of Hitler’s extermination of 6 million Jews who were decent, honorable and law-abiding, bona fide German citizens. And Amin has not disavowed his statement.”
The editorial observed that “Israel was established not by Zionists alone, but by a consortium of enlightened international opinion backed by the famous Lord Balfour Declaration which recognized the eminent right of the Jewish people to have a home state.” The editorial berated Amin for entering into a field of history–the Palestinian question–“about which he knows as much as the monkeys which roam the wilds of Africa.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
