Yehuda Blum, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, charged here yesterday that a number of statements made during the current Mideast debate in the General Assembly were pervasively anti-Semitic in tone. “The crudest anti-Semitic slanders were uttered by the representative of the Palestinian Arab state of Jordan, “Ambassador Hazen Nuseibeh, Blum said, charging that delegates to the UN “enjoy on immunity to spread anti-Semitic invective with on openness and in a way which will not be tolerated in any decent society.”
The Israeli envoy’s remarks followed charges by Nuseibeh that there is a Jewish cabal “which controls, manipulates and exploits the rest of humanity by controlling the money and wealth of the world.”
Blum said that this is not the first time that the Jordanian official “has revealed his warped mentality and embarrassed this Assembly by drawing almost word by word from such notoriously anti-Semitic works as the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'”
In his speech Monday in the course of the Mideast debate, which was concluded yesterday, Nubieber attacked “People like Lord Rothschild (who) every day, in iron-clod secrecy, decide and flash round the world how high the price of gold should be on each particular day,” and Harry Oppenheimer of South Africa, chairman of the Anglo American company, parent of De Beers Consolidated Mines, the diamond monopoly, for holding “15 million Blocks in bondage” and exploiting South Africa’s natural resources.
“These odious charges, “Blum declared yesterday,” are nothing but out and out anti-Semitism of the worst and most virulent kind. If this Assembly were to stop playing at a mock parliament, and were to introduce some real parliamentary rules and ethics such calumnies would have long been ruled out of order.”
“I have warned of the danger of this organization becoming a world center for anti-Semitism,” Blum continued, “on a number of occasions. Nowadays, it is fashionable to avoid direct attacks on Jews and the Jewish people. Instead, anti-Semites now attack Zionism and Zionists… There used to be a time when some delegates here claimed that they were not anti-Jewish, but merely anti-Zionist. That cover has long been blown by statements of the Nurseries and their ilk — to the lasting shame of this organization.”
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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.
